“Charity begins at home” was already a tired piece of wisdom by the time Thomas Browne invoked the phrase with some exasperation in Religio Medici (1643). Despite its simple logic prioritizing kinship ties in distributing charity, however, the proverb situates the domestic household as a crucial site of ethical formation and practice, one that intersects with broader social networks and complex moral imperatives. Katie Barclay follows a similar trajectory in her illuminating monograph, Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self, which traces the impact of caritas in structuring early modern Scotland's household relations and serving as a nexus between the home and wider community. Indeed, in this brisk but densely learned study, Barclay shows how caritas gave shape to gendered practices of love and labor, undergirded economic and romantic relations based on trust, motivated (and sometimes alleviated) moral discipline, and animated a wide range of social rituals. Barclay also reveals an important paradox that she highlights in a range of distinct contexts: although caritas shaped communal life and neighborly relations within a broad framework of sympathy and mutuality, it likewise helped to construct individual selves and cultivate notions of privacy and mobility as the people of eighteenth-century Scotland negotiated between the concept's inherent constraints and liberating possibilities. In other words, this is a rich, varied, and often vexed landscape of love, one that Barclay explores with sensitivity. Her study is a valuable contribution to the history of emotions, and social history more generally, and it offers insights to a range of scholars of the early modern period.
Barclay links her study of caritas to spirited conversations in the disciplines of law, literature, philosophy, and theology—indeed, there are moments when the reader might want a fuller treatment of some thorny topics—but her work remains focused on the lives of the lower social orders, providing a capacious vision of their social relations by assembling an impressive catalogue from depositions, testimonials, Kirk session records, and other archival materials. Equally important is Barclay's decision to frame caritas as an emotional ethic, one that “shaped how people felt, behaved, responded to each other and their environment, and made decisions” (29), which enlivens this study of the emotional and affective realities of caritas. Rather than letting topics related to caritas like sociability or respectability recede into abstractions, Barclay resolutely situates them in their material and embodied contexts. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Barclay takes caritas seriously, treating the concept not as an “unrealistic or romantic” (177) aspiration, but instead as a robust framework informing the community's entire social and affective field of relations.
Chapter 1 sets the table for the rest of the work, as Barclay describes the central role of marriage and the holy household in practicing caritas within Scotland's larger social landscape and surveys its private and public dimensions as a site of independence and neighborly mutuality—a site that attempted to protect patriarchal order, resolve quarrels, and preserve harmony. In the second chapter she then pivots to the education of children, whose moral formation was considered an opportunity to socialize young people in the central tenets of caritas. This was not a simple method of coercion and conformity, as Barclay deftly illustrates, but instead one that required “a negotiation between individual and family interest” (75). Adolescents learned how to compose and adopt a neighborly self by exploring the boundaries of acceptable conduct, although this process could sometimes be threatened by youthful passion or caregiver neglect. Chapter 3 examines the limits of love, focusing on romantic and sexual excess—sexual assault, extramarital affairs, children born out of wedlock—that posed a challenge to the moderating norms of caritas. Observing that “the threat of exclusion was a critical component of neighbourly discipline” (101), Barclay guides the reader through various communal rituals of estrangement and reconciliation.
In chapter 4 Barclay provides a fascinating exploration of how the logic of caritas, which imposed contradictory imperatives to correct a neighbor's sinful behavior but also to maintain civic harmony, encouraged members of society to negotiate the fraught traffic between secrecy, privacy, and publicity. Focusing on crimes of infanticide, rape, and spousal murder, Barclay traces a nuanced interplay between silence and gossip, witnessing and withholding that is complicated further both by the close proximity of living spaces among the lower orders and by widening rifts between elite, middle, and lower social orders. Barclay concludes the fifth chapter by extending her focus outside the traditional domain of the holy household to the marginal spaces occupied by the banished, the vagrant, and the itinerant. Noting how the independence and vulnerability of these individuals encouraged a different and often pragmatic form of interactions, as “porous selves open to new relations and engagements” (171), Barclay likewise probes some of the inherent tensions and limitations of caritas as it was embodied in early modern Scotland. This last chapter is among the most fascinating, with its treatment of loneliness and exclusion, providing a useful reminder that charity might begin at home, but it does not stay there.
With Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self, Barclay offers a sensitive and thorough account of social life in eighteenth-century Scotland. She is least persuasive in her repeated gestures linking the particularities of Scotland to the European mainland, as if Scottish society (and its kirk) were an easy synecdoche for early modern Europe. But this study of Scotland's lower orders is rich enough on its own. Indeed, Barclay's nuanced treatment of caritas as an emotional ethic is a productive lens through which to investigate the lived experience of charitable norms in early modern society. Shuttling between public customs and private experiences, Barclay's nuanced examination of the interchange between the communal norms of caritas and the construction of the self is persuasive and provocative.
