Gifts and Gift-giving [ Politics & Society / Furniture & Interior decoration / Social interaction ]
… Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State’. Gifting was not, of course, new in the long eighteenth-century and there was already a long tradition of writing about the topic, from Christian, … 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 … they were unifying ‘civilities’, ‘tokens of respect’ and aides-memoires for guests. This practice spread to New England in the early eighteenth century: Massachusetts governor Jonathan Belcher gave more than a thousand pairs of …
Charity | Empire | Friendship | Gift | Hospitality | Reciprocity | Religion
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