The Limits of Love

If an emotional ethic like caritas was embodied, how did some come to engage in ‘deviant’ behaviours such as premarital sex and why did a society so enculturated in a Christian ethic come to have such a significant illegitimacy rate? This chapter uses a case study of servants and their sex lives to explore how people reconciled their ‘sinful’ behaviour with their commitment to caritas. It first looks at the ways in which individuals justified their romantic feelings that led to sex within the moral framework of the community, as well as those—especially men—who instead made a claim to human frailty as an excuse for misbehaviour. It then attends to how the community responded to such activities, particularly in making life uncomfortable and encouraging those who did not conform to move on. A final section looks at how sinners were restored to the community once they had reformed, especially attending to rituals of reconciliation and peace, including touch, kisses, and sharing food and drink.

The Loving Community

Caritas was an idea with resonance across early modern Europe, but given shape and form within particular national or religious contexts. This chapter introduces how the Scottish Kirk envisioned caritas as an embodied ethic—an experience of love that was manifested in deportment, thought, feeling, and behaviour—as well as its widespread take-up as a cultural norm. It particularly highlights that the family—the holy household—was imagined as the basis of a social order founded on caritas and introduces how the idea of caritas shaped the practice of the family-household relationships in eighteenth-century Scotland. It explores how the family was located not just as a site of patriarchal discipline, but also of peace and comfort, where fighting and quarrelling (excesses of passion) should be minimized. The family-household was not formed in private, however: its loving behaviours were interpreted and given meaning by a watching community.

Living Outside of Love

Charity and hospitality are perhaps the most well-recognized components of caritas in the historiography. This chapter explores the hospitality offered to the itinerant poor in Scotland, highlighting how the practice of charitable giving enabled the reincorporation of a group that lived on the edges of community. Many of these people lived outside of formal family structures because of the legal practice of banishment following criminal activity. This chapter also explores this formal process of exclusion and how providing hospitality not only allowed such people to survive but also acted as an opportunity to encourage moral reform. Those who lived in the margins were often thought of as ‘lonely’, structurally distanced from the connections that brought comfort and security, and pushed to locations—the spaces between towns and villages—imagined as lonely. Importantly, as caritas was an embodied ethic, punishment here was imagined in physical, not just symbolic, terms.

Introduction

An ‘emotional ethic’ is a system of feelings and embodied actions informed by a set of moral principles. This chapter introduces this concept and explains why caritas, a form of grace that ensured that neighbourly love was moral and ethical, operated as an emotional ethic in early modern Europe. This Introduction to the monograph introduces the concept of caritas and how it underpinned several significant ideas of the period, and explores why we might think of it as an embodied ethic. It details the methodological underpinnings of an emotional ethic, noting its foundation in performance theory and association with other emotional norms, such as ‘emotional communities’ and ‘emotional regimes’. The remainder of the chapter introduces the case study of the lower-order Scottish community in the eighteenth century, the source material through which they are accessed (mainly legal records), and the broader historical context for the book.

Learning to Love

As an emotional ethic, caritas was taught. This chapter explores the education of children and youth in caritas through acts of care and affection by those within their community. It highlights how youth was understood as a period of imperfect knowing, excusing passionate excess in young people as they learned to develop a personal conscience—an independent self—within a society that placed significant emphasis on community relationships. Teenage romance was a particularly important opportunity for teenagers to explore how caritas was to operate as moral feeling, and this chapter notes how the growing significance of romantic love in the cultural imagination provided young people with an occasion to refigure their self in relation to the group. Yet, if some young people used this as an opportunity to contest social boundaries, evidence suggests that many young people learned their lessons in love too well, on occasion failing to notice the nuances that moderated the discipline of caritas.

Promoting Harmony

The practice of caritas enjoined Christians to keep the peace with their neighbour whilst also looking out to admonish them for their sin, necessary to ensure their salvation. Unsurprisingly, these ideas could come into conflict. This chapter explores how lower-order Scots, who often lived in small houses with many people, produced ‘privacy’ by deciding when to see, hear, or feel sin. It deploys the distinction made by the Church between secret, private, and public worship as a framework of knowing and publicity used by Scots to help them live harmoniously with their neighbours. Focusing on infanticide, rape, and domestic violence cases, this chapter highlights both the contexts in which people chose to keep secrets and the rituals used—such as processioning or calling witnesses—designed to make things public. It particularly attends to the importance of physical space and material conditions in shaping the experience of caritas in this context.

Conclusion

Caritas was an emotional ethic that underpinned many of the ideals and behaviours of early modern peoples. Like the felt judgements of contemporary emotions theory, it guided decision-making through bodily feeling and was manifested in actions performed in and by bodies. This Conclusion draws together the threads of this book to highlight the utility of the concept of an ‘emotional ethic’ in helping us understand the social, economic, and cultural life of the Scottish poor, and suggests its possibilities for interpreting other contexts and future feeling. It concludes by reflecting on the possibilities of love as an ethic for the future.