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.
Chapter 1
Pitiful Sights
Reading the Wars of Religion
On dit prov. Guerre et pitié ne s’accordent pas ensemble, pour dire, qu’Ordinairement à la guerre on n’est pas fort touché de pitié, et que mesme il est quelquefois dangereux de l’estre.
[One says proverbially War and pity do not go well together, to mean that ordinarily in war one is not much moved by pity, and that sometimes it is even dangerous to be so moved.]
So a 1694 dictionary tells us.1 In this opening chapter, though, and more broadly throughout the book that follows, I investigate the ways in which war and pity were necessarily connected in early modern France. I turn first to one particular and powerfully formative intertwining of war and pity: the topos of the “pitoyable spectacle” or “pitiful spectacle” that punctuates writing from the period of the Wars of Religion on both the Catholic and Protestant sides. This topos functioned as an apparatus for the apportioning and directing of pity, underscoring the increasing partisanship of the wars. What did it mean for history on both sides to be told with such repetitive recourse to the pitiful spectacle?
The insistence on spectacle was a strange feature of printed texts about and from the Wars of Religion, especially those by Protestants. These texts often insisted on the verbal quality of their message, the senseless noise of battle translated into words that could be carried like a militant gospel to those ready to hear it. In the capture of one French town, wrote the Protestant historian Simon Goulart, the streets resounded with sighs, with lamentations, yells and miserable groans, all mixed up together as a confused noise and strange tintamarre heard throughout the town. In short, Goulart concluded, “it was a pitoyable spectacle, a pitiful sight.”2 In Goulart’s very typical formulation, noise becomes spectacle and spectacle in turn becomes words. The pitiful spectacle depends on the transubstantiation of the printed page. It is a thing witnessed by those present that through the medium of print becomes something readers, too, can look upon. (It is worth noting that Goulart wasn’t there, either; he relied on others for his accounts.) But the reader’s eye does not merely glance back to what is recounted; in painting such a sight, the author imagines a future for the scene of
