A Golden World: How the Americas Transformed Renaissance England

A wonderfully stylish, gloriously technicolour book that wears its immense learning lightly. The vivid picture of England that it paints gleams with gold and pearls and feathers from the New World of the Americas, shaped both by encounter and extraction. And in the process, it reminds us that ‘New World’ itself was also an ancient one, thrumming with its own poetry, traditions, and peoples.

Rich, original, and eye-opening, A Golden World is an exquisitely written account of the flow of objects from the Americas that entranced the English, and transformed English culture. But Working never lets us forget that, behind the dreams of gold and the coveted jewels, furs, sugar and tobacco, are the lives and labour of Indigenous peoples. A courtier’s shiny pearl earring will never look the same again.

An absolute joy to read. This book unveils how the Americas did not simply widen England's horizons—they reconfigured its identity

A sparkling cabinet of curiosities which invites us to consider the dark threads entwining Indigenous and African influences with the gilded fantasy of the Tudors' global world.

Unfolding with ravishing detail and rich humanity, A Golden World is a glittering account which casts early modern England in an entirely new light . . . Lauren Working weaves tales of extraordinary journeys made by artefacts and materials from the Americas -- objects often hidden in plain sight whose significance is revealed here for the first time.

A fascinating insight into the mutability of identities and objects, in an age when the world was turning out to be bigger and fuller than previously imagined . . . Working is an authoritative guide . . . Working demonstrates that, in fact, much of what we imagine to be the typical Renaissance and baroque aesthetic can be linked to influences emerging from the Americas.