In his The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present , Jan de Vries notes connections between the “Confessionalizing” movement of the seventeenth century and the rise of “genteel” standards of taste and consumption: “While an awakened desire for God’s grace should not be made one with a new desire for a more refined manner of living, or genteel grace, the practice by which the construction of both types of desire was cultivated interacted with each other. The inward religious project assumed outward material forms (church architecture, bibles, books, and, in Counter-Reformation Catholicism, objects of veneration for the home) while the outward projection of more elevated or refined daily life depended on the development of a suitable material culture.”

He cites an article by Mark Peterson: “If we understand Puritanism as a culture that replicated itself by cultivating in believers a demand for certain experiences, a demand that could only be satisfied (and then only partially and temporarily) through access to sophisticated cultural products, of which communion silver was one, then we can begin to see how Puritanism created patterns of thought and feeling that flowed as easily into the genteel forms of a culture of consumption as they did into the frugal and disciplined norms of the ‘spirit of capitalism.’”

New luxury items were not status-distinguishing but unifying, and the result was, increasingly, national standards of taste: “By the late seventeenth century the striking feature of Dutch material culture is its uniformity. The basic form of expressing status and achieving comfort were remarkable similar between city and country, and between rich and poor. It was the cost and specific quality rather than the types of objects and their general form that differed.” What happened in the Netherlands happened throughout Europe. He quoted from John Nef: “With the help of a new artistic craftsmanship, a style of living spread throughout Europe that led all Europeans to want to share, at least to some extent, in that douceur de vivre , accompanied by high standards of virtue in actual living, which a very considerable few were coming to possess for the first time in history.”