Historians of Renaissance and early modern Europe have, for decades, endeavored to explore the lives of the unprivileged. But the perennial challenge is how to access the experiences and values of people for whom the documentary record is, at best, uneven. In this this study of ordinary Scots between 1660 and 1830, Katie Barclay demonstrates the utility of new developments in the history of emotion for understanding the material, communal, and moral lives of the poor. Barclay defines caritas, or neighborly love, as “an ‘emotional ethic’ designed to promote a particular type of community relation” (3). Caritas, she argues, was a means of defining the self in relation to society that was grounded in religious belief and in the embodied expression of love. Caritas thus united feelings, moral principles, and bodily actions in everyday spaces.
The model for neighborly relations was the family, both the love between married couples and that between parent and child. As Barclay explores in chapter 1, these links went both ways. While contemporaries defined society in terms of familial love and obligation, neighbors were ever ready to mediate in a disharmonious marriage. The “watching community” shielded abused or neglected spouses while protecting the community itself from the emotional ripple effects of marital strife. Barclay's second and third chapters focus on the socialization of children into the “loving community” and on the tension between solidarity and the maintenance of moral discipline. There was a recognition, for instance, that young people were still learning how to act with caritas. So youthful transgressions, whether romantic or violent, might be treated with latitude. Even so, the uneven distribution of caritas's protections is a persistent theme; gender and social status affected communal responses to moral failings. The weight of punishment for premarital sex, for instance, typically fell more on unmarried pregnant women than on fathers of illegitimate children. Sexual violence, too, was often seen as natural or caused by the perceived sexual availability of lower-class women (98).
Later chapters emphasize pragmatic approaches to community. Barclay argues that the material and social conditions of early modern Scotland meant that neighbors living in close proximity might come into possession of unwanted knowledge of each other's activities. Neighborly love thus required respect for both individual secrecy and familial privacy as a means of balancing “charitable hatred [of misdeeds] with patience, kindness, and tolerance for human nature” (144). She moves then to the situation of mobile populations, the migrant poor or those banished for transgressions. Though charity or the camaraderie of the road, these too had a place within caritas, despite their lack of a fixed community. But fleeting or unequal relationships were often insufficient to alleviate the loneliness of independence. Loneliness, for Barclay, was the opposite of love. Shunning or banishment, thus, was an obvious punishment for those who failed to conform to community values. For those denied physical proximity, exclusion was a reminder of “the loss entailed in living beyond love” (171).
This brief précis cannot capture the depth of research presented in this book; scholars of childhood, family, gender relations, social space, and more will find much of interest. This is in part because Barclay draws on a corpus of roughly two thousand judicial and church court records, while deftly embedding this archival base within the broader historiography. These records permit access to intimate details of people's lives, but they also mean that Barclay must examine caritas through the moments in which it failed: theft, rape, abuse, and rejection. Moreover, these mediated documents are less exact descriptions of events than prescriptive texts meant to shape social relations. This privileges a reading of caritas as an imposed emotional ethic that bound love together with power and resistance. People may indeed have naturalized and embodied the principles of caritas, but not always happily. One might quibble, moreover, with the term caritas, which seems to have appeared in none of her sources. Barclay presents the concept as an overarching ideal that structured communal relations and individuals’ sense of self. But it is not clear that her subjects saw all the issues described here as fundamentally bound together by a single emotional ethic. A more detailed discussion of the contemporary nomenclature of love and ethical responsibility would help to explicate this issue.
These are minor concerns, however, in a book so well-conceived and painstakingly researched. Barclay has broken new ground in both the history of emotions and in our understanding of the experiences and motivations of ordinary people. Though focused on Scotland, Barclay's discussion connects to broader European concerns; her methods and conclusions are applicable far beyond the putative geographic scope of the book.
