Sympathy in Early Modern Literature and Culture

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

Richard Meek (Author)

9781009280266, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 April 2023

298 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.2 cm, 0.58 kg

'Sympathy is a key emotion in affect studies and the history of feeling because its changing meanings reveal not just how this particular emotion was experienced and understood, but also how writers have considered the movement of affect more generally from one individual to others. Richard Meek's interdisciplinary analysis of an impressive range of early modern English texts (both literary and non-literary, and both canonical and under-examined) is therefore crucially relevant to historical and contemporary emotion studies. Tracing the semantic shifts in the word 'sympathy' and its imaginative and metaphorical use in the period – from describing a magical affinity or transmission between physical objects and substances in texts of natural philosophy, for instance, to its transpositions denoting compassion or pity in religious texts, to its evaluation as a politically potent and sometimes failed 'fellow-feeling' in dramatic works including King Lear, Meek unravels any simple historical understanding of this emotion's emergence in the eighteenth century. He insists instead that sympathy's widening use and accretion of meanings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveals a growing understanding of this fundamental emotion as intersubjective, as well as both mimetic and willed.' Cora Fox, Arizona State University

This is the first comprehensive study of sympathy in the early modern period, providing a deeply researched and interdisciplinary examination of its development in Anglophone literature and culture. It argues that the term sympathy was used to refer to an active and imaginative sharing of affect considerably earlier than previous critical and historical accounts have suggested. Investigating a wide range of texts and genres, including prose fiction, sermons, poetic complaint, drama, political tracts, and scientific treatises, Richard Meek demonstrates the ways in which sympathy in the period is bound up with larger debates about society, religion, and identity. He also reveals the extent to which early modern emotions were not simply humoral or grounded in the body, but rather relational, comparative, and intertextual. This volume will be of particular interest to scholars and students of Renaissance literature and history, the history of emotions, and the history and philosophy of science.

Introduction: 'Solemn sympathy'
1. 'A sympathy of affections': sympathy, love and friendship in Elizabethan prose fiction
2. 'Compassion and mercie draw teares from the godlyfull often': the rhetoric of sympathy in the early modern sermon
3. 'Grief best is pleased with grief's society': female complaint and the transmission of sympathy
4. 'O, what a sympathy of woe is this': passionate sympathy in late Elizabethan drama
5. 'Soveraignes have a sympathie with subjects': the politics of sympathy in Jacobean England
6. 'As God loves sympathy, God loves symphony': sympathy at a distance in Caroline England Coda.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG], Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]