Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and Its Limits in Early Modern France.

Abstract

Katherine Ibbett explains, our definition of compassion as an emotion with connotations of sympathy and heartfelt concern harks back to the meaning the term began to acquire in the eighteenth century. In the preceding early modern period, roughly from the end of the Wars of Religion through the era of Louis XIV, the conception and practice of compassion were subject to definite limits, limits that are clearly visible in Le Brun’s uneasy figure and which are explored in detail in this illuminating study.