The first comprehensive and interdisciplinary study of sympathy in early modern Anglophone literature and culture.

Explores how early modern Europeans responded to suffering and asks how they both described and practised compassion.

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.

An examination of the themes of pain and compassion in key Renaissance writers, at a time when religious attitudes to suffering were changing.

What did it mean to be happy in early modern Europe? Positive emotions in early modern literature and culture includes essays that reframe historical understandings of emotional life in the Renaissance, focusing on under-studied feelings such as mirth, solidarity, and tranquillity. Methodologically diverse and interdisciplinary, these essays draw from the history of emotions, affect theory and the contemporary social and cognitive sciences to reveal rich and sustained cultural attention in the early modern period to these positive feelings. The book also highlights culturally distinct negotiations of the problematic binary between what constitutes positive and negative emotions. A comprehensive introduction and afterword open multiple paths for research into the histories of good feeling and their significances for understanding present constructions of happiness and wellbeing.

Whilst Shakespearean drama provides eloquent calls to war, more often than not these are undercut or outweighed by compelling appeals to peaceful alternatives conveyed through narrative structure, dramatic context and poetic utterance. Placing Shakespeare's works in the history of pacifist thought, Robert White argues that Shakespeare's plays consistently challenge appeals to heroism and revenge and reveal the brutal futility of war. White also examines Shakespeare's interest in the mental states of military officers when their ingrained training is tested in love relationships. In imagery and themes, war infiltrates love, with problematical consequences, reflected in Shakespeare's comedies, histories and tragedies alike. Challenging a critical orthodoxy that military engagement in war is an inevitable and necessary condition, White draws analogies with the experience of modern warfare, showing the continuing relevance of Shakespeare's plays which deal with basic issues of war and peace that are still evident.

This book explores the possibilities and limitations of violence on the Early Modern stage and in the Early Modern world. This collection is divided into three sections: History-cal Violence, (Un)Comic Violence, and Revenge Violence. This division allows scholars to easily find intertextual materials; comic violence may function similarly across multiple comedies but is vastly different from most tragic violence. While the source texts move beyond Shakespeare, this book follows the classic division of Shakespeare’s plays into history, comedy, and tragedy. Each section of the book contains one chapter engaging with modern dramatic practice along with several that take textual or historical approaches. This wide-ranging approach means that the book will be appropriate both for specialists in Early Modern violence who are looking across multiple perspectives, and for students or scholars researching texts or approaches.