ABSTRACT
Denham has appropriated the authority of country house discourse, of nobility built on the ruins of dispossessed monasteries, to establish royal legitimacy. The continuing economic revolution meant that attitudes about the relationship of lineage to legitimacy continued to change as well. The failure of the simulacra of noble hospitality to feed the body is here finessed by the interpellation of a new kind of lordship, one that values the fungible commodities that circulate within the emerging art economy over dapes inemptae. The economic revolution in agriculture and trade that these publications reflected also fostered renewed discussion of the Dissolution, with critiques based in economic arguments as well as moral and religious ones. And, indeed, the kind of hospitality associated with the great hall was by the late seventeenth-century a topic of derision rather than pious rehearsal, its practice increasingly understood to be subject to the values of a capitalist rather than a manorial economy.
