Gifts and Gift-giving [ Politics & Society / Furniture & Interior decoration / Social interaction ]
… that saw the gift as both potentially virtuous and a threat to virtue, an ambiguity reinforced by humanist and Christian literature. The Renaissance had witnessed renewed stress on disinterested gifts, manifested in the gifting of books and advice manuals, a practice which continued into the eighteenth century. Christian advice literature warned against excessive gifting but also saw a place for it. The Anglican divine Jeremy Taylor’s popular …
Charity | Empire | Friendship | Gift | Hospitality | Reciprocity | Religion
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