Skip to main content

IMC 2014: Sessions

Session 1625: Mercantile Morality and Moral Emotions in Medieval England

Thursday 10 July 2014, 11.15-12.45

Organiser:Merridee Lee Bailey, ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, University of Adelaide, Napier Building School of History and Politics, ADELAIDE SA 5005
Moderator/Chair:Julie Hotchin, Independent Scholar, Canberra
Paper 1625-aIs There Such a Thing as a Moral Emotion?: Aquinas on the Place of the Passions within the Prima Secundae of the Summa Theologiae
(Language: English)
Robert Miner, Department of Philosophy, Baylor University
Index terms: Learning (The Classical Inheritance), Mentalities, Philosophy
Paper 1625-bObject of Exchange: Mercantile Theology in St Erkenwald
(Language: English)
Anne McTaggart, Department of English, University of Western Ontario
Index terms: Economics - General, Language and Literature - Middle English, Religious Life, Social History
Paper 1625-cPower to Persuade: Mercantile Ideology and Moral Emotions for Late Medieval Londoners
(Language: English)
Merridee Lee Bailey, ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, University of Adelaide, Napier Building School of History and Politics, ADELAIDE SA 5005
Index terms: Economics - General, Language and Literature - Other, Printing History, Social History
Abstract

This interdisciplinary session interrogates how moral emotions were understood, enacted, and contested in late medieval and early modern England. Taking as its basis the idea that emotions and morality are historically constructed, this session explores the production of late medieval emotional discourse across a range of literary and historical sources. Questions to be raised include: what are moral emotions? Can a moral decision be conceptualised and enacted without emotion? Are there emotions that do not have a moral component? Can we identify moral emotions as having an impact on historical lives? The papers in this session interrogate these broader ideas by exploring emotional dynamics around salvation anxiety in St Erkenwald and through the mercantile ideology of late medieval London merchants. Close contextualised analysis of vernacular literature, devotional writings, didactic texts, and urban bureaucratic sources uncover the shifting and changeable connections between emotions and morality, moral emotions and rationality, mercantile theology, and emotions and sin.