About this Book

Theorizing. The ethics of compassion in early modern England / Bruce R. Smith -- The compassionate self of the Catholic Reformation / Katherine Ibbett -- Consoling. 'Hee left them not comfortlesse by the way' : grief and compassion in early modern English consolatory culture / Paula Barros -- Friendship, counsel, and compassion in early modern medical thought / Stephen Pender -- Exhorting. 'Compassion and mercie draw teares from the godlyfull often' : the rhetoric of sympathy in the early modern sermon / Richard Meek -- Mollified hearts and enlarged bowels : practising compassion in Reformation England / Kristine Steenbergh -- Performing. Civic liberties and community compassion : the Jesuit drama of Poland-Lithuania / Clarinda E. Calma and Jolanta Rzegocka -- Compassion, contingency and conversion in James Shirley's The sisters / Alison Searle -- Responding. Mountainish inhumanity in Illyria : compassion in Twelfth night as social luxury and political duty / Elisabetta Tarantino -- Standing on a beach : Shakespeare and the sympathetic imagination / Eric Langley -- Giving. 'To feel what wretches feel' : Reformation and the re-naming of English compassion / Toria Johnson -- Alms petitions and compassion in sixteenth-century London / Rebecca Tomlin -- Racializing. Pity and empire in the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552) / Matthew Goldmark -- 'Our Black hero' : compassion for friends and others in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko / John Staines -- Contemporary compassions : interrelating in the Anthropocene / Kristine Steenbergh.