The shaping of young consumers in early modern book-objects

This chapter analyses how book-objects for youths affected body and mind and helped to manage readers’ desires. It argues that these kinds of discursive book-object hybrids spurred the development of young consumers who considered books as affective objects. In this way, the early modern book market created engaged consumers who used book-objects to manage their emotions, and who were gradually shaped as agents within a money-driven market culture. Market success rather depended on its reliability and moral character: using books was represented as an instrument of managing affects. Young people have been given little attention in the historiography of early modern consumption. Books for younger children functioned as instruments for explicit market socialization, while adolescent literature generally discussed the economy of love, and spurred the interest for money and amusement. In the seventeenth century, affective book-objects for young people functioned as sensual practices to structure and redirect emotions.

Aesthetics · Art · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity