Compassion, Love, and Happiness: Positive Emotions and Early Modern Communities

Abstract

Compassion, Love, and Happiness:Positive Emotions and Early Modern Communities Linda Pollock (bio) Barclay, Katie, Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2021; hardback; pp. 240; R.R.P. £72.00; ISBN 9780198868132. Fox, Cora, Bradley J. Irish, and Cassie M. Miura, eds, Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2021; hardcover; pp. 240; R.R.P. £85.00; ISBN 9781526137135. Steenbergh, Kristine, and Katherine Ibbett, eds, Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Feeling and Practice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021; hardback; pp. 290; R.R.P. £80.00; ISBN 9781108495394. Wood, Andy, Faith, Hope, and Charity: English Neighbourhoods, 1500–1640, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020; paperback; pp. xvi, 306; R.R.P. £64.99; ISBN 9781108814454. Up until recently, much of the work in the history of emotions in early modern Europe has focused on those strong passions that rend individuals, families, and communities asunder: anger, jealousy, envy, and grief, for instance.1 But the tide is turning away from negativity, suppression, and destruction and towards those passions crucial to the creation and preservation of communities. The four books under review all grant passions and affections a constructive role in individual lives and social relations, delineating how emotion was woven into the fabric of early modern society. In Faith, Hope, and Charity: English Neighbourhoods, 1500–1640, Andy Wood examines the building and experience of neighbourhood for all ranks of English society for the period 1500 to 1640 through the trifecta [End Page 131] lens of faith, hope, and charity. Katie Barclay explores in Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self the meaning of community for ordinary people in eighteenth-century Scotland through the belief and enactment of caritas. The essays in Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture, edited by Cora Fox, Bradley Irish, and Cassie Miura, augment the 'happiness turn' and seek to redress the imbalance in current scholarship by bringing to light the existence of positive feelings in daily life, the active pursuit of pleasure, and how literary structures elicit and encourage affective attachments. The contributors to Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Feeling and Practice, edited by Kristine Steenbergh and Katherine Ibbett, concentrate on compassion but take a broad-brush approach to the concept, as well as moving beyond England. The essays delve into interrelated concepts along with compassion's multiple forms and complexities, in the hope that such entanglements will be productive and lead to new understandings. Andy Wood's meticulously researched and deeply felt book investigates how early modern English people, rich, middling, and poor, did their best to make their communities operate. The three biblical tenets of faith (in God, neighbours, and friends to provide pleasure and support), hope (for a future with economic security and political empowerment), and charity (which both rendered help to those in need and granted a right to assert claims to aid) structured and guided the workings of early modern neighbourhoods, rural and urban. By examining the idea and definition of neighbourhood, the obligation to live in harmony and help others, the nature of disputes and reconciliation, as well as who was included and excluded, he shows that notwithstanding problems, challenges, inconsistencies, and changes, neighbourliness endured as an ideal and practice. Barclay's Caritas, based on around two thousand court cases, supplemented with personal correspondence, and replete with moving stories of those of lowly social status, places love at the centre of eighteenth-century Scottish society. She considers the centrality of marriage to the foundation of a loving community, how young people were socialized into upholding caritas, and how caritas promoted harmony and underpinned hospitality, as well as investigating the costs involved in this model for those who would not or could not conform. Deploying practice theory—the concept that emotions are engrained in body and mind through repeated practice—she lays out how caritas restrained violence, promoted peacekeeping, shaped social interaction, and offered a model for ethical relations. The interdisciplinary Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture brings together the insights of affect theory and historical studies of emotion in order to reconsider which emotions mattered to early modern culture, and their...