Merridee L. Bailey

Anxieties with Political and Social Order in Fifteenth-Century England

In this chapter, I examine how late fifteenth-century books published by William Caxton were part of a broader dialogue about social order and moral anxieties. It is possible to infer emotional states through the political and social fears felt inside mercantile and gentry communities and which were manifested as a heightened concern for moral standards. Analysing fears concerning disorder is a way to see how the mercantile and gentry classes demonstrated their interest in establishing moral authority and status. As England’s first publisher, Caxton’s books deserve special attention for how early print responded to, and exacerbated, anxieties with political and social order. Caxton’s literature was reflective of English political events and cultural changes particularly associated with England’s loss of its French territories and the civil conflict created by the Wars of the Roses. While escalating military and political intrigue was felt most strongly inside royal and aristocratic circles, other social groups, particularly England’s middling ranks of merchants and gentry, responded in their own ways to anxieties and disorder in political rule. Manuscripts and print offered a tool through which fears relating to order and governance could be discussed. Awareness of social and political disorder leads to an interest in how to resolve insecurities and focus on future stability.

What history reveals about reactions to climate debates

Public support for many environmental issues is waning [1,2] despite escalating problems arising from increasing human population size and resource consumption, rapid climate change and biodiversity loss. Here, we argue that scientists need to look to history and the humanities more broadly, to explain why many people intrinsically resist change. We further suggest that scientific solutions to environmental problems have the best chance of being accepted when historical views are combined with modern perspectives.

The Importance of Equilibrium in Thomas Dekker’s A Worke For Armourers (1609)

ABSTRACT This article explores the importance of economic and social equilibrium in Thomas Dekker’s prose allegory, A Worke For Armourers (1609). I investigate the intersection between economics and literature during a period of profound economic growth and social upheaval when the seeds for capitalism were laid. I discuss how Dekker’s allegory grapples with the possibility for radical change but confronts an equally strong desire for balance and stability. Early modern dramatic writers rarely used single terms to convey concepts like change, balance and equilibrium. Instead, Dekker used allegorical situations, complex allusions and metaphors to explore how economic and social change could be achieved. A reading of Dekker’s text shows that he created an allegorical world turned economically and socially upside down before providing a resolution that returns the world to its previous state of equilibrium.

Emotion, Ritual and Power: From Family to Nation

The relationship between ritual and the creation, maintenance and destabilisation of power has not gone unexplored by historians, art historians and anthropologists, given the centrality of ritual to religious practice and to institutional structures both across time and throughout the world.1 Yet the place emotion holds in the relationship between ritual and power—indeed, that emotion should be one of the analytical tools historians turn to in order to understand power dynamics—has received less systematic attention.2 It is only recently that the emotions, rather than the ritual, have moved to the centre of the academic debate. This shift in focus has in part been motivated by Renato Rosaldo’s observation that some rituals are formed to manage emotions (such as grief) as much as rituals are designed to create emotion in the participants.3 It has also been influenced by a swathe of new methodologies and theoretical approaches emerging from across the humanities and social sciences that have rejuvenated investigations into what emotions are and how they work in organising, mediating and constructing social, cultural and institutional relationships.

Writing Histories of Law and Emotion

ABSTRACT In recent years the study of emotions in the past has received considerable attention. At the same time, many historians of law have shown reluctance to acknowledge and systematically explore emotions in legal sources and legal contexts. This issue of the Journal of Legal History addresses this imbalance and demonstrates how emotions have played important roles in legal reasoning, legal doctrine, the behaviour of legal actors, and the development of law over time. This article investigates recent developments in the study of the history of emotions and of emotions in contemporary law, before assessing the challenges of writing law and emotions histories. It argues for the importance of utilizing both legal and extra-legal source material to uncover the relationship between legal rationality and emotion; to gain insights into the emotional worlds of those participating in legal systems; and to provide a deeper understanding of the workings of the law.