Learning to Love

Abstract

As an emotional ethic, caritas was taught. This chapter explores the education of children and youth in caritas through acts of care and affection by those within their community. It highlights how youth was understood as a period of imperfect knowing, excusing passionate excess in young people as they learned to develop a personal conscience—an independent self—within a society that placed significant emphasis on community relationships. Teenage romance was a particularly important opportunity for teenagers to explore how caritas was to operate as moral feeling, and this chapter notes how the growing significance of romantic love in the cultural imagination provided young people with an occasion to refigure their self in relation to the group. Yet, if some young people used this as an opportunity to contest social boundaries, evidence suggests that many young people learned their lessons in love too well, on occasion failing to notice the nuances that moderated the discipline of caritas.