Compassion in early modern literature and culture : feeling and practice / edited by Kristine Steenbergh, Katherine Ibbett.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Ibbett, Katherine, editor.

Steenbergh, Kristine, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

English literature.

Literature and society--England--History--17th century.

Literature and society.

England.

History.

Literature and society--England--History--16th century.

Christianity and literature--England--History--17th century.

Christianity and literature.

Christianity and literature--England--History--16th century.

Compassion in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 305 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2021.

System Details:

text file

PDF

Summary:

This collection is an enquiry into compassion as an early modern emotional phenomenon, situating it within the complexity of European economic, social, cultural and religious tensions. Drawing on recent work in the history of emotions, leading scholars consider the particularities of early modern compassion, demonstrating its entanglements with diverse genres and geographies. Chapters on canonical and less familiar works explore tragedy, comedy, sermons, philosophy, treatises on consolation, medical writing, and dramatic theory, showing how early modern compassion shaped attitudes and social structures that remain central to the way we imagine our response to suffering today, and how such investigations can ultimately provoke new ways of thinking about community in contemporary Europe.

Contents:

Theorizing. The ethics of compassion in early modern England / Bruce R. Smith

The compassionate self of the Catholic Reformation / Katherine Ibbett

Consoling. 'Hee left them not comfortlesse by the way' : grief and compassion in early modern English consolatory culture / Paula Barros

Friendship, counsel, and compassion in early modern medical thought / Stephen Pender

Exhorting. 'Compassion and mercie draw teares from the godlyfull often' : the rhetoric of sympathy in the early modern sermon / Richard Meek

Mollified hearts and enlarged bowels : practising compassion in Reformation England / Kristine Steenbergh

Performing. Civic liberties and community compassion : the Jesuit drama of Poland-Lithuania / Clarinda E. Calma and Jolanta Rzegocka

Compassion, contingency and conversion in James Shirley's The sisters / Alison Searle

Responding. Mountainish inhumanity in Illyria : compassion in Twelfth night as social luxury and political duty / Elisabetta Tarantino

Standing on a beach : Shakespeare and the sympathetic imagination / Eric Langley

Giving. 'To feel what wretches feel' : Reformation and the re-naming of English compassion / Toria Johnson

Alms petitions and compassion in sixteenth-century London / Rebecca Tomlin

Racializing. Pity and empire in the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552) / Matthew Goldmark

'Our Black hero' : compassion for friends and others in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko / John Staines

Contemporary compassions : interrelating in the Anthropocene / Kristine Steenbergh.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 27 Apr 2021).

Other Format:

Print version:

ISBN:

9781108862172

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.