Abstract
Chancery was a court that became infamous for provoking anger, contempt, distrust, and disgust, even loathing and rage, two basic emotions that feature right at the centre of Robert Plutchik’s three-dimensional emotions wheel. Chancery never became well known for the positive basic emotion of joy.1 Yet, some litigants must have experienced a happy outcome. All literary representations of Chancery have been overwhelmingly negative. Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House of 1793 portrayed the jealous viciousness of Mrs Lennard and her hidden will alongside the stifling orderliness of the court, with its dull annual reports and opaque precedents.2 In 1920, John Galsworthy gave us In Cancery, one volume of the Forsyte family chronicle focused on the unforgettably mean and proud 'man of property', Soames Forsyte, whose 'possessive instinct never stands still' and extends to his wife.3 Again the court of Chancery featured almost as a metonym for people who were jealous and obsessive and deeply interfering. And then there is Bleak House. The trundling and cripplingly expensive case over a disputed will, which Charles Dickens named Jarndyce v Jarndyce, played to a knowing readership, though, ironically, the court so hated by the Victorians had a structure and procedures that originally developed from the late sixteenth century under Thomas Egerton, Lord Ellesmere, in response to the weight of demand.
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Notes
Dylan Evans, Emotion: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 5
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Kew, The National Archives (hereafter TNA), C2, C3, C5, C6, C22 (1558-1649). Chancery records number half a million sets of documents and are relatively under used. They have been fairly extensively considered by historians interested in the law itself and Chancery as a legal institution. See, for example, Timothy S. Haskett, ‘The Medieval English Court of Chancery’, Law and History Review, 14, no. 2 (1996), 245–313
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See, for example, Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998)
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Cf. Amanda L. Capern, ‘Adultery and Impotence as Literary Spectacle in the Divorce Debates and Tracts of the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Spectacle, Sex and Property in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture, ed. Julie A. Chappell and Kamille Stone Stanton (New York: AMS, 2015)
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© 2015 Amanda L. Capern
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Capern, A.L. (2015). Emotions, Gender Expectations, and the Social Role of Chancery, 1550–1650. In: Broomhall, S. (eds) Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137531162_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137531162_11
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