ABSTRACT
Moving money to tax havens has become one of the many financial practices which have increased the financial precarity of working peoples of both North and South. This movement of the characters of private international law has become a phenomenal one, rather than real, and locatable in the aesthetic, juridical and theological traditions of English Exchequer and monetary practices, amongst others, and the social imaginaries of some global elites. Shakespearian and Jacobean England of the early seventeenth century provides aesthetic, performative, theological and literary resources for connecting these beliefs about Mary Magdalene’s tears of grief as exchangeable things buying the presence of Christ, with other cultural forms of tendering and gain. Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure shared with Richard Hooker’s Of Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity a concern with the role of the proper Beloved in a meritorious life, how one’s Beloved might be honoured and remembered, and which social imaginaries might better measure one’s chances of being redeemable. Judeo-Christian social imaginaries remain as structural practices in twenty-first-century global financial practices, their payment systems and their crypto-currencies. Humanities scholarship on the mos Magdalena – the habits of thinking through the body of Mary – provides new strategies for understanding the cultural and experiential supports of digital finance, and tax avoidance by global corporations.
