Early Modern Bonds of Trust: Shakespeare to Milton

TY - BOOK

T1 - Early Modern Bonds of Trust: Shakespeare to Milton

A2 - Findlay, Alison

A2 - Wilcox, Helen

A2 - Sterrett, Joseph William

PY - 2025/4

Y1 - 2025/4

N2 - The aim of this volume is to present a collection of essays that consider the importance of two concepts, trust and risk, in early modern English literature. The first is a somewhat deceptively simple word, owing to its common and frequently informal usage in a wide range of scenarios. The second is perhaps trickier, given the fact that the word itself was only just entering the English language (borrowed from French, ‘risque’) in the early seventeenth century, and the meanings that it would eventually acquire over the course of the period were just beginning to develop. Shakespeare, to name one notable example, never uses the word ‘risk’ in his vast vocabulary. Yet the fact that these concepts were not clear, stable, or fully developed in no way means that they were unimportant during the period. In fact, quite the contrary – they underlie many of the recurring ideas and emotions of the era, and find expression in a variety of fascinating ways in early modern texts. Trust was very much in people’s minds, as it is very much in ours. Indeed, trust, in its various forms, was of particular interest to writers and thinkers in this period undoubtedly because the world as they experienced it was undergoing such dramatic changes, and these changes required new systems, procedures or new ways of thinking. In a world so full of dramatic change – in the church, in government, in systems of commerce, personal and professional relationships, indeed in language itself – the ways in which trust was exercised and maintained demanded dramatic flux as well. New means of trust had to be found that would allow people to engage with others across greater distances, perhaps strangers, perhaps people they had never met nor could meet. Increasing social mobility meant that the traditional means of attributing trustworthiness to an individual through reputation, family, or social position were less reliable. It was a world that was experiencing what Anthony Giddens describes as an expansion of time and space, the underlying condition of modernity, the condition that links our world with theirs. New forms of trust were required in intimate, intermediate and extended relations between lovers, kinsmen, and social institutions, since all of these were changing in profound ways. And with such change came an evolving understanding of uncertainty. What had long been understood to be the providence of God – the daily experience of hazard being only comprehensible to divine wisdom – began to be calculated as risk, hedged and even predicted through a changing perception of probability. Risk as we now understand it was on the horizon, necessarily entwined with, and perhaps even born out of, new forms of trust. In one sense, it is hoped that the importance of these concepts should be obvious to readers of the volume. Plays, poems, sermons and other forms of prose all make explicit reference to trust, often in passages with which we are highly familiar. King Duncan, no less, in Macbeth asserts that the Thane of Cawdor was a man upon whom he built an ‘absolute trust’ (1.4.14-15), and he does so at the moment when the Thane is being hanged for treason, just before Duncan entrusts Cawdor’s titles to Macbeth… who promptly murders Duncan in his sleep. It is remarkable that so little attention has been paid to this central concept of trust and its alter ego, risk, and that literary criticism has been so silent on a theme which was of such vital and explicit importance throughout early modern literature. As is widely acknowledged, the first social and political theorist to compose a philosophical analysis of trust was Thomas Hobbes (1651). Since the last forty years have seen vigorous critical and theoretical debate about the nature of trust (across a range of disciplines including sociology, political science, economics, and business studies), it is surprising that literary criticism has apparently been oblivious to the importance of this concept in the subject-matter, modes and reception of early modern literature.The notion of risk has, recently, fared a little better, as critics and literary historians have examined the history of probability (Hacking) and the changes in a culture that began using the novel concept of ‘risk’ as a way of understanding uncertainty (Nacol). But the importance of risk as the necessary corollary to trust has been overlooked. Indeed, trust itself, as a value – its assumptions, procedures, and protocols – remains almost entirely unexamined. Perhaps literary critics have thought trust was too obvious. Yet, trust was never too obvious for early modern writers: it was, in fact, central. ‘Trust not your daughters’ minds’, Brabantio warns, articulating the fundamental dilemma that underlies the Othello plot. And how many rings in how many early modern plays are exchanged as expressions of trust? How many of them get lost, stolen, or given away, complicating or risking the trust they represent? Trust may indeed be abstract, but its symbols and procedures are very much material, and all the more imperfect for being so. Trust is palpable, never more obvious than when it is absent. Yet trust, in its essence, creates risk, exposing the vulnerabilities of assumption and prediction in an unknowable and unpredictable environment.

AB - The aim of this volume is to present a collection of essays that consider the importance of two concepts, trust and risk, in early modern English literature. The first is a somewhat deceptively simple word, owing to its common and frequently informal usage in a wide range of scenarios. The second is perhaps trickier, given the fact that the word itself was only just entering the English language (borrowed from French, ‘risque’) in the early seventeenth century, and the meanings that it would eventually acquire over the course of the period were just beginning to develop. Shakespeare, to name one notable example, never uses the word ‘risk’ in his vast vocabulary. Yet the fact that these concepts were not clear, stable, or fully developed in no way means that they were unimportant during the period. In fact, quite the contrary – they underlie many of the recurring ideas and emotions of the era, and find expression in a variety of fascinating ways in early modern texts. Trust was very much in people’s minds, as it is very much in ours. Indeed, trust, in its various forms, was of particular interest to writers and thinkers in this period undoubtedly because the world as they experienced it was undergoing such dramatic changes, and these changes required new systems, procedures or new ways of thinking. In a world so full of dramatic change – in the church, in government, in systems of commerce, personal and professional relationships, indeed in language itself – the ways in which trust was exercised and maintained demanded dramatic flux as well. New means of trust had to be found that would allow people to engage with others across greater distances, perhaps strangers, perhaps people they had never met nor could meet. Increasing social mobility meant that the traditional means of attributing trustworthiness to an individual through reputation, family, or social position were less reliable. It was a world that was experiencing what Anthony Giddens describes as an expansion of time and space, the underlying condition of modernity, the condition that links our world with theirs. New forms of trust were required in intimate, intermediate and extended relations between lovers, kinsmen, and social institutions, since all of these were changing in profound ways. And with such change came an evolving understanding of uncertainty. What had long been understood to be the providence of God – the daily experience of hazard being only comprehensible to divine wisdom – began to be calculated as risk, hedged and even predicted through a changing perception of probability. Risk as we now understand it was on the horizon, necessarily entwined with, and perhaps even born out of, new forms of trust. In one sense, it is hoped that the importance of these concepts should be obvious to readers of the volume. Plays, poems, sermons and other forms of prose all make explicit reference to trust, often in passages with which we are highly familiar. King Duncan, no less, in Macbeth asserts that the Thane of Cawdor was a man upon whom he built an ‘absolute trust’ (1.4.14-15), and he does so at the moment when the Thane is being hanged for treason, just before Duncan entrusts Cawdor’s titles to Macbeth… who promptly murders Duncan in his sleep. It is remarkable that so little attention has been paid to this central concept of trust and its alter ego, risk, and that literary criticism has been so silent on a theme which was of such vital and explicit importance throughout early modern literature. As is widely acknowledged, the first social and political theorist to compose a philosophical analysis of trust was Thomas Hobbes (1651). Since the last forty years have seen vigorous critical and theoretical debate about the nature of trust (across a range of disciplines including sociology, political science, economics, and business studies), it is surprising that literary criticism has apparently been oblivious to the importance of this concept in the subject-matter, modes and reception of early modern literature.The notion of risk has, recently, fared a little better, as critics and literary historians have examined the history of probability (Hacking) and the changes in a culture that began using the novel concept of ‘risk’ as a way of understanding uncertainty (Nacol). But the importance of risk as the necessary corollary to trust has been overlooked. Indeed, trust itself, as a value – its assumptions, procedures, and protocols – remains almost entirely unexamined. Perhaps literary critics have thought trust was too obvious. Yet, trust was never too obvious for early modern writers: it was, in fact, central. ‘Trust not your daughters’ minds’, Brabantio warns, articulating the fundamental dilemma that underlies the Othello plot. And how many rings in how many early modern plays are exchanged as expressions of trust? How many of them get lost, stolen, or given away, complicating or risking the trust they represent? Trust may indeed be abstract, but its symbols and procedures are very much material, and all the more imperfect for being so. Trust is palpable, never more obvious than when it is absent. Yet trust, in its essence, creates risk, exposing the vulnerabilities of assumption and prediction in an unknowable and unpredictable environment.

KW - Trust

KW - Risk

KW - Early modern

KW - Shakespeare

KW - Jonson

KW - Donne

KW - Calvin

M3 - Anthology

SN - 978-1-3504-6200-7

BT - Early Modern Bonds of Trust: Shakespeare to Milton

PB - Bloomsbury Academic

CY - London

ER -