Compassion’s Edge
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
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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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
Contents
Introduction. Compassion’s Edge
Chapter 1. Pitiful Sights: Reading the Wars of Religion
Chapter 2. The Compassion Machine: Theories of Fellow-Feeling, 1570–1692
Chapter 3. Caritas, Compassion, and Religious Difference
Chapter 4. Pitiful States: Marital Miscompassion and the Historical Novel
Chapter 5. Affective Absolutism and the Problem of Religious Difference
Chapter 6. Compassionate Labor in Seventeenth-Century Montreal
Epilogue. Something Like Compassion
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
