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Introduction

Compassion’s Edge

A man fixes his gaze resolutely on something beyond the edge of the page, his eyebrows drawn together in concentration, his eyes a little downcast, his mouth slightly open, somewhere between apprehension and alarm (fig. 1). This is a sketch in black chalk by Charles Le Brun, Louis XIV’s favored painter, gathered in a collection used to teach other painters the proper representation of the passions. The drawing was not included in Le Brun’s original lecture in 1668, but by 1727 it had been bundled into a volume with those that were and coupled with a text narrating it as “compassion,” a label many subsequent critics have resisted on the grounds of the subject’s fierce and unyielding aspect. And indeed, the head is very distant from our imaginings of the compassionate, especially the compassionate as framed for us by the sympathetic and sentimental eighteenth century.¹ Yet within its seventeenth-century context, the man’s unyielding aspect is easier to understand: the drawing represents the austere masculine compassion central to discussions of the emotion in the seventeenth century, far from our current understandings of the term. In Compassion’s Edge, I restore the severe face of early modern compassion, and suggest what we lose if we turn away from its historical significance.

This book pursues the varied inflections of the language of fellow-feeling—pity, compassion, charitable care—that flourished in France in the period from the Edict of Nantes in 1598, which established some degree of religious toleration, to the official breakdown of that toleration in 1685 with that edict’s revocation. But this is not a story about compassion overcoming difference; rather, it’s about compassion reinforcing divides. Where an eighteenth-century literature of sympathy is often imagined to usher in newly communal concerns, in earlier texts the language of fellow-feeling marks or even brings about isolation. Instead of being a precursor to eighteenth-century sensibility, early modern compassion stands as evidence of the persistently painful residues from France’s sixteenth-century wars. This emotional legacy continues to shape the way we think about difference and our emotional response to it today.

Figure 1. Charles Le Brun. Compassion: man’s head in profile, facing left, 1690. White paper, black stone, 20.6 cm × 20.2 cm. INV28324-recto-folio34. Musée du Louvre, Paris, France. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

Compassion’s overarching affective grammar structures relations between the object of compassion and its subject, the compassionater. Yet this clear grammar of suffering and response could also pivot: the early modern adjectives piteux and pitoyable indicated both someone likely to show pity but also someone who should be shown it.² Compassion’s clarity is easily troubled by the fear that we might find ourselves no longer merely compassionate but rather the object of the compassion of others. Accordingly, much early modern writing about compassion attends anxiously to the proper disposition of the compassionate self, rather than to the suffering abounding in the period.³

For seventeenth-century writers, the categorization of the passions was central to moral and political discourse. Many texts, especially from the middle of the century, devoted themselves to the repetitive but compelling task of defining and distinguishing the passions, determining their origin, their manifestation, and the best way to control them.⁴ But compassion was often not seen as passion in the way the seventeenth century understood that term, as something one undergoes despite one’s judgment or will. Compassion is also a technology that governs social relations, bringing out the structural affiliations of affect. Its surprising cognitive coolness reminds us that Aristotle considered emotions to entail a form of evaluation, and early modern writings about compassion often evaluate the social status of those who are, as the expression of the time has it, “worthy” of compassion, “digne de compassion.”⁵

In distinguishing between the deserving rather than the undeserving, the seventeenth century—perhaps as we do today—assessed suffering within a differentiating and distancing structure. If compassion appears ideally able to broker a bond, to serve as what John Staines has called for seventeenth-century England “one model for public politics,” it also insistently returned its feeler—the compassionater—to a sealed-off space of reserve; its publicness served chiefly to reinforce already existing categories rather than to broker any new settlement.⁶ Far from reaching out to the others for whom it feels, compassion often kept the other at arm’s length. This is what I call compassion’s edge.

In mapping both compassion’s edge and its hinterlands, I range over a number of different genres, contexts, and geographies. Most of the forms of writing I describe were produced and read chiefly by a relatively small and elite circle, but they all represent ways of describing and responding to social or religious difference, and they suggest that very different groups—Jesuits, tragedians, nurses—all drew on the language of compassion to describe something particular about their group identity. In the texts discussed here we will see that emotional communities, to use Barbara Rosenwein’s term, repeatedly define themselves as much by what others do not feel as what they themselves do; the figure of the pitiless is as important to this material as the pitier himself.⁷ These texts name and perform compassion in varied ways, across different genres; in some places they account or ask for compassion, in others they feature an economy in which it can be glimpsed. But for the most part they show compassion to be a sifting mechanism, operating on a spectrum of inclusion and exclusion, and they suggest that outside the bounds of Catholic compassion lies the unassimilable Protestant, and more broadly the unassimilated remainders of the Wars of Religion. In Compassion’s Edge, we hear from the Catholics who determine the official structure of toleration in this period, but we will also step past the edge to hear the Protestant response.

Early modern compassion’s concern for the self nonetheless often entailed a surprising evacuation of the first person. The emotion historian William Reddy makes a particular model of “first person, present-tense emotion claims,” what he calls “emotives,” central to the eighteenth century’s emotional and political changes; in turn, this concept has become central to much work in the field.⁸ In contrast, very few of the texts I describe ask for or otherwise voice compassion in the first person; instead, they describe, elicit, or reject it in the third person by making a set of structural generalizations, with the compassionater as judge or appraiser. The second half of the book, however, shows a range of first-person requests for compassion, both fictional and painfully factual: novels, requests for religious tolerance, and transatlantic demands for assistance. If the first part of the book insists on compassion’s rigorous grammar, the tough apportioning out of emotion from subject to object, the second suggests that movement to new genres and to new places might sometimes shift some of compassion’s rigidity, restoring something of its unsettling promise. In these final chapters, beyond compassion’s edge, compassion sometimes enables some form of change, be it aesthetic or social.

“What is pity,” asks Augustine in the City of God, “except a kind of fellow-feeling in our own hearts for the sufferings of others that in fact impels us to come to their aid as far as our ability allows?” (emphasis mine).⁹ Versions of the opening of this question can be found anywhere in the early modern period; yet the second part, on our impelled movement to help, is often absent in seventeenth-century accounts.¹⁰ Many of my texts show the compassionate as an observer from the sidelines, unable to intervene. Sometimes, instead, the compassionate action is shown to fail, or to have misunderstood the suffering it seeks to relieve. What can we make of this compassionate inaction or misfire?

The classicist Elizabeth Belfiore notes that “Eleein in Homer, unlike the English ‘to pity,’ is primarily to do an action rather than to feel a certain way. For example, to pity a friend fallen in war is to seek revenge.”¹¹ Those of us less given to heroic valor may ruefully recognize themselves more in the regretful tone of the seventeenth-century French military man Henri de Campion, who says that seeing a war crime gave rise to “une pitié que je ne puis exprimer, mais l’on ne pouvait rien empêcher” [“a pity that I cannot express, but we couldn’t do anything to stop it happening”].¹² In Campion’s observation compassion sidelines us; that is, it makes us spectators, as in Samuel Beckett’s Not I of 1972, in which Beckett calls for an onstage auditor, hooded, who makes a repeated movement which “consists in simple sideways raising of arms from sides and their falling back, in a gesture of helpless compassion. It lessens with each recurrence till scarcely perceptible at third.”¹³ These scarcely perceptible gestures are also operative in many of the texts I read here. Yet if in the seventeenth century it could be said that to move someone is also an action, then equally to be moved is sometimes, at some historical moments, all the action of which one is capable.¹⁴ If initially I looked at early modern inaction in a slightly chiding way, feeling shamefacedly that compassion then and now should do more, I’ve come to be interested in the productive aesthetics of that helpless compassion and the sort of media it shapes, as well as in the scarcely perceptible spaces for gestures of fellow-feeling carved out behind compassion’s edge.

Compassion’s Reformations

The new language of compassion took shape in a post-chivalric, post-Reformation France; out of the horror of the Wars of Religion came new discursive strategies for imagining difference. Most scholarly work on compassion begins in the eighteenth century. Yet the particularity of compassion after the wars tells us something not only about the early modern period but also about the way we think about emotion and toleration today. Compassion’s Edge tracks not the political history of toleration but its affective undertow, and in so doing suggests a different way to read the history of our own time.¹⁵

My focus is not on what happened during the Wars of Religion or at the level of political negotiation, but rather on the ways in which the wars and their aftermath figured affectively in time of (relative) peace throughout the seventeenth century.¹⁶ For a long time scholars of the French seventeenth century seemed to have swallowed the monarchical propaganda of the period, according to which the Edict of Nantes signaled a new peace and prosperity for France, a period in which France could begin again. In the last decade or so, things have shifted; scholars have increasingly begun to weigh the difficult legacy of the wars and to push against this historical fiction of the tolerant tabula rasa. Jacques Berchtold and Marie-Madeleine Fragonard’s volume on the memory and memoirs of the Wars of Religion painstakingly traced the ways in which the wars returned in subsequent historiography; Hélène Merlin-Kajman has argued that the classical tragedy, paradoxically a literary form associated with the seventeenth century’s modernity, drags around with it the unburied body of the wars; Andrea Frisch has shown how seventeenth-century historiography and dramatic theory are, despite the injunctions of the Edict of Nantes, unable to forget the crisis of the sixteenth century.¹⁷

The language of pity and compassion certainly marks the traces of the wars and their divisions.¹⁸ But in attending to early modern compassion I want to do more than sketch the history of a concept. In thinking through compassion, I look back to the degree zero of the wars: the distinctions painfully established and sometimes eroded between one side and the other. If the language of compassion takes shape amid the rubble of the religious wars, it does so because it is necessarily attached not just to a partisan theology but also more broadly to the nature of partisanship itself.

Compassion’s restrictions help us trace another limited ideal of the period: tolerance as attitude, and toleration as policy. The toleration of religious difference was not, in early modern understandings, a positive policy, even if we have been encouraged by Whiggish narratives centered on toleration’s intellectual heroes to think of it as such.¹⁹ We think of tolerance as an absolute virtue, but early modern France reminds us that no such absolute obtains. For early moderns, to tolerate meant to suffer or endure, to put up with something but also to allow; it marked the acceptance of an unacceptable loss of Christian unity. Until the end of the sixteenth century the term “tolerer,” to tolerate, signified the ability to bear one’s own pain, and the modern notion of an acceptance of a belief other than one’s own separates only slowly from that first meaning.²⁰ In 1690 the French lexicographer Antoine Furetière puts it that tolerance is a “patience par laquelle on souffre, on dissimule quelque chose” [“patience with which one suffers and dissimulates something”], while the verb “to tolerate” marks a nonaction toward the other alongside whom one lives: “Souffrir quelque chose, ne s’en pas plaindre, n’en pas faire la punition. Il faut tolerer les defauts de ceux avec qui nous avons à vivre.” [“To suffer something, not to complain about it, not to punish it. We must tolerate the faults of those with whom we have to live.”]²¹ We can see such suffering at work in the procureur Omer Talon’s infamous note of 1634: “Les Réformés ne sont soufferts que par tolérance et dissimulation, comme on souffre une chose qu’on voudrait bien qui ne fût pas.” [“The Protestants are suffered only through tolerance and dissimulation, as one suffers something one would rather did not exist.”]²² Furetière’s declaration that in tolerance we must suffer those with whom we have to live is remarkably like his definition of “compatir,” to compassionate, whose primary meaning he puts not as the positive virtue of sensitivity to suffering, but rather the capacity to “demeurer ensemble … sans se détruire l’un l’autre … Vivre bien avec quelqu’un” [“remain together … without destroying one another … to live well with someone”].²³ Both verbs, to tolerate and to compassionate, describe a base-level putting up with another’s difference, a dealing with difference that might be understood on a national or a domestic scale; both might be heard in today’s French formulations about the importance of the value of “vivre-ensemble,” recently invoked in the court case S.A.S. v. France (2014) as a reason for Muslim women not to cover their faces.²⁴ Living together does not always mean to let live.

In the last twenty years historians have increasingly turned from high-minded narratives of toleration’s virtue to attend instead to the “vivre-ensemble” of early modern civic life, looking at the pragmatic ways in which Catholics and Protestants got on with the task of living alongside one another, sometimes painfully: putting up with differences, observing the necessary distance for coexistence.²⁵ This book provides an account of the affective echoes of such civic projects. Both compassion and toleration were arm’s-length pursuits, dispositions toward difference that leaned on much structural underpinning, and both defined from their edge. In early modern England, Ethan Shagan describes, “toleration was constituted precisely by normalising and naturalising its limitations.”²⁶ Both toleration and compassion looked not to overcome gaps between selves but rather to observe a necessary distance, to mind the gap.

In looking at compassion’s limits as an indicator of the limits of tolerance, I follow recent critiques of tolerance itself in trying to listen to different voices, rather than just according them a space apart from the norm. Kirstie McClure picks apart tolerance’s significance in the history of liberalism by drawing in part on the tools of feminist critique, remembering Audre Lorde, who asked that her existence be more than just tolerated.²⁷ After 9/11, diagnosing “something of a global renaissance in tolerance talk,” Wendy Brown has argued that tolerance manifests “as a strand of depoliticization in liberal democracies … construing inequality, subordination, marginalization, and social conflict.”²⁸ Brown’s observation holds in both the United States and the United Kingdom, although thinking about difference is mapped differently in each tradition; in recent years the praise of tolerance has become a default response to fundamentalist separatism, much as an automatized “compassion talk” has often surrounded the dismantling of state responses to social difference. The liberal tolerance Brown describes is often imagined to have been established in response to early modern Europe’s violent religious wars.²⁹ In tracing the significance of compassion talk for the understanding of religious and social difference in France after those wars, I point to an alternative genealogy for thinking through the affective promise of liberal narratives.

Compassion’s Lexicon

You might already find my mingled use of the words “pity” or “compassion” hard to tolerate. I began this project with just such an irritation, noting that the seventeenth-century reception of Aristotle’s Poetics translated the eleos of the famous formulation phobos and eleos, fear and pity, sometimes as “pitié,” sometimes as “compassion.” In a first reading of those texts, seventeenth-century usage seemingly did not engage what I took to be a common distinction today, where pity implies a hierarchical relationship and compassion a more companionable sort of fellow-feeling (I return to that distinction in Chapter 2).

Much of this book’s work around lexical shifts arises from close readings of genres that attend to compassion: dramatic and moral theory, religious writing, the novel, pamphlet literature. But France’s seventeenth century is also a boom period for lexicography, and many of the dictionary definitions of emotion were appropriating and recycling material from a range of genres, making them something akin to commonplace books. Dictionary entries for the terms of fellow-feeling show considerably more range and slippage than we would give those terms today, making few firm distinctions: pity is described as compassion and vice versa, allowing for the emphatic hendiadys of “pity and compassion” seen everywhere in this period. Furetière has compassion as a “mouvement de l’ame qui nous porte à avoir quelque pitié, quelque douleur en voyant souffrir un autre” [“movement of the soul which brings us to have some pity, some pain in seeing another suffer”]. Some lexicologists were keen to tip definitions immediately into solid theories, as in Richelet’s 1680 entry for compassion, which gives a paragraph resembling the careful Aristotelian boundaries we will encounter in Chapter 2. For Richelet, compassion is an

afliction qu’on a pour un mal qui semble menacer quelqu’un de sa perte, ou du moins de le faire beaucoup soufrir, quoi qu’il ne mérite nullement qu’un tel malheur lui arrive, à condition toutefois que celui qui a de la compassion se trouve en un tel état que lui-même apréhende qu’il ne lui en arrive autant, ou à quelqu’un des siens.

[affliction one has for some trial which seems to pose a mortal threat to another, or at least to make them suffer greatly, even though they do not deserve such suffering; on the condition that he who feels compassion is in such a situation that he understands such a thing could happen to him, or to one of his own.]

In avoiding reducing compassion to any such singular and tightly defined story, my lexically eclectic gathering takes a lead instead from the definition of Cotgrave, who puts pitié as “Pitie, ruth, compassion, commiseration; charitie, kindnesse, or tendernesse of disposition; also, grace, clemencie, mercifulnesse.” In English and in French in this period, compassion is a synonymically sticky cluster of terms.

These word choices work differently in different vernaculars. Marjorie Garber has shown how, in early modern English, compassion can imply a sharing of suffering or a feeling for the sufferer; only later, she suggests, did compassion take on the hierarchical feeling that I described above as pity, whereas sympathy retains fellow-feeling’s affinity or likeness.³⁰ Compassion’s history is inseparable from a history of translation. Béatrice Delaurenti describes how medieval medical accounts drawing on Aristotle turned to the vocabulary of compassio rather than sympathia to describe an almost contagious physical response to the movements of another, so that subsequent scholastic inquiry drew together the terms of antiquity and Christian resonances.³¹ In Delaurenti’s account, medieval compassion is a response something more like what seventeenth-century France would term sympathy. In French, sympathy seems to retain its corporeal, material sense longer than it does in English. During the seventeenth century it refers chiefly to the complementary properties of two objects, before a further exploration in the eighteenth century sets it on a more familiar philosophical path.

If in early modern French the use of these terms—pity, compassion, commiseration, mercy, and so on—is often mixed, we can nonetheless distinguish between something like what I would call a pity function and a compassion function: a narrow and hierarchical response or a broader, more generous one. I use the terms “pity” and “compassion” interchangeably throughout this book, insisting on one term when it seems to me (as it will in Chapters 2 and 5) that there is something at stake for early moderns in the way they use it; by the end of the century, for example, in part owing to the texts I describe in Chapter 5, pity (and “pitoyable” along with it) has taken on the language of scornful hierarchy, along the lines of Mr. T’s famous “I pity the fool.” Compassion talk also has complicated bodily origins which sometimes signify politically. Early moderns spoke of the bowels of compassion, “les entrailles” from the Greek splagchnizomai, to be moved to one’s bowels, thought to be the seat of love; yet John Staines suggests that in England Protestants tended to avoid the term, indicating “the growing distrust of the visceral notion of compassion” that accompanied the rejection of Catholic Eucharistic forms. (In French, however, Protestants were seemingly less squeamish: the Bible de Genève gives “entrailles de compassion.”)³² If compassion itself is, in its best iterations, a form of translation—a movement across difference—it seems important to look both to its terminological particularity and its range across several conceptual positions.³³

Some thinkers have depended on fierce distinctions between compassion and pity. Hannah Arendt, for example, distinguished between them, arguing that in attending to the singular or particular case, compassion is not generalizable, whereas pity reaches for a wider remit. In Arendt’s reading, stemming from an engagement with Rousseau, compassion “abolishes the distance, the in-between which always exists in human intercourse,” and this proximity erodes its ability to act politically: “Because compassion abolishes the distance, the worldly space between men where political matters, the whole realm of human affairs, are located, it remains, politically speaking, irrelevant and without consequence.”³⁴ Compassion is “to be stricken with the suffering of someone else as though it were contagious” (75); pity, in contrast, shuns such touch, “keeps its sentimental distance” (79), and “can reach out to the multitude,” though Arendt contrasts pity chiefly with a solidarity able to establish a more effective “community of interest.” Arendt separates solidarity, compassion, and pity as different categories: “Terminologically speaking, solidarity is a principle that can inspire and guide action, compassion is one of the passions, and pity is a sentiment” (79).

Arendt’s distinctions have inspired many. They are central, for instance, to the arguments made by Luc Boltanski, who, drawing on eighteenth-century discussions of pity, inquires into the ethical implications of seeing suffering at a distance, on-screen, without the possibility of direct action.³⁵ And something like Arendt’s contagious compassion—but this time more eagerly embraced—returns in Jean-Luc Nancy’s preface to his essay “Being Singular Plural,” where he makes a plea for compassion as a social force, specifying “but not compassion as a pity that feels sorry for itself and feeds on itself. Com-passion is the contagion, the contact of being with one another in this turmoil. Compassion is not altruism, nor is it identification; it is the disturbance of violent relatedness.”³⁶ For Nancy, compassion’s contagion makes it a powerful force for rethinking the social; his scorn for pity, on the other hand, looks something like the long-standing Stoic rebuff of such an emotion.³⁷ Nancy’s sacramental language makes of compassion a kind of political theology.³⁸

Compassion’s Histories

Of course, the philosophical battle over pity’s scope and value has a long history.³⁹ Plato’s scorn for pity can be countered with Aristotle’s careful protection of its status by virtue of catharsis’s regulatory machinery.⁴⁰ The Stoics dismissed pity’s femininity and its attachment to external effects. In De clementia Seneca contrasted pity, an emotion to be rejected, and clemency, a rational and helpful one: “Misericordia non causam, sed fortunam spectat; clementia rationi accedit.” [“Pity regards the plight, not the cause of it; mercy is combined with reason.”]⁴¹ As Staines notes, this distinction between looking at (spectat) and rationally considering is significant, for the history of compassion is entangled with concerns about spectatorship.⁴² Seneca further recommends that the merciful Stoic can relieve another’s tears but not add his own to them. This concern over spectatorship, alongside the dismissal of a gendered pity, became central to seventeenth-century debates, which put the Stoic rejection of pity in fraught relation with Christianity’s exhortation to charity.

The eighteenth century continued this anxious consideration of spectatorship, but a defense of pity became central to philosophical debate about the social bond.⁴³ Increasingly in eighteenth-century usage the term “sympathy” gains ground; if compassion referred to a shared suffering of pain, this model of sympathy could involve the sharing of any kind of emotion. David Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature (1739–40) thinks through a fellow-feeling built on affinity and relation: “We have a lively idea of everything related to us.”⁴⁴ Hume’s exploration of sympathy’s structure is not limited to the sharing of one emotion but addresses rather the communicative contagion that takes place between different selves, asking how the contagion praised by Nancy and feared by Arendt comes about. Hume also introduces a nuance that takes us closer to the hierarchy we hear in the language of pity today, addressing a kind of pity close to dislike. Rousseau’s stance is mixed. Whereas in his Discourse on Inequality (1755) the naturalness of pity underwrites every social good, thus moderating our tendency to self-love, in his antitheatrical Letter to D’Alembert (1758) he fears that the pity felt by a theater audience might forestall any emotion leading to a real-world response to suffering.⁴⁵ In the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith praised compassion, placing the emotion as a crucial building block of what he calls the “immense machine” of human society. In Smith’s usage, pity and compassion are broadly interchangeable terms, whereas sympathy indicates the sharing of any emotion. Kant distinguished between an admirably free and rational sympathy, to be considered as a duty, and a less admirable communicable or contagious compassion, which he saw as potentially “an insulting kind of beneficence, since it expresses the kind of benevolence one has toward someone unworthy, called pity.”⁴⁶ Not every subsequent reader welcomed the Enlightenment embrace of fellow-feeling. Nietzsche, no friend to Rousseau, brushed aside this exploration of pity’s social benefits, castigating pity (and his teacher Schopenhauer in so doing) as “the most sinister symptom of a European culture that had itself become sinister.”⁴⁷

Despite Nietzsche’s best efforts, though, many theoretical discussions of emotion today draw squarely on eighteenth-century vocabularies and histories. The critical predominance of a secular eighteenth-century sympathy and sentimentalism, as well as a later and looser vocabulary of empathy, has obscured the particularity of seventeenth-century fellow-feeling and its religious battles.⁴⁸ Accounts of humanitarianism, for example, often trace a secular and Enlightenment origin for such debates, with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith as their tutelary figures.⁴⁹ Yet the religious battles of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation provide an alternative if unhopeful genealogy for our own concerns about a response to suffering. In early modern theological debate about compassion, a tentative theory of global justice begins to make itself felt. Early modern Jesuits, launching their missionary projects even as they worried about the state of their order in Europe, inquired into the nature and extent of our obligations to others whether they be the proximate poor or the distant needy (Chapter 3). We could say that global justice theory is a secularized theological concept.⁵⁰

Likewise, the language of the human and of humanity arises out of bitterly sectarian battles. To speak of “humanity” suggests that one abandons any claim to particularity or partisanship, but like the term “compassion” the language of the human often crops up just at the moment that its potential fails. For some of my writers, the human is held up as an ideal against the animal, the beastly, or the stony; for others, it is contrasted with a machine-like calculation.⁵¹ For a rare few (the dramatic theorist André Dacier in Chapter 2, for example), the “human” refers to the contingencies of lived lives; for many, it is hailed as an easy universal even as it pushes away the suffering of actual humans. Yet for those in imperiled circumstances, like the Protestant refugees of the late seventeenth century (Chapter 5), the language of the human provided an urgently needed vocabulary that broke sovereign stalemate and made international intervention possible.

Samuel Moyn has recently suggested that the language of human rights stems from a 1930s Christian Democratic insistence on the language of human dignity. “No one interested in where human rights came from can afford to ignore Christianity,” he writes.⁵² Moyn offers a powerfully disruptive model that suggests terms arising from theological doxa can reappear or be reappropriated in surprisingly different contexts. In offering sectarian genealogies for the way we today worry about the relative distance or proximity of suffering or the vexed language of humanity, I do not propose to source an unbroken intellectual history but rather to show how such languages can be swiftly appropriated and reworked for surprisingly varied political ends. In “compassion talk” (like that which Moyn identifies as a language of international politics in the 1990s), we must learn to hear a negative heritage of exclusion and restriction. The language of the human, like the language of compassion, is always polemical; we should eye it with care.

Compassion’s Judgment

Calls to compassion often look to an emergency heroism, an immediate affective response, yet the discourse of compassion also builds a slow and enduringly rigid structure of appraisal.⁵³ Like other social mechanisms of the period, early modern compassion was dependent on a keen sense of timing, for compassionate and compassionable alike. For Saint-Evremond, even the solicitation of courtly pity depended on a particular temporality; he notes that a woman will take pity on her lover’s punctual and discreet expressions of pain but will mock him if he moans too long.⁵⁴ Some writers presented compassion as an immediate affective reaction to suffering, akin to a passion that one undergoes. The Dominican Nicolas Coeffeteau thought of it as a reaction to suffering immediately present: “Il faudroit avoir renoncé à tous les sentimens de l’humanité pour n’avoir point l’ame attendrie de douleur quand l’image s’en presente à nos yeux.” [“One would have to have had renounced all human feeling to not have the soul touched with pain when the image presents itself to our eyes.”]⁵⁵ Others imagined it as a mental exercise capable of a more careful and considered temporal reflection. Eustache de Refuge’s Traité de la cour imagined compassion as a possible response to past, present, and future events: “Mais non seulement le mal present, mais aussi l’advenir s’il est proche nous esmeüt à pitié: comme semblablement le passé, s’il n’est trop esloigné de temps, ou que la souvenance en soit encore fraiche.” [“Not only present suffering, but also the future if it is close moves us to pity; as does the past, if it is not too distant, or if the memory of it is still fresh.”]⁵⁶ For many writers, to label an action compassionate was chiefly to mark it as a heroic event, a one-off, like the incident of the Good Samaritan, around which many such discussions turned; compassion tends to be figured as an incident rather than a more general and steady disposition to be compassionate. It appears more often as noun than as adjective or verb. The quotidian labor of care carried out by women, for instance, something I take up in the final chapter, too often fell under the radar of the compassion label; it simply went unseen.⁵⁷

In the early modern period as now, compassion is a judgment which, as Lee Edelman puts it, “commits us to a calculus, a quantification of the good.”⁵⁸ Admirers of compassion often allow for compassion’s appraising nature—even its narrowness—but they see that as part of compassion’s skill and power. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s account, for example, celebrates compassion as “a reasonably reliable guide to the presence of real value. And this appears to be so ubiquitously, and without elaborate prior training.”⁵⁹ Nussbaum acknowledges that we need to be cautious about compassion, since as the Stoics argued our judgments show partiality and are “narrow and uneven” (386), and she imagines an ideal and properly instructed compassion that would not be subject to such conditions: “Compassion will be a valuable social motive only if it is equipped with an adequate theory of the worth of basic goods, only if it is equipped with an adequate understanding of agency and fault, and only if it is equipped with a suitably broad account of the people who should be the object of an agent’s concern, distant as well as close” (399). Nussbaum reads the altruism available through a properly trained and properly deployed compassion in the light of a Rawlsian understanding of justice, and she concludes that “compassion makes thought attend to certain human facts” but suggests that to do more than this it must take on a larger theory of “desert and responsibility” (342). The seventeenth-century compassionate judge or careful appraiser—always a man—who figures throughout my chapters would certainly like to imagine himself in these terms, even if his improvisational and contingent judgments often remind us of compassion’s partiality.

Nussbaum’s normative distinction between weaker (more immediate) and more valuable (reflective) compassions pursues the same urge to distinguish that characterizes the debate about compassion from Aristotle on. In contrast, I want not to make normative claims about compassion itself, but rather to suspend judgement about its virtues even as I trace what its limitations can tell us about early modern France.⁶⁰

Compassion’s Gender

Most seventeenth-century instances of the compassionate subject describe men, although before that point compassion is often a female virtue, associated especially with devotion to Christ. But in the wars of religion, compassion is wrenched away from that private devotional context to become a masculine and public emotion, brokering a public religious compromise. This regendering of compassion is central to my story.

In late medieval Europe, compassionate devotion to Christ was chiefly marked as women’s work.⁶¹ Sixteenth-century compassion, too, is insistently feminine, whether within a devotional or a Petrarchan context in which women are asked to take pity on their lover’s sufferings, a scene stitched throughout Renaissance love lyrics and reimagined in Marguerite de Navarre’s La Coche, which both represents and elicits a mutual pity between women, with the queen herself promising three weeping women that she will suffer “grant compassion” [“great compassion”] with them.⁶² In these instances, compassion is women’s domain: embodied and forming a particular form of Christian or courtly community.

In the early seventeenth century, this embodied feminine compassion is still central to the writing of Pierre de Bérulle, founder of the Oratorians and a key figure in postwar French repositionings of state and religion in the role of confessor to the newly converted king, Henri IV.⁶³ In a meditation entitled “Des souffrances de la Vierge compatissante à son Fils,” probably from around 1615, he suggests the particular role female compassion might be imagined to play in the theological mystery of the Incarnation. Bérulle posits that the flesh of Jesus is also and quite literally the flesh of his mother, specifying that the two do not share the same flesh “selon l’animation” [“in life”] but rather “selon l’affection” [“in emotion”].⁶⁴ This maternal version of the corporate communion makes the mother the essential compassionate because of her embodiment, and makes the primal mothering scene into one of emotional labor: because of Jesus, after Jesus, she gives birth only to pain.⁶⁵ It suggests that emotions come about through a physically embodied sharing, an understanding also key to the work of Nicolas Malebranche, an Oratorian philosopher active half a century later.⁶⁶ Since Bérulle’s works circulated in manuscript form among Oratorians, Malebranche might well have been thinking of his incarnate maternal compassion when he declares that the greatest of all human unions is that between the mother and the child in utero. But Malebranche’s pivot from maternal compassion to other forms of emotion also tells us something about the regendering of compassion in seventeenth-century discourse.

Like many seventeenth-century thinkers, Malebranche was insistent that the emotions and experiences of pregnant women affected their unborn children.⁶⁷ These theories of maternal impression were understood to form part of what contemporary scientists termed “les principes mécaniques de compassion” [“the mechanical principles of compassion”].⁶⁸ Although Malebranche begins his discussion of compassion with this maternal body, he then branches off to consider compassion as a larger moral concern. For Malebranche, compassion is always an incarnate suffering which begins in the body. If we see someone hurt, we might also feel a twinge—especially, of course, if we are one of those “personnes delicates, qui ont l’imagination vive, et les chairs fort tendres et fort molles” [“delicate people, with a lively imagination, and very tender and soft flesh”].⁶⁹ And where the body leads, the emotions follow: “Cette compassion dans les corps produit la compassion dans les esprits.” [“This compassion in the body produces compassion in the mind.”]⁷⁰

In distinguishing between types of compassionate, Malebranche, like other writers of the period, suggests that women and children will be especially prone to such delicacy, such that they will “machinalement” [“mechanically”] respond to sights of brutality, even when exercised only against animals, which in turn are “que des machines” [“only machines”] (281). (Think of Agnès in Molière’s L’École des femmes, whose compassion even to animals marks out her vulnerability; she can’t see a chicken die without weeping, she says, so when a man tells her he suffers for want of her love she is dead meat.)⁷¹ On the one hand, Malebranche’s attentive praise of the unique bond between mother and child, worthy of the praise of God and man, proclaims women to be central to compassion; on the other (and in keeping with Stoic tradition, though he was usually opposed to it) he distinguishes between masculine and feminine experiences of compassion.⁷²

Here, as elsewhere in the period, women’s animality places them outside of the reason that the seventeenth century saw as central to the proper procedures of compassion. In early modern French discussions of compassion, the compassionates are mostly men, even if sometimes maternal figures both despised and praised recur as a motif in their theories.⁷³ In the descriptions of the proper sort of compassion that feature in the first half of this book, the body disappears, and with it women’s significance.

Women as objects of compassion feature frequently as literary topoi throughout the materials I explore. More than one of my austere compassionates will remember Dido with tears in his eyes, recalling Augustine’s reading of Virgil in so doing. (In contrast, Heather James argues that in early modern England Dido becomes a figure for compassionate response to suffering, and that such a response was, in English texts, gendered female.)⁷⁴ Leah Whittington describes how boys in humanist classrooms were often invited to take on the characters of suffering women from antiquity, suggesting, “The humanist schoolroom … was a laboratory for compassion.”⁷⁵ Yet those who exercise or, as in Whittington’s example, learn to perform compassion are gendered male. Where eighteenth-century compassion will, via the new language of sensibilité and sentimentalism, return to the domain of women and move back into the female body, made visible by a woman’s tears, the male compassionates I study here might well have nodded at Bérulle’s maternal incarnation, but they set their own emotional practices resolutely apart from the bodily compromise it suggests.

In the final chapter, however, I suggest that away from theoretical discussion, away from metropolitan France, and away from what has come to be our canon of the period, women’s writing on their own compassionate practices sometimes spoke of a less restrictive compassion, one able to bind people together instead of hold them apart. In proffering this difference I mean not to cling to an essentialized gendering of emotion but to complicate the rigors of compassion’s edge by approaching it from a different perspective and via a very different territory.

One woman central to the writing of emotion in this period makes only a fleeting appearance in this book: Madeleine de Scudéry, briefly discussed in Chapter 2. Yet Scudéry, the great architect of civility, and her salon women set the terms for many of the emotional concepts of the period, most famously in the Carte de Tendre, or map of the land of tenderness, which features in her beloved midcentury novel Clélie, histoire romaine and which mapped emotional vocabulary for women and men for decades to come. Scudéry’s key term is “tendresse.” To arrive at that tenderness, we learn from our heroine Clélie’s map, we must pass through certain named practices: show “petits soins” [“small cares”], send a “billet doux” [“love letter”], demand “exactitude” [“exactness”], or demonstrate “constante amitié” [“constant friendship”].⁷⁶ Tenderness might seem akin to compassion, and indeed Eric Langley’s reading of Shakespeare shows that in English the two concepts are elastically intertwined, tendering a new vision of the self.⁷⁷ Scudéry’s French tenderness, however, is a practice of civility built through outward performance rather than by interior movement. Scudéry’s civil practice suggests itself at various moments in this book. For some figures I discuss, especially Pierre Nicole (Chapter 2), a true inner compassion is importantly nourished out of worldly civility. But figures like Nicole remain attached to an anxious theological dialectic between inner emotional fidelity and outward show, whereas Scudéry’s graceful secular gestures do not dwell on such a fear. Since I (like many other new friends of the period) first learned to think about emotion in the seventeenth century from Scudéry, I hope that the admirable Clélie will understand me when I say that compassion’s edge and its troubled hinterlands are scarcely set out in her map, even if I hope to show the routes between them on another occasion.

Compassion’s Present Time

In 1640s Paris, Thomas Hobbes set out a classification of different sorts of grief: “griefe for the calamity of another is Pitty, and ariseth from the imagination that the like calamity may befall himselfe, and there fore is called compassion, and in the phrase of this present-time a fellow-feeling.”⁷⁸ Hobbes’s observation that a response to another’s suffering stems from a fear for the self is common to the period; it stems from Aristotle’s reflections on pity in both the Rhetoric and the Poetics, and I discuss its implications in Chapter 2. Hobbes tells us that the phrase “fellow-feeling” is “of this present-time,” and he is etymologically correct in that: the term was a seventeenth-century neologism.⁷⁹ But we could also say that compassion’s anxious recourse to the self is also always a reflection on our own present time, wherever we find ourselves. Lauren Berlant writes that scholarly work on compassion is necessarily a history of the present because “the word compassion carries the weight of ongoing debates about the ethics of privilege.”⁸⁰ Each present time—and perhaps our own time is in particular connection to that of Hobbes—produces a form of compassion adapted to its own moment.

In today’s present time, compassion is certainly familiar currency. A University of California research project, for example, has devoted itself to “the deep roots of human goodness,” fusing cognitive research with a social task by sharing “inspiring stories of compassion in action.”⁸¹ A MOOC (massive open online course) at Wesleyan asks students worldwide to perform a day of compassion as their final assignment, with a prize at the end, thus blending virtue and strategy in a way that would have appealed to the seventeenth century.⁸² This affective optimism spills over into popular work like Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization, which asks breathlessly, “Can we reach global empathy in time to avoid the collapse of civilization and save the Earth?”⁸³ Rifkin’s staging of a temporal drama alerts us to the centrality of heroic moments in studies that are pro-compassion, and suggests how easily such work can be exploited by those in power. The rhetoric of compassion is equivalent to the dangerous rhetoric of the “necessary” in its capacity to spur immediate political action in whatever sense the orator feels it should be directed.

Compassion is also big business. A Charter for Compassion, started by Karen Armstrong, with the Dalai Lama as mascot, rubber-stamps various institutions and companies as compassionate.⁸⁴ The charter’s website provides a range of case studies as part of a “business compassion reader,” showcasing figures such as John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, who promotes executive sleepovers as a bonding experience. There’s a burgeoning field of therapeutic self-compassion, too. Paul Gilbert’s 2009 The Compassionate Mind draws on a liberal narrative of progress, calling for “the start of a compassionate awakening.”⁸⁵ Self-compassion’s emphasis on doing things for oneself, on the self-training of what two practitioners call “portable therapy,” is entangled with the swiftly instrumentalized languages of cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness; it speaks of a moment at which larger social structures are failing many in need, where mental health is something one does, entrepreneurially, for oneself.⁸⁶

This self-reliance recalls the language of American compassionate conservatism in the 1980s, when the influential evangelical Marvin Olasky set out the relations between compassion and enterprise. Effective compassion, Olasky argued, needs forms of nonpublic affiliation. Families work best when they help themselves, and compassion works best when women don’t take paid jobs but can organize soup kitchens instead.⁸⁷ Such language, writes Berlant, “resituates who the subject of compassionate action ought to be,” turning that much-touted hardworking family into the focus of our care.⁸⁸ This entrepreneurial compassion was revived by George W. Bush and has become standardized across party lines. Twenty years after Olasky, Barack Obama declared the United States to be competitive and compassionate, and in 2011 the UK’s David Cameron called for a “modern compassionate conservatism.”⁸⁹ This neoliberal compassion is always quantifiable. Cameron even suggested that nurses should be promoted on the basis of their relative compassionate capacity (an early version of this quantification of care appears in Chapter 6).⁹⁰ If compassion is meant to rally political sentiment in positive ways, pity—or its lack—is used today in a way that recalls the partisan rhetoric of the Wars of Religion. The day after the November 2015 attacks in Paris, then president François Hollande called for an “impitoyable” [“pitiless”] response to the terrorists, making an absolute affective division between two sides. The language of fellow-feeling, and its threatened lack, is central to contemporary modalities of political life that seek to create and maintain partisan divides to political and military ends.

How have scholars responded to this present time’s insistent language of compassion? If the Enlightenment probed compassion’s place in a rather abstracted social bond, in recent years scholars working on the underside of normative national cultures have proffered more specific critiques of contemporary compassion. Where a 1990s interest in trauma sought to operate or provoke compassion, more recent work seeks to study its effects.⁹¹ In these scouring readings of the contemporary, compassion blinds us to larger asymmetrical relations and to historically embedded structures of power. For both French and American critics of compassion, compassion is an antipolitics which focuses on particular cases of need instead of establishing wider political responses to inequality or suffering, but the difference in their approach tells us something of how difference itself is conceived in each national tradition.

In readings of French situations, an attention to compassion’s particularity allows us to see the frays in the apparently seamless universalism of the republican ideal. Through a compelling analysis of governmental and journalistic discourse, the anthropologist Didier Fassin explores the tensions between compassion and repression in immigration and asylum policy, reading immigration law as an oscillation “between a politics of pity and policies of control.”⁹² Miriam Ticktin pursues these insights by focusing on the French “illness clause,” a humanitarian exception in France’s 1998 immigration laws allowing suffering undocumented migrants to be granted immigration rights as a compassionate response to their particular need.⁹³ Ticktin argues that compassion is “inherently exclusionary” since in determining the morally legitimate suffering body the possibility of larger and more collective forms of change is reduced. The body for whom the state feels compassion is, as Ticktin puts it, a victim without a perpetrator.⁹⁴ Ticktin argues persuasively that this does not mean we should abandon care and compassion but that we must think about how “we might care differently.”⁹⁵

In contrast, during and after the Bush years, U.S. scholars like Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman have traced what Berlant memorably calls “compassion’s withholding” in recent American history.⁹⁶ For Berlant, “reparative compassion”⁹⁷ has been central to liberalism’s attempts to grapple with the racial violence of American history: “Compassionate liberalism is, at best, a kind of sandpaper on the surface of the racist monument whose structural and economic solidity endures.”⁹⁸ In a similar vein, Lee Edelman has explored “compassion’s compulsory disavowal of its own intrinsic callousness”; Edelman gives as an example the Catholic Church’s proffering of compassion to homosexuals only if they deny their sexuality.⁹⁹ U.S. critiques of compassion often interrogate uninflected whiteness or heteronormativity, showing compassion to be a move that seeks to silence difference.¹⁰⁰ “What if,” Berlant asks, “it turns out that compassion and coldness are not opposite at all but are two sides of a bargain that the subjects of modernity have struck with structural inequality?”¹⁰¹

Compassion is a key site for scholars who, like Berlant, cluster around what might loosely be called affect studies. If an emotion is understood to belong to an individual, to usher out from an interior core, then affect work has a rather different configuration, unattached to the self or the subject that might produce one of Reddy’s first-person emotives, instead emerging socially, extra-individually, often bodily.¹⁰² Thinking about affect enables us to read feeling within larger transpersonal or social networks and relations; it erodes our notion of what Elspeth Probyn, writing on Deleuzian affect, calls “the boundedness of bodies.”¹⁰³ And compassion, of course, is a feeling dependent on sociality—it takes place because of a being-in-relation with another—even though it does not always signify a fellow-feeling or feeling together as much as a feeling about another or even a judgment on another’s feeling.

Affect work has tended to focus on contemporary cultures, and it is no accident that it has burgeoned in the United States since 2001, drawing on our own (often negative) emotions in relation to larger political situations. But the term has an important early modern heritage, derived loosely from Baruch Spinoza via Gilles Deleuze; it offers an occasion to put the early and late modern in a necessary and charged relation to one another. The early modern, read through the lens of affect studies, is not the birthplace of rationalist subjectivity as much as a moment when various assumptions about the relation of emotion to reason, or to body, or to self, had not yet hardened into familiarity.¹⁰⁴ Where older models of emotion history imagined rationality to be set firmly against feeling—perhaps most of all in seventeenth-century France, the imagined home of a rigidly overdrawn Cartesianism—more recent work has eroded this distinction, which does not hold in many early modern texts.¹⁰⁵ Recent work on the seventeenth century suggests that early moderns thought of what we now call the emotions as having a more social, more bodily, and more cognitively significant status than that rigorous divide would suggest.¹⁰⁶ Reclaiming the early modernity of affect prompts a very different history both of early modern France and of critical theories of emotion.

Compassion’s Forms

Compassion is itself a medium, reaching for common ground between two parties. This book traces not so much the experience of compassion’s historical phenomenology (to use the term of Bruce Smith) but rather the way we know compassion through particular media, and in particular through the medium of the printed book and its various expositional devices.¹⁰⁷ How do early modern texts in their various genres and material forms—books, pamphlets, staged plays—represent and construct compassion? The compassion I dissect here lives textually, but it frequently draws on books about “live” rhetorical persuasion, our oldest models for reflecting on the emotions, and that relation between performed gestures and the textual tradition is central to the weighing of the relation between inward emotion and its outward show in many of the texts I discuss.¹⁰⁸ Textual compassion strives to indicate movements of the body or modulations of the voice, and to do so it will often look to new forms of writing.

Compassion’s forms also prompt us to look into the relation between reading and emotional response. There’s a powerful and popular narrative about reading and compassion, which has it that we can learn to feel for others through reading itself. Martha Nussbaum’s recent work on compassion, for example, glimpses compassion’s breadth at work in art forms that bring us the experiences of people for whom we might not otherwise feel. Nussbaum calls us to build a “public culture of compassion” by building “a bridge from the vividly imagined single case to the impartial principle by challenging the imagination.”¹⁰⁹ Nussbaum is not attached to works from any single place or period (though she has a preference for the nation-building nineteenth century), but other such narratives about reading have centered themselves on versions of the early modern, around the development of prose fiction.

In one such narrative about the eighteenth-century novel, the sentimental novel is a force for social good. Heroines swoon, are betrayed, die; readers weep, learn, and come together in so doing. This novel teaches its readers to feel, and through feeling to know themselves in relation to countless others. Through sentiment, through sensibilité, through sympathy, communities are formed; the reader becomes sensitive to a shared kinship, a gathering together of like-minded readers, a humming, caring hive of emotion which stands ready to be co-opted into all sorts of new social formations. This is a particularly hopeful narrative of the novel’s progress, or rather of the novel’s relation to social progress. In this story, readers cry over novels, but they learn from their tears and are able to imagine forms of social union hitherto unexpressed. This is the case for the novel made by Lynn Hunt in work on the invention of human rights.¹¹⁰

The psychologist Steven Pinker notes that literary scholars often resist such notions: “They see the idea as too middlebrow, too therapeutic, too kitsch, too sentimental, too Oprah.”¹¹¹ I count myself firmly among the resisters such as Suzanne Keen, who in a study of readers has shown how empathetic reading tends only to reaffirm in-groups and out-groups.¹¹² Not all resisters of the Nussbaum/Hunt model are literary scholars. The historian Thomas Laqueur, for example, cautions that “sad and sentimental narratives can raise just as readily as lower the alterity threshold. The divide between who is in and who is out, between neighbor and stranger, is terrifyingly vulnerable and is secured by exactly the same means as it is breached in the name of humanity.”¹¹³ Again, the term “human” prompts us to read with caution.

Keen’s and Laqueur’s resistance draws on reception, real and imagined, but we can also resist the therapeutic model by attending to formal devices and structures. Insisting on the importance of “structures of identification,” Lynn Festa’s trenchant response to the sentimentalization of sentimentalism argues that eighteenth-century tropes and figures work to differentiate as much as to consolidate diverse groups.¹¹⁴ Festa reads sentimentalism as “affective piracy,” a system which usurps the voices of sufferers to insist upon “the humanity of the feeling subject”; she insists that “sentimental form institutes restrictive communities. Sentimental tropes … create the semblance of likeness while upholding forms of national, cultural, and economic difference.”¹¹⁵ Reading sentimentally reinforces difference rather than overcoming it.

How does early modern compassion function as form? In French writing a varied set of structures of compassion—modes of address, rhetorical set pieces, spatializations of affect—are built out of the techniques and aftereffects of the writing of the Wars of Religion. In Chapter 1, for example, we will see the way in which texts frame events as pitiful spectacles; that tableau of affectively fraught spectatorship will also structure the genre of the novel, which I discuss in Chapter 4. The structures of compassion are a dispositif, a set of formal contrivances for bringing a spectator into relation with an instance or idea of suffering; but that dispositif also shapes a disposition, a way of feeling. Where sensibilité lingers on the object, compassion constructs our relation to it.¹¹⁶

Throughout this book I suggest that a certain compassionate mode—not sentimental or contagious, but rather reserved and reflective—is figured by a particular way of reading and interpreting. In many of the texts discussed here, compassion is mediated through images or through other texts; characters frame their encounters with suffering as a spectacle, or philosophers distinguish a compassion elicited by tragedy from a feeling retained from the reading of a poem. These aesthetic experiences are not the contagious and community-building scenes imagined by the readers of sentimentalism. The compassionate mode of reception is not a form of fervent identification. Its readers mark an affective relation with what they read but keep it at a distance.

In Compassion’s Edge, fictional representations of and theoretical discourse about compassion mingle, both participating in the construction of compassion’s exclusions. The history of emotions has tended to disregard literary texts as sources.¹¹⁷ Yet my aim in bringing these different forms of writing together is not to insist on literature’s privileged perspective on the emotions; indeed, very few of the texts I read here come from what are usually understood to be literary genres. Instead, I want to insist that fictive representations and theoretical discussions of compassion in this period alike reflect on the emotional and ethical engagements of our modes of reading. Sometimes this reading-for-compassion is explicit, as it is in the multiple texts where theorists of compassion reflect on scenes of reading or spectating, on novels or on tragedy. More broadly, both kinds of texts suggest that compassion is a way of reading the other, of appraising and responding to signs of suffering that are imagined to figure a narrative. And if I read nonliterary texts with the perspective of my own literary training, sometimes pushing them out of their more usual places in an intellectual history, that serves to remind us that reading, like the compassion I describe here, is a contingent and partisan way of apprehending the world even as it reaches out to draw others in.

Compassion’s Chapters

The first three chapters of this book establish the structures of early modern compassion as they unfold in early modern France, exploring compassion’s edge and looking at the drawing of partisan distinctions and the theoretical structures generated by such distinctions. In the final three chapters, I suggest that those rigid structures are reworked in varied forms of early modern writing which speak from the sometimes more nuanced territory beyond the edge, looking at fiction, at writing about religious difference and transnationalism, and at writing from New France. In these liminal zones, I suggest that compassion’s edge is still fiercely observed but also sometimes recuperated, even if only briefly. In some of this material, the compassionate gesture reaches across difference, although often with troubling results.

In the first chapter, “Pitiful Sights: Reading the Wars of Religion,” I explore the topos of the pitiful spectacle that punctuates writing from the period of the wars on both the Catholic and Protestant sides. This pitiful spectacle became a key weapon in the affective policing of a divided France, across a range of genres and sectarian divides: from Ronsard to Montaigne, via Agrippa d’Aubigné. The pitiful spectacle functioned as an apparatus for the apportioning and directing of pity, underscoring the increasing partisanship of the wars. It also established response to spectacle as something central to the political life of the troubled nation. Through that figure, which returns throughout the book, the Wars of Religion make themselves felt repeatedly and affectively throughout the seventeenth century; the language of pity and compassion shapes the way the French negotiated both the wars and the difficult experiment with toleration that followed them.

In the second chapter, “The Compassion Machine: Theories of Fellow-Feeling, 1570–1692,” I pursue the secular structures of compassion as they were explored by writers of moral and dramatic theory from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century: La Taille, Montaigne, Charron, Descartes, La Rochefoucauld, Esprit, Nicole, La Mesnardière, Corneille, Rapin, and Dacier. These very different writers all return to the structure of fellow-feeling set out in Aristotle’s account of pity and terror in the Rhetoric and Poetics: we pity another’s suffering and, in pitying, fear that the same might happen to ourselves. For some this structure makes pity into a narrow response to suffering, whereas for others the ritual observation of the same pairing leads to a broader reflection on human vulnerability. In tracking the variant breadth of pity over these theorizations, I trace the sharply structured constructions of compassion’s edge.

In Chapter 3, “Caritas, Compassion, and Religious Difference,” I ask how religious difference disrupted structures of proximity and distance, looking at Catholic and Protestant understandings of caritas, the bond of universal love. I describe the reach to universalism sketched out in the compassion theories of the Jesuits Jean-Baptiste Saint-Jure and Pierre Le Moyne, and the Capuchin Yves de Paris, but set them against writers who insisted that compassion was importantly differential: the Jansenist Blaise Pascal, the midcentury Protestant theologian Moïse Amyraut, and the refugee minister Pierre Jurieu. How did such different early moderns imagine the “us” of their community to which a “them” stood in opposition? This theological gerrymandering of fellow-feeling—the re-ascription of sameness and difference—allows us to see something central to compassion’s mechanisms. Even as compassion aspired to the universal, it betrayed its limits, and those limits eventually gave rise to another edge: the modern distinction between compassion and pity.

The final three chapters turn to varied textual instances of compassion, considering how generic or rhetorical structures (the novel, drama, journals) explore the hinterland behind compassion’s edge. In the fourth chapter, “Pitiful States: Marital Miscompassion and the Historical Novel,” I turn to the problem of misreading in seventeenth-century historical fiction, exploring Lafayette’s careful experiments with the motif of failed compassion between husband and wife in the novellas La Princesse de Montpensier and La Comtesse de Tende and the longer novel La Princesse de Clèves. In moments of misplaced compassion or what I call “miscompassion” in the novellas, Lafayette draws on the tableau of the “pitiful spectacle,” recalling the figure of Chapter 1; in so doing, she points her reader to a larger historical inquiry about coexistence in France after the Edict of Nantes. In the longer novel, she also builds a new aesthetic out of failed compassion.

Chapter 5, “Affective Absolutism and the Problem of Religious Difference,” continues the dialogue between Catholic and Protestant writing seen in Chapter 3. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes—which denied freedom of worship to Protestants and constrained them to convert—deployed a language of nonconsensual compassion, and I explore the ways in which the Protestants responded to this absolutist affect. The chapter begins with pro-Revocation material and then turns to Protestant accounts of the Revocation: Élie Benoist’s History of the Revocation, Protestant pamphlet literature, and pastoral writings from Jurieu and Pierre Bayle. Lastly, in counterpoint to those polarized positions, I read the affective language of Jean Racine’s play Esther, first performed for the king four years after the Revocation, and centrally concerned with supplication and religious difference. In moving between these shifting emotional rhetorics, we get a more complex picture of what I term affective absolutism.

My final chapter, “Compassionate Labor in Seventeenth-Century Montreal,” crosses the Atlantic and turns to women’s labor in texts addressed to women from the Hôtel Dieu, Montreal’s first hospital. For the nuns that served as nurses, compassion was not the glancing product of a singular encounter but rather something that had to be reproduced in accordance with an institutional routine. I examine rule books sent from the nursing order’s original French home, set against a journal (Marie Morin’s Histoire simple et véritable) and letters produced in Montreal. Morin’s settler story unsettles the textual rules of metropolitan compassion, and the consideration of care that arises from the Montreal material allows me to frame an epilogue about our own practices as readers of both the past and the present time. The austere compassion I trace throughout the book affords us a different understanding of early modern differences and how they still signify for us today. It also lets us think anew about what a compassionate poetics might mean for our ways of reading.