SOURCE: "Anti-Entrepreneurial Attitudes in Elizabethan Sermons and Popular Literature," in The Journal of British Studies, Vol. XV, No. 2, Spring, 1976, pp. 1–20.

In the following excerpt, O'Connell discusses the relation between religion and capitalism in Deloney's novels. She contends that Deloney believed women are covetous by nature, and thus thought it was appropriate for them to pursue the accumulation of wealth while their husbands devoted themselves to piety and good works.

It has been nearly half a century since R. H. Tawney published Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, and in spite of many efforts to refine and to dispute Tawney's thesis, the work has retained great influence over sixteenth and seventeenth-century English historical studies. There is considerable debate over the nature of the connection between Calvinism and capitalism, but amidst this disagreement there is a basic acceptance of the idea that the Puritan "work ethic" and the development of...