Envy, Jealousy and Zeal in the Ancient and Medieval Mediterranean

This book traces the phenomena and language of jealousy, envy and rivalry from the Old Testament and Classical Greece through the Roman Empire and Medieval Christendom.

Envy, Jealousy and Zeal in the Ancient and Medieval Mediterraneanis a cross-cultural history of the rivalrous emotions. This open access book traces changing understandings of jealousy and envy across two millennia, through close studies of half a dozen Mediterranean societies – from biblical Israel and classical Greece to Umayyad Córdoba and medieval Latin Christendom. By treating envy, jealousy and their estranged cousin zeal as concepts with long and complex histories, it shows how they have reflected and also driven changes in gender relations, friendship, class structure, marriage norms, religious piety, sexuality, emotional style and language. Is jealousy a healthy social virtue, or a manifestation of the depravity of human nature? The answer depends, to a surprising extent, on the language you speak.

A host of unexpected stories emerge along the way: how religious ‘zealotry’ evolved out of pious ‘jealousy’ to become the emotion which drove devout heroes to combat heretics; how ‘romantic jealousy’ developed in tandem with the biblical metaphor of God as a ‘jealous husband’; how philosophers since antiquity have waged war on jealousy and envy through a succession of utopian projects spanning from Plato’s Republic and Christian monasticism to the free love of Hippy communes. Ancient and medieval texts brim with answers to timeless questions: is jealousy the proof of love, or love’s opposite? What role is there for envy in a healthy community? When does ideological zeal improve society, when does it lead to intolerance and misguided violence?

Using historical anthropology, this book questions basic assumptions about envy and jealousy within contemporary psychology, philosophy and theology, offering a new basis for a cross-cultural understanding of these fundamental human feelings.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on Bloomsbury Collections. Open access was funded by The Swiss National Science Foundation.