Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Katherine Ibbett is Professor of French at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Compassion's Edge: Fellow-Feeling and Its Limits in Early Modern France (2017), which won the 2018 Biennial Book Prize of the Society for Renaissance Studies. Kristine Steenbergh is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.

Introduction Kristine Steenbergh and Katherine Ibbett; Part I. Theorizing: 1. The ethics of compassion in early modern England Bruce R. Smith; 2. The compassionate self of the Catholic Reformation Katherine Ibbett; Part II. Consoling: 3. 'Hee left them not comfortlesse by the way': grief and compassion in early modern English consolatory culture Paula Barros; 4. Friendship, counsel, and compassion in early modern medical thought Stephen Pender; Part III. Exhorting: 5. 'Compassion and mercie draw teares from the godlyfull often': the rhetoric of sympathy in the early modern sermon Richard Meek; 6. Mollified hearts and enlarged bowels: practising compassion in reformation England Kristine Steenbergh; Part IV. Performing: 7. Civic liberties and community compassion: the Jesuit drama of Poland-Lithuania Clarinda E. Calma and Jolanta Rzegocka; 8. Compassion, contingency and conversion in James Shirley's The Sisters Alison Searle; Part V. Responding: 9. Mountainish inhumanity in Illyria: compassion in Twelfth Night as social luxury and political duty Elisabetta Tarantino; 10. Standing on a beach: Shakespeare and the sympathetic imagination Eric Langley; Part VI. Giving: 11. 'To feel what wretches feel': Reformation and the re-naming of English compassion Toria Johnson; 12. Alms petitions and compassion in sixteenth-century London Rebecca Tomlin; Part VII. Racializing: 13. Pity and empire in the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552) Matthew Goldmark; 14. 'Our Black hero': compassion for friends and others in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko John Staines; Part VIII. Contemporary Compassions: 15. Contemporary compassions: interrelating in the Anthropocene Kristine Steenbergh.