Emotion and Ethics: The Conjoined Twins of Early Modern English Culture

Abstract Passions and affections, notwithstanding their potential and capacity for disorder, were fundamental to the workings of the early modern world and lay at the centre of ethical life. Yet, most scholarship ignores the inseparability of emotion and ethics for early modern society. This article reviews the current state of scholarship in three fields: history of philosophy, history of emotions, and English society and governance, highlighting the assumptions and arguments which have led to the mistaken severance of affect from morality, the exclusion of ethics from histories of emotion, and the omission of emotion from studies of English power and authority. It argues that this separation is anachronistic and impairs our ability to understand governance in early modern England. This was a world of fused affect and morality which underpinned particular notions of power and authority. That governance was located within an ethical/emotive paradigm has been given insufficient attention.