Linda Levy Peck is an award-winning historian of early modern British politics, political thought, and culture. Her first book offered a revisionist study of the court of James I that analyzed politics, policy making, and administrative reform in the early seventeenth century. Her second book examined the crucial importance of patronage in the informal power structures of the early modern monarchy and how the gift society existed alongside and could give way to corrupt practices. More recently, Professor Peck has turned to social and cultural history in the long seventeenth century. Her most recent book, Consuming Splendor, is a study of the ways in which the consumption of luxury goods transformed social practices, gender roles, royal policies, and the economy in seventeenth-century England. Awarded funding by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others, Professor Peck is Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is currently writing The Grocer's Apprentice, a story of three generations of a seventeenth-century gentry and merchant family whose experience expands our understanding of social mobility, money, and gender roles in early modern England.
Complete C.V. (PDF)
HIST 3130: History of England
HIST 3132: Tudor England
HIST 3134: Stuart England
HIST 6130: Early Modern Britain
HIST 6133: English people and Institutions
Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Honorable Mention, 2006 Roland H. Bainton Prize in History and Theology, awarded by the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference.
Editor, The Mental World of the Jacobean Court. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; paperback ed., 2005.
"Luxury and War: Reconsidering Luxury Consumption in Seventeenth Century England." Albion 34 (Spring 2002): 1-23.
"Consuming Splendor: Building, Buying and Collecting, London, 1600-1625." In Material London, c. 1600, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin, 268-289. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.
"Beyond the Pale: John Cusacke and the Language of Absolutism in Early Stuart Britain." Historical Journal 41 (March 1998): 121-149.
"Uncovering the Arundel Library at the Royal Society: Changing Meanings of Science and the Fate of the Norfolk Donation." Notes and Records of the Royal Society 52 (1998): 3-24.
"Hobbes on the Grand Tour: Paris, Venice or London?" Journal of the History of Ideas(Jan. 1996): 177-183.
Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England. London: Unwin Hyman, 1990. Winner, 1991 John Ben Snow Prize for the best book in History and the Social Sciences, awarded by the North American Conference on British Studies.
"'For a King not to be Bountiful were a Fault': Perspectives on Court Patronage in Early Stuart England." Journal of British Studies 25 (1986): 31-61.
Northampton, Patronage and Policy at the Court of James I. London: Allen & Unwin, 1982.
Ph.D., Yale University, 1973