Compassion's Edge. Katherine Ibbett
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minister Pierre Jurieu. How did such different early moderns imagine the “us” of their community to which a “them” stood in opposition? This theological gerrymandering of fellow-feeling—the re-ascription of sameness and difference—allows us to see something central to compassion’s mechanisms. Even as compassion aspired to the universal, it betrayed its limits, and those limits eventually gave rise to another edge: the modern distinction between compassion and pity.
The final three chapters turn to varied textual instances of compassion, considering how generic or rhetorical structures (the novel, drama, journals) explore the hinterland behind compassion’s edge. In the fourth chapter, “Pitiful States: Marital Miscompassion and the Historical Novel,” I turn to the problem of misreading in seventeenth-century historical fiction, exploring Lafayette’s careful experiments with the motif of failed compassion between husband and wife in the novellas La Princesse de Montpensier and La Comtesse de Tende and the longer novel La Princesse de Clèves. In moments of misplaced compassion or what I call “miscompassion” in the novellas, Lafayette draws on the tableau of the “pitiful spectacle,” recalling the figure of Chapter 1; in so doing, she points her reader to a larger historical inquiry about coexistence in France after the Edict of Nantes. In the longer novel, she also builds a new aesthetic out of failed compassion.
Chapter 5, “Affective Absolutism and the Problem of Religious Difference,” continues the dialogue between Catholic and Protestant writing seen in Chapter 3. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes—which denied freedom of worship to Protestants and constrained them to convert—deployed a language of nonconsensual compassion, and I explore the ways in which the Protestants responded to this absolutist affect. The chapter begins with pro-Revocation material and then turns to Protestant accounts of the Revocation: Élie Benoist’s History of the Revocation, Protestant pamphlet literature, and pastoral writings from Jurieu and Pierre Bayle. Lastly, in counterpoint to those polarized positions, I read the affective language of Jean Racine’s play Esther, first performed for the king four years after the Revocation, and centrally concerned with supplication and religious difference. In moving between these shifting emotional rhetorics, we get a more complex picture of what I term affective absolutism.
My final chapter, “Compassionate Labor in Seventeenth-Century Montreal,” crosses the Atlantic and turns to women’s labor in texts addressed to women from the Hôtel Dieu, Montreal’s first hospital. For the nuns that served as nurses, compassion was not the glancing product of a singular encounter but rather something that had to be reproduced in accordance with an institutional routine. I examine rule books sent from the nursing order’s original French home, set against a journal (Marie Morin’s Histoire simple et véritable) and letters produced in Montreal. Morin’s settler story unsettles the textual rules of metropolitan compassion, and the consideration of care that arises from the Montreal material allows me to frame an epilogue about our own practices as readers of both the past and the present time. The austere compassion I trace throughout the book affords us a different understanding of early modern differences and how they still signify for us today. It also lets us think anew about what a compassionate poetics might mean for our ways of reading.
Chapter 1
Pitiful Sights
Reading the Wars of Religion
On dit prov. Guerre et pitié ne s’accordent pas ensemble, pour dire, qu’Ordinairement à la guerre on n’est pas fort touché de pitié, et que mesme il est quelquefois dangereux de l’estre.
[One says proverbially War and pity do not go well together, to mean that ordinarily in war one is not much moved by pity, and that sometimes it is even dangerous to be so moved.]
So a 1694 dictionary tells us.1 In this opening chapter, though, and more broadly throughout the book that follows, I investigate the ways in which war and pity were necessarily connected in early modern France. I turn first to one particular and powerfully formative intertwining of war and pity: the topos of the “pitoyable spectacle” or “pitiful spectacle” that punctuates writing from the period of the Wars of Religion on both the Catholic and Protestant sides. This topos functioned as an apparatus for the apportioning and directing of pity, underscoring the increasing partisanship of the wars. What did it mean for history on both sides to be told with such repetitive recourse to the pitiful spectacle?
The insistence on spectacle was a strange feature of printed texts about and from the Wars of Religion, especially those by Protestants. These texts often insisted on the verbal quality of their message, the senseless noise of battle translated into words that could be carried like a militant gospel to those ready to hear it. In the capture of one French town, wrote the Protestant historian Simon Goulart, the streets resounded with sighs, with lamentations, yells and miserable groans, all mixed up together as a confused noise and strange tintamarre heard throughout the town. In short, Goulart concluded, “it was a pitoyable spectacle, a pitiful sight.”2 In Goulart’s very typical formulation, noise becomes spectacle and spectacle in turn becomes words. The pitiful spectacle depends on the transubstantiation of the printed page. It is a thing witnessed by those present that through the medium of print becomes something readers, too, can look upon. (It is worth noting that Goulart wasn’t there, either; he relied on others for his accounts.) But the reader’s eye does not merely glance back to what is recounted; in painting such a sight, the author imagines a future for the scene of sorrow. The discourse of the pitiful spectacle imagines emotional spectators and readers, crafting a future in which the pain of the past will make itself insistently seen and heard and in the process will become central to the history of the wars on both deeply contested sides. In this chapter, I sift through the pitiful spectacle’s appearance on the Catholic side (Pierre Ronsard, the genre of the histoire tragique, Loys de Perussiis, and Pierre de l’Estoile), before turning to the principal Protestant spectacle-shapers, Jean de Léry and Agrippa d’Aubigné, and then considering a rather different iteration of the topos in the Essais of the moderate Michel de Montaigne.3 But before we hear from the partisans, I will try to give a less impassioned account of events.
It is hard to settle on any single account of the Wars of Religion, whose historiography has from the beginning been fragmentary and partial.4 The writing of the wars involved conflicting and competing genres and voices, building to a cacophony of confused noise. The colloquy of Poissy in 1561, at which Catholics agreed to give the “parti protestant” or Huguenots a hearing, sought to establish some shared ground on forms of worship but was unable to do so. In 1562 Catherine de Médici’s regency government introduced the Edict of Saint-Germain, which allowed a very limited freedom of worship for Protestants and encouraged tolerant relations between the two communities. Yet in March of that same year members of the ultra-Catholic Guise family household attacked a Protestant service and a massacre followed, opening what would be almost four decades of violence.
Historians sometimes distinguish between a series of wars—usually eight in total—each brought to a close by an edict or treaty, initially making concessions or granting amnesty to the Protestants and insisting on the forgetting of what had come before.5 On each occasion the suppression of Protestant freedoms started up again soon afterward. In between the promised pauses, violence was widespread across most regions of France and across ranks, with hugely damaging effect on the noncombatants dragged in its wake. A particularly bloody turning point was the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of August 1572, in which Protestant leaders and nobles gathered in Paris for a wedding between the king’s Catholic sister and the Protestant Henri de Navarre were slaughtered by the Guise faction; approximately two thousand died in Paris and three thousand in the provinces.6 The death and mutilation of the Protestant leader Coligny, a key event of the massacre, figured in Protestant martyrologies and Catholic celebrations for decades thereafter; the tortured body of Coligny frequently figured as a spectacle at