Cultures of Compassion in English, French, and Italian Literature and Music, 1300–1700

Abstract

Compassion describes fellow feeling stimulated by witnessing the suffering of others. This feeling of shared suffering binds groups of individuals together. This article argues that compassion is by definition radically unbounded, and that it entails the possible disintegration of the borders between self and other, human and animal, and human and non-animal. Its first recorded usage is in early Christian writings, but over the medieval and early modern periods, even in religious texts, it gained increasingly secular implications. It was frequently cited in Neostoic arguments for emotional restraint, and co-opted into the service of limiting the membership of various communities. Nevertheless, the concept is mobile and particularly slippery to define. This is illustrated through brief consideration of mid-seventeenthcentury English poetry: John Milton's 'Paradise Lost' and Andrew Marvell's 'The Mower's Song'.