Abstract

This dissertation studies the ways in which various Protestant writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries addressed the issue of commodification. It argues that the question was approached through theological concepts, and in a religious vocabulary. Each of the chapters examines a writer or group of writers who use the categories made available by the Protestant religion to comment on the market economy and its ideological effects, such as the fetishization of labor and the displacement of use-value by exchange-value. In each section of the study, an attempt is made to explore the relationship of ethics to aesthetics in the development of a specifically, self-consciously Protestant mode of representation