term, as something one undergoes despite one’s judgment or will. Compassion is also a technology that governs social relations, bringing out the structural affiliations of affect. Its surprising cognitive coolness reminds us that Aristotle considered emotions to entail a form of evaluation, and early modern writings about compassion often evaluate the social status of those who are, as the expression of the time has it, “worthy” of compassion, “digne de compassion.”5
In distinguishing between the deserving rather than the undeserving, the seventeenth century—perhaps as we do today—assessed suffering within a differentiating and distancing structure. If compassion appears ideally able to broker a bond, to serve as what John Staines has called for seventeenth-century England “one model for public politics,” it also insistently returned its feeler—the compassionater—to a sealed-off space of reserve; its publicness served chiefly to reinforce already existing categories rather than to broker any new settlement.6 Far from reaching out to the others for whom it feels, compassion often kept the other at arm’s length. This is what I call compassion’s edge.
In mapping both compassion’s edge and its hinterlands, I range over a number of different genres, contexts, and geographies. Most of the forms of writing I describe were produced and read chiefly by a relatively small and elite circle, but they all represent ways of describing and responding to social or religious difference, and they suggest that very different groups—Jesuits, tragedians, nurses—all drew on the language of compassion to describe something particular about their group identity. In the texts discussed here we will see that emotional communities, to use Barbara Rosenwein’s term, repeatedly define themselves as much by what others do not feel as what they themselves do; the figure of the pitiless is as important to this material as the pitier himself.7 These texts name and perform compassion in varied ways, across different genres; in some places they account or ask for compassion, in others they feature an economy in which it can be glimpsed. But for the most part they show compassion to be a sifting mechanism, operating on a spectrum of inclusion and exclusion, and they suggest that outside the bounds of Catholic compassion lies the unassimilable Protestant, and more broadly the unassimilated remainders of the Wars of Religion. In Compassion’s Edge, we hear from the Catholics who determine the official structure of toleration in this period, but we will also step past the edge to hear the Protestant response.
Early modern compassion’s concern for the self nonetheless often entailed a surprising evacuation of the first person. The emotion historian William Reddy makes a particular model of “first person, present-tense emotion claims,” what he calls “emotives,” central to the eighteenth century’s emotional and political changes; in turn, this concept has become central to much work in the field.8 In contrast, very few of the texts I describe ask for or otherwise voice compassion in the first person; instead, they describe, elicit, or reject it in the third person by making a set of structural generalizations, with the compassionater as judge or appraiser. The second half of the book, however, shows a range of first-person requests for compassion, both fictional and painfully factual: novels, requests for religious tolerance, and transatlantic demands for assistance. If the first part of the book insists on compassion’s rigorous grammar, the tough apportioning out of emotion from subject to object, the second suggests that movement to new genres and to new places might sometimes shift some of compassion’s rigidity, restoring something of its unsettling promise. In these final chapters, beyond compassion’s edge, compassion sometimes enables some form of change, be it aesthetic or social.
“What is pity,” asks Augustine in the City of God, “except a kind of fellow-feeling in our own hearts for the sufferings of others that in fact impels us to come to their aid as far as our ability allows?” (emphasis mine).9 Versions of the opening of this question can be found anywhere in the early modern period; yet the second part, on our impelled movement to help, is often absent in seventeenth-century accounts.10 Many of my texts show the compassionate as an observer from the sidelines, unable to intervene. Sometimes, instead, the compassionate action is shown to fail, or to have misunderstood the suffering it seeks to relieve. What can we make of this compassionate inaction or misfire?
The classicist Elizabeth Belfiore notes that “Eleein in Homer, unlike the English ‘to pity,’ is primarily to do an action rather than to feel a certain way. For example, to pity a friend fallen in war is to seek revenge.”11 Those of us less given to heroic valor may ruefully recognize themselves more in the regretful tone of the seventeenth-century French military man Henri de Campion, who says that seeing a war crime gave rise to “une pitié que je ne puis exprimer, mais l’on ne pouvait rien empêcher” [“a pity that I cannot express, but we couldn’t do anything to stop it happening”].12 In Campion’s observation compassion sidelines us; that is, it makes us spectators, as in Samuel Beckett’s Not I of 1972, in which Beckett calls for an onstage auditor, hooded, who makes a repeated movement which “consists in simple sideways raising of arms from sides and their falling back, in a gesture of helpless compassion. It lessens with each recurrence till scarcely perceptible at third.”13 These scarcely perceptible gestures are also operative in many of the texts I read here. Yet if in the seventeenth century it could be said that to move someone is also an action, then equally to be moved is sometimes, at some historical moments, all the action of which one is capable.14 If initially I looked at early modern inaction in a slightly chiding way, feeling shamefacedly that compassion then and now should do more, I’ve come to be interested in the productive aesthetics of that helpless compassion and the sort of media it shapes, as well as in the scarcely perceptible spaces for gestures of fellow-feeling carved out behind compassion’s edge.
Compassion’s Reformations
The new language of compassion took shape in a post-chivalric, post-Reformation France; out of the horror of the Wars of Religion came new discursive strategies for imagining difference. Most scholarly work on compassion begins in the eighteenth century. Yet the particularity of compassion after the wars tells us something not only about the early modern period but also about the way we think about emotion and toleration today. Compassion’s Edge tracks not the political history of toleration but its affective undertow, and in so doing suggests a different way to read the history of our own time.15
My focus is not on what happened during the Wars of Religion or at the level of political negotiation, but rather on the ways in which the wars and their aftermath figured affectively in time of (relative) peace throughout the seventeenth century.16 For a long time scholars of the French seventeenth century seemed to have swallowed the monarchical propaganda of the period, according to which the Edict of Nantes signaled a new peace and prosperity for France, a period in which France could begin again. In the last decade or so, things have shifted; scholars have increasingly begun to weigh the difficult legacy of the wars and to push against this historical fiction of the tolerant tabula rasa. Jacques Berchtold and Marie-Madeleine Fragonard’s volume on the memory and memoirs of the Wars of Religion painstakingly traced the ways in which the wars returned in subsequent historiography; Hélène Merlin-Kajman has argued that the classical tragedy, paradoxically a literary form associated with the seventeenth century’s modernity, drags around with it the unburied body of the wars; Andrea Frisch has shown how seventeenth-century historiography and dramatic theory are, despite the injunctions of the Edict of Nantes, unable to forget the crisis of the sixteenth century.17
The language of pity and compassion certainly marks the traces of the wars and their divisions.18 But in attending to early modern compassion I want to do more than sketch the history of a concept. In thinking through compassion, I look back to the degree zero of the wars: the distinctions painfully established and sometimes eroded between one side and the other. If the language of compassion takes shape amid the rubble of the religious wars, it does so because it is necessarily attached not just to a partisan theology but also more broadly to the nature of partisanship itself.
Compassion’s restrictions help us trace another limited ideal of the period: tolerance as attitude, and toleration as policy. The toleration of religious difference was not, in early modern understandings, a positive policy, even if we have been encouraged by Whiggish narratives centered on toleration’s intellectual heroes to think of it as