Abstract
Abstract Compassion plays a significant role in many historiographies because of its capacity to explain human motivation and action. Within the history of judicial punishment in particular, compassion is a key agent of change—a feeling with explanatory power for historians. With its call to historicize feeling, the history of emotions troubles such accounts, undercutting the human universalism that compassion’s explanatory power relies on. This article argues that an emotions history of early modern compassion leads us to draw quite different conclusions about not just the operation of early modern punishment but especially what changed with the decline of corporeal punishment and the rise of human rights in the eighteenth century. It reminds historians that the history of emotions is important not just for those in this subdiscipline but for any who use emotion to explain historical events.
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