Compassion's Edge: Fellow-Feeling and its Limits in Early Modern France by Katherine Ibbett (review)

This is an astounding book in topic, argument, and style. Compassion in seventeenth-century France has — when it has been considered at all — typically either been diagnosed as a classical hangover from Aristotelian reflections on pity, or read in the distorting retrospective glow of Enlightenment sensibility. Covering the period roughly from the Wars of Religion until the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Katherine Ibbett's bold, astute, and considerate study takes early modern compassion on the period's own terms, while gesturing generously towards ways in which these terms could be made applicable to contemporary debates and practices. Resisting the temptation to distinguish too artificially between 'compassion' and related concerns ('pity', 'charity', 'sympathy', 'empathy', 'humanity', 'tolerance', and so forth), Ibbett focuses above all on what she dubs 'compassion's edge' — a certain hardness or limiting distance that invariably accompanies compassion in the period. Aiming to 'restore the severe face of early modern compassion' (p. 1), Ibbett stresses the role of appraisal, reflection, and critical distance in keeping pity from lapsing into all-engulfing sentimental contagion. Her study recurrently focuses on questions of religious conflict and persecution, showing us compassion not 'overcoming difference' but 'reinforcing divides' (p. 1) and tracing 'not the political history of toleration but its affective undertow' (p. 3). Indeed, as Ibbett demonstrates, in this period of religious tension, those who do not feel pity — and indeed those who do not deserve pity — prove to be just as important in delineating sectarian divisions as those who do. Her first, third, and fifth chapters focus on compassion's capacity to enshrine or (occasionally) to overcome religious difference in a range of related contexts. Chapter 1 traces Protestant and Catholic accounts of the religious wars as modes of policing affective responses, ideas also developed in Chapter 3's exploration of compassion's limits in sectarian works by mainstream Catholics and their Protestant and Jansenist adversaries, while Chapter 5 treats compassion's rhetorical role in works surrounding the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, ending with a compelling reading of Racine's biblical tragedy Esther. Intertwined with these studies, and offering a theoretical and practical underpinning to their concerns, are chapters on more secular issues: Chapter 2 offers a narrative of developing engagements with compassion, pity, and fellow-feeling in psychological and dramatic theories from Jean de La Taille to André Dacier, while Chapter 4 explores moments of what Ibbett neatly calls 'miscompassion' in Mme de La Fayette's prose fiction. Finally, Chapter 6 shifts the scene to Montreal, tracing the regulated role of compassion in the emotional and practical labours of nuns tending the sick, before the Epilogue offers a sensitively intelligent and personal reflection on compassion's continued role in thinking about political, religious, or historical difference. Ibbett's writing style is so clear, careful, and yet effortlessly readable that it is hard to begrudge her the occasional functional but ugly technical term ('to compassionate', 'a compassionater'). Balancing astute close reading with a persuasive general narrative, and intense scholarly acumen with a warm critical compassion, this is a profound and genuinely rewarding study.