“Stories have been circulating for nearly 400 years about the apparently strange compulsion that led otherwise sensible merchants, nobles and artisan weavers to spend all they had and more on tulips, only to land in bankruptcy and ruin” – and pulling the entire country’s economy down with them – “when the bottom fell out of the market in February 1637.” Historian Anne Goldgar argues that this narrative is a moralistic Victorian invention and that primary documents from the late 1630s tell a somewhat different story.