Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and Its Limits in Early Modern France

305 Pages·2017·2.711 MB·English

by  Katherine Ibbett

Compassion’s Edge
This page intentionally left blank
Compassion’s Edge
Fellow-Feeling and Its Limits
in Early Modern France
Katherine Ibbett
university of pennsylvania press
philadelphia
A volume in the Haney Foundation Series, established in
1961 with the generous support of Dr. John Louis Haney.

Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for
purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book
may be reproduced in any form by any means without
written permission from the publisher.

Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104- 4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-f ree paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Ibbett, Katherine, author.
Title: Compassion’s edge : fellow-feeling and its limits in
early modern France / Katherine Ibbett.
Other titles: Haney Foundation series.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of
Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Series: Haney Foundation
series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017033939 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4970-5
(hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: French literature—16th century—
History and criticism. | French literature—17th
century—History and criticism. | Compassion in
literature. | France—History—Wars of the Huguenots,
1562–1598. | Religion and politics—France—History—
17th century.
Classification: LCC PQ239 .I23 2018 | DDC 840.9/353—
dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017033939
For Éric
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Introduction. Compassion’s Edge 1
Chapter 1. Pitiful Sights: Reading the Wars of Religion 29
Chapter 2. The Compassion Machine:
Theories of Fellow- Feeling, 1570– 1692 60
Chapter 3. Caritas, Compassion, and Religious Difference 98
Chapter 4. Pitiful States: Marital Miscompassion
and the Historical Novel 134
Chapter 5. Affective Absolutism
and the Problem of Religious Difference 159
Chapter 6. Compassionate Labor in Seventeenth-C entury Montreal 196
Epilogue. Something Like Compassion 223
Notes 229
Bibliography 263
Index 287
Acknowledgments 293
This page intentionally left blank
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 repre-
sentation 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 un-
yielding aspect. And indeed, the head is very distant from our imaginings of
the compassionate, especially the compassionate as framed for us by the sym-
pathetic 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 understand-
ings of the term. In Compassion’s Edge, I restore the severe face of early mod-
ern 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—t hat 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