Being Moved: Louis XIV’s Triumphant Tenderness and the Protestant Object

This essay examines the place of affect in Le Triomphe de la Religion, a text from 1687 that praises Louis XIV for the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the forced conversion of French Protestants. It explores the role of the material object in this text and contrasts it with seventeenth-century Protestant fears about the seductive power of Catholic objects. Drawing on the work of affect theory, it suggest how attention to the strange relation between emotion and the material object might better illuminate our sense of what it meant to be religiously different in absolutist France

Faites mes baisemains à Monsieur V. Present my service to Mr V.

Nous croyons devoir prévenir le Public que nous ne garantissons pas l’authenticité de ces dialogues qui nous sont parvenus, et qui ont de fortes ressemblances avec un texte de 1694, The compleat French master for ladies and gentlemen being a new method, to learn with ease and delight the French tongue, fait par Abel Boyer, un Français réfugié en Angleterre. Toutefois, ces quelques extraits nous semblent un si beau portrait de la vie de M. Viala à Oxford que nous avons voulu les partager ici a..

Introduction

In the early modern period, the feeling and practice of compassion were recalibrated in a pressure cooker of social, religious and political changes. The rich philosophical heritage of classical ideas about the role of pity in virtuous citizenship and prudent statesmanship and the embodied practices of late-medieval affective meditation on compassion with the suffering of Christ jostled against new contexts of civil war, colonisation and capitalism. Notions of neighbourliness, charity and compassion became elastic as communities changed shape. Much of today’s critical impatience with compassion is predicated on its failure to follow through on its rhetoric, its incapacity to practice as it preaches. Yet early modern compassion was not merely an erudite textual tradition: it was also a set of practices that took on differing importance in different social and religious groups. These practices were impacted by and in turn shaped textual representations of compassion. The chapters in this volume analyse a broad range of sources to access the interplay between texts and practice in the early modern period

Mollified Hearts and Enlarged Bowels: Practising Compassion In Reformation England

Kristine Steenbergh argues that the Reformation impacted traditional practices cultivating compassion. Late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century sermons reveal a concern over the disappearance of traditional habits of charitable giving and affective meditation, and explore new forms of nurturing a capacity for sharing in the suffering of others. Clergymen thought that a mollified heart requires constant practice. With the loss of traditional habits of charity, they feared their congregations’ hearts were in danger of hardening against the sight of suffering. These concerns are expressed in a recurrent image: in their sermons, preachers worry that the members of their congregation suffer from hardened, closed and dry bowels. The concept of the ‘bowels of compassion’ is central to early modern practices of charity and fellow-feeling: these organs need to be soft and moist to open and stretch towards those in need, to share in their suffering. The active process of compassion was seen as a long-term process of softening the bowels – a concept that brings together religious terminology with humoral and bodily notions of the workings of compassion

Contemporary Compassions: Interrelating In The Anthropocene

In this closing chapter, Kristine Steenbergh compares early modern configurations of compassion to contemporary notions of fellow-feeling in multispecies relations. The chapters in Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Feeling and Practice foreground how the emotion was a situated practice shaped by the religious battles of the Reformation. Like the Reformation, the Anthropocene is a fault line urging a rethinking of ideologies, values, and practices. Humankind’s impact on the earth’s ecosystems shapes a need for new worldviews which are less anthropocentric and more attuned to the interconnections between different life forms on our planet. Steenbergh demonstrates that in the work of Donna Haraway, Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren, compassion is envisaged as central to posthuman affective relations. In these relations, compassion is inflected similarly to early modern definitions of compassion as a literal ‘suffering-with’

Héros ou personnages ?

Le mythe du « héros cornélien » a longtemps dominé la scène critique, avant de laisser place à une approche plus dramaturgique des personnages de Corneille, au pluriel, et pièce par pièce. Au passage, la notion même d'héroïsme cornélien s'est trouvée légitimement interrogée. Le héros doit-il se dissoudre alors dans le personnage, fût-il principal, voire dans le type, l'emploi, le rôle ou la place ? Corneille le distingue pourtant, ce « premier acteur » pour lequel le spectateur a de « l'amitié » ; ou plutôt il les distingue, héros et héroïne, tant le théâtre de Corneille est une « dramaturgie du couple ». Si l'éclat de l'héroïsme demeure manifeste, très concrètement construit - ou mis en question - sur la scène par le jeu des regards, des discours et des voix, son contenu demeure problématique : volonté, vertu, hauteur, point d'exception ? Pour quelles valeurs, et au prix de quels risques choisirons-nous encore aujourd'hui de parler de héros, ou de personnages de Corneille