Enthusiasm for tulips, as in a period in the Dutch Golden Age during which contract prices for bulbs of the recently introduced tulip reached extraordinarily high levels and then suddenly collapsed.
1989, Stanford M. Lyman, The Seven Deadly Sins: Society and Evil, p. 250.Certainly one of the best illustrations of the fantastic in the motley variety of items that avarice might seize for its own is the tulipomania that swept over the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
