This edited volume is drawn from the conference held in Amsterdam and contains essays of fifteen contributors. Its commendable coherence is determined by both the central theme and the well-thought-through structure, which supports the topic’s conceptualization. The reader is invited to reflect on the intricate process of redefining and negotiating the boundaries of compassion in early modern period Kristine Steenbergh and Katherine Ibett believe essential for understanding features that characterize modernity. An informative introduction states this clearly while presenting a picture of the historical evolution of the notions from which the early modern category of compassion emerged (Greek eleos, oiktos, Latin misericordia, and late medieval compassio) and emphasizing the key role of the Reformation in changing its meaning.
Arranged into eight sections, the studies collected in this volume focus on both early modern theories and practices of compassion, drawing material from normative, literary, and archival texts. Each section (except for the last) contains two essays examining similar aspects of the subject matter.
While the book does not pretend to be an exploration of the early modern history of the concept of compassion, certainly many of its chapters accurately and convincingly demonstrate its tensions and limitations, indeed, not far removed from those we confront today. Bruce S. Smith outlines a general picture of the ambivalences in the ethics of compassion in Protestant England (1560–1666), pointing out the intrinsic contradictions, which featured within humanistic culture, between Christian morality and the Stoic view of pity as a harmful passion, and analyzing limitations in the “distribution” of compassion, its institutions, and cultural representations. Similar tensions are also evident in the works of French Catholic authors (François de Sales, Robert Bellarmine, and Pierre Le Moyne) examined in the following chapter, who, as Ibbett argues, tend to treat compassion as a specific disposition of the will, and the issue of the legitimacy of compassion figures prominently in their discourse.
Thus, beginning with this first section, early modern compassion appears as a space of moral and theological uncertainty, as well as conceptual and social conflict. Subsequent chapters further develop many of these problems.
The section on English consolatory culture discusses the gradual erosion of the Stoic ethos of humanistic consolation, replaced by a compassionate approach of shared vulnerability (Paula Barros), and explores intricate relationship between counsel, compassion, and friendship in medical thought (Stephen Pender). In the section “Exhorting,” a reader finds an insightful chapter by Richard Meek, who analyzes the late-Elizabethan sermons in order to show a shift from the physiological to the emotional understanding of sympathy, and Steenbergh’s stimulating essay on the concept of “the bowels of compassion” in Protestant preaching. Since the theater and the preaching appear on Smith’s map of “the social geography of compassion” as crucial sites where compassionate attitudes were fostered, the fourth pairing of the volume deals with the performing arts. Clarinda Calma and Jolanta Rzegocka discuss limits and conditions of cross-denominational compassion in Jesuit theater within Poland-Lithuania, while Alison Searle examines factors affecting the limits of fellow-feeling in James Shirley’s play The Sisters.
Theater and drama feature prominently also in another section (“Responding”), which seems the least obvious in this otherwise precise structure of the volume. Responding to the images of suffering (whether true or performed on the stage) would be compassion in its essence, so it does sound promising. However, the chapters paired here focus on literary works as such, not the audience, actual or intended. Elisabetta Tarantino engagingly explores limits of compassion as presented in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Eric Langley provides an essay on how the use of the Lucretius’s topos serves as a test for a compassionate imagination.
The sixth section focuses on “Giving” and offers insightful analyses of post-Reformation problems with deeds of charity. Toria Johnson in her comparative reading of the medieval morality play Everyman and Shakespeare’s King Lear convincingly argues that Protestant Reformation, which had denied the penitential value of charity, reimagined it as an expression of common humanity. However, “giving” still required theological justification, which could not have been provided by sola fides principle. In her excellent contribution, Rebecca Tomlin, by investigating alms-gathering licenses from St. Botolph’s, Aldgate between c.1580–1600, examines institutional structures of the practice of almsgiving and shows how spiritual motivations of the charity merge with ideas of restoring social and economic orders.
The boundaries of compassion and ways to cross them are also the subject of chapters paired in the section “Racializing.” Matthew Goldmark brilliantly analyzes the paternalistic-colonial rhetorical strategies of Bartolomé de Las Casas in his famous Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, intended to motivate Philip ii to pity and intervene on behalf of the Indigenous American population. John D. Staines interestingly explores the ways in which the sympathetic relationship between the black protagonist of Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave (1688) and the narrator is formed and how it becomes limited.
The last section (by Steenbergh) serves as conclusion, emphasizing once again the pivotal role of the Reformation, but also offering the perspective of a post-humanist pondering on compassion extended to non-human others.
Chapters on the tension between Stoic and Christian approaches to compassion, its physiological interpretations rooted in humoral medicine, the post-Reformation search for a theologically satisfying concept of works of charity, and on the limits of compassion and their transgression account among the best in this valuable volume. What comes as surprise, however, is the almost complete omission of the issue of religious persecution and martyrdom for the faith. The matter is only mentioned in the context of solidarity with suffering co-religionists, but the issue deserves more attention, as it has more intriguing aspects, such as compassion (towards a community threatened with heresy or an individual whose soul is at risk of damnation) as a paradoxical motivation for religious violence.
Overall, the volume is a valuable contribution on a timely topic, whose relevance—as it is convincingly argued—seems pressing not only from the academic perspective of the cultural history of emotions.
