Emotion and Calculation: Marriage Markets and Match Making from Early Modernity to the Present

Abstract

Love and economics are usually considered to be opposites: While love is seen as an irrational, unexplainable and ungovernable feeling towards another person, economics is regarded as the art of egoistic, profit-oriented, rational calculations and actions. But are they, really? By examining a wide range of literary and historical sources throughout European modernity, the papers assembled in this volume investigate how the process of finding a partner or spouse interlaces love and economics. In their analysis of Early Modern marriage legislation, drama, Spanish novellas, Jane Austen’s novels, films, dating apps and more, they reveal major cultural-historical changes in the notions of love and economics, and stress the role that concepts of gender, epistemic discourse, and media play in their interrelated history. Yet, despite their differing findings, they all show one thing: that „opposition“ is far too simple a term to grasp the complicated relation of emotion and calculation.