Affection, Interest and Office in Early Modernity

Abstract

Conceptualising corruption as a process of degeneration enabled two broad forms of usage in Medieval and Early Modern discourse. First, corruption could be used to describe the process of moral or physical decay of animate beings, possibly even including the degeneration of the earth and the cosmos itself. Second, corruption might also be used to describe the terminus of this process of decay, the state of death or utter destruction to which the process of decay inevitably led. Complicating this categorisation was that both of these usages could also be applied in descriptions of the moral vitiation of a person or a whole community, and the political debility or decline of nations and empires.1 A further complication was that the moral and political connotations of degenerative corruption were often linked to widespread acts of public office corruption, that is, the abuse of public (secular or Church) offices. The apparently divergent understandings of degenerative and public office corruption were also connected by prevailing assumptions about the correspondences between the divine structure of the cosmos, the hierarchies of nature, the rightly ordered society and the well-proportioned body of a human being. As Sir Walter Raleigh (1552–1618) put it, ‘in the little frame of man’s body there is a representation of Universall, and (by allusion) a kind of participation of all the parts thereof’.2