Compassion's Edge traces the relation between compassion and toleration after France's Wars of Religion. This is not, however, a story about compassion overcoming difference but one of compassion reinforcing division. It provides a robust corrective to today's hope that fellow-feeling draws us inexorably and usefully together.

Compassion's Edge
Fellow-Feeling and Its Limits in Early Modern France

Katherine Ibbett

2017 | 304 pages | Cloth $79.95
Literature
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Table of Contents

Introduction. Compassion's Edge
Chapter 1. Pitiful Sights: Reading the Wars of Religion
Chapter 2. The Compassion Machine: Theories of Fellow-Feeling, 1570-1692
Chapter 3. Caritas, Compassion, and Religious Difference
Chapter 4. Pitiful States: Marital Miscompassion and the Historical Novel
Chapter 5. Affective Absolutism and the Problem of Religious Difference
Chapter 6. Compassionate Labor in Seventeenth-Century Montreal
Epilogue. Something Like Compassion

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments