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Engaging with recent thinking about performance, political theory
and canon formation, this study addresses the significance of the
formal changes in seventeenth-century French theater. Each chapter
takes up a particularity of seventeenth-century theatrical style
and staging"for example, the clearing of violence from the
stage"and shows how the conceptualization of these French stylistic
shifts appropriates a rich body of Italian political writing on
questions of action, temporality, and law. The theater's
appropriation of political concerns and vocabularies, the author
argues, proffers an astute reflection on the practices of
government that draws attention to questions obscured in reason of
state, such as the instrumentalization of women's bodies. In a new
reading of tragedies about government, the author shows how the
canonical figure of Pierre Corneille is formally engaged with the
political strategizing he often appears to repudiate, and in so
doing challenges a literary history that has read neoclassicism
largely as a display of pure French style.
Engaging with recent thinking about performance, political theory
and canon formation, this study addresses the significance of the
formal changes in seventeenth-century French theater. Each chapter
takes up a particularity of seventeenth-century theatrical style
and staging"for example, the clearing of violence from the
stage"and shows how the conceptualization of these French stylistic
shifts appropriates a rich body of Italian political writing on
questions of action, temporality, and law. The theater's
appropriation of political concerns and vocabularies, the author
argues, proffers an astute reflection on the practices of
government that draws attention to questions obscured in reason of
state, such as the instrumentalization of women's bodies. In a new
reading of tragedies about government, the author shows how the
canonical figure of Pierre Corneille is formally engaged with the
political strategizing he often appears to repudiate, and in so
doing challenges a literary history that has read neoclassicism
largely as a display of pure French style.
Compassion's Edge examines the language of fellow-feeling-pity,
compassion, and charitable care-that flourished in France in the
period from the Edict of Nantes in 1598, which established some
degree of religious toleration, to the official breakdown of that
toleration with the Revocation of the Edict in 1685. This is not,
however, a story about compassion overcoming difference but one of
compassion reinforcing division: the seventeenth-century texts of
fellow-feeling led not to communal concerns but to paralysis,
misreading, and isolation. Early modern fellow-feeling drew
distinctions, policed its borders, and far from reaching out to
others, kept the other at arm's length. It became a central feature
in the debates about the place of religious minorities after the
Wars of Religion, and according to Katherine Ibbett, continues to
shape the way we think about difference today. Compassion's Edge
ranges widely over genres, contexts, and geographies. Ibbett reads
epic poetry, novels, moral treatises, dramatic theory, and
theological disputes. She takes up major figures such as D'Aubigne,
Montaigne, Lafayette, Corneille, and Racine, as well as less
familiar Jesuit theologians, Huguenot ministers, and nuns from a
Montreal hospital. Although firmly rooted in early modern studies,
she reflects on the ways in which the language of compassion
figures in contemporary conversations about national and religious
communities. Investigating the affective undertow of religious
toleration, Compassion's Edge provides a robust corrective to
today's hope that fellow-feeling draws us inexorably and usefully
together.
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.
In the summer of 1927, Walter Benjamin wrote about a possible
future project on what he called French Trauerspiel, or mourning
drama. In this volume of Yale French Studies, an international team
of leading scholars of early modern Europe takes its cue from that
lapsed project to reread the seventeenth-century French tragic
canon as Trauerspiel. These new readings draw attention to early
modern French theater's reflections on chance and contingency,
political compromise, the question of allegory, the philosophy of
the provisional, the place of sound, and the status of the
creaturely.
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.
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