Caritas: Neighbourly Love & the Early Modern Self

In her latest monograph, Caritas, leading historian of emotions Katie Barclay explores the ‘emotional ethic’ after which the book takes its name. As Barclay describes it, caritas was a form of grace – God’s working in the Christian – ‘designed to promote a particular type of community relation in early modern Europe’ (p. 3). Operating at the level of the individual and the collective, caritas simultaneously helped inculcate specific conceptions of self-hood and relationality, and encourage a corresponding set of normative expectations and behaviours. Though caritas has been described as an ‘other-worldly love’ that made the mundane appear as a ‘temporal shadow’ (Goodrich, 1996, p. 31), Barclay is interested in caritas’ earthly side. She is concerned with what goes on in the shadows. In keeping with this focus, Barclay examines how caritas was felt, embodied and enacted both inside and outside the home by ordinary eighteenth-century Scots. As an ethic of social relations, caritas might manifest in the reassuring touch of a parent (p. 37) or the act of sharing one’s bed with a guest (p. 153). As an embodied emotion, it might be experienced as ‘the tingling of the nerves and the tightening of the sinews’ (p. 13) or be read as a signifier of maturity, as with the capacity for romantic love that was presumed to accompany sexual desire (p. 78). These examples show that caritas, like grace more generally, involved the performance of ‘pleasurable exchange’ (Mac Carthy, 2020, p. 24) and that this might occur both when prescriptive norms were followed and when they were challenged. One quite moving example of the latter is the relationships that sprung up – partly through pragmatism, but also through affection – between itinerant and outcast individuals. ‘These were not shallow ties,’ Barclay tells us, ‘but they refused the co-dependency and subordination of the patriarchal household for autonomous selves’ (p. 170). As this quotation signals, the book is also committed to charting some of the ways that pursuing the divine/profane ethic of caritas often naturalised unequal distributions of power. One point about Caritas that is likely to be of immediate interest to legal scholars is that many of the book’s arguments are founded on legal records. When setting out her sources, Barclay explains that the papers attached to civil, criminal and church court proceedings are ‘strewn’ with ‘[t]he language of love – amity, friendship, charity, affection’ (p. 1). For scholars working at the intersections of law and the humanities, or within any of the critical legal traditions, this will not be altogether surprising. Despite claims to autonomy, impartiality and objectivity, law borrows from, props up and sometimes clashes with cognate normative and ethical regimes. Furthermore, legal cases are rooted in human stories and represent attempts by needy, feeling creatures to be heard and acknowledged (for some reflections on how artistic methods might help make these dimensions of law visible, see Cowan et al. (2020)). Insofar as social historians and legal researchers of certain stripes both home in on these dimensions of law, they might therefore have overlapping goals. Yet law has distinctive aims and characteristics vis-à-vis other normative and ethical regimes, and understanding what law ‘does’ with other