She shows how objects such as funeral sculpture moved across cultures and countries, from Rome to Chelsea, and how early science, particularly after the foundation of the Royal Society, both enabled and underpinned new forms of luxury consumption. Gardens and the collecting of rare plants became widely fashionable among aristocrats, gentlemen and merchants. Consuming Splendor tells of new ways to shop, above all in London of royal patronage, notably by James I, of luxury trades such as the import of porcelain and of manufactures such as silk and tapestries and of new aspirations shaped by print, often imported, and travel to the European continent, which often resulted in new expenditures on buying, building, furnishing and collecting paintings and sculpture. Linda Levy Peck proposes instead a different chronology with a significantly different emphasis, outlining the rise of luxury consumption between c.1600 to the 1670s. This view also reinforced the theory of the development across the same period of a new, essentially bourgeois, "public sphere" of reading, discussion and participation.
The general consensus among social historians has been that the eighteenth century-or at least the "long eighteenth century" from c.1660 to c.1820-saw middle-class consumers creating a new kind of luxury consumption through new wants, new goods, new ways to sell them, and new social amenities.
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