L'envie au Moyen Âge

Envy in the Middle Ages. A concept not to be found either in literature or in art before the XIIIth century, envy evolved in conjunction with the growing awareness of the sin which followed in the wake of the church's decision in 1215 to require annual confession. Men of the middle ages, however, could only conceive of envy in terms of its most external aspects. It was associated with slander in the 13th : with covetousness in the XIVth : and with hatred in the XVth, making it a temporal instead of spiritual sin. Supplanted by avarice and eventually relegated to the penultimate position in the last of the seven deadly sins, after the Black Death envy came to be seen as the guiding force behind all human behaviour and the explanation for the wars and rivalries which then divided France. Simultaneously, it became the sin associated with men who sought, not money itself but the ostentatious finery which money could buy and who would stop at nothing to achieve that goal even though they would never get the satisfaction of having obtained it.Vincent-Cassy Mireille. L'envie au Moyen Âge. In: Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations. 35ᵉ année, N. 2, 1980. pp. 253-271