Richard Meek. Sympathy in Early Modern Literature and Culture

Extract

Over the last two decades, scholars of early modern England have become increasingly interested in the literary and cultural history of emotion. Though sometimes overshadowed by flashier subfields of Renaissance Studies, this emotional history (as it is often known) boasts a formidable number of articles, monographs, and edited collections in its ranks, and it seems safe to say that it is now established as an enduring area of inquiry in the period. Richard Meek’s Sympathy in Early Modern Literature and Culture is one of the newest monographs to emerge from this research programme, and it is certainly one of the best: It stands as a remarkable achievement that demonstrates why all readers of early modern literature should pay attention to the workings of emotion.

Put simply, Meek’s book presents ‘a new conceptual and semantic history of sympathy in the early modern period’ (p. 2). Historians have devoted some recent attention to sympathy, but they traditionally identify the eighteenth century as the period crucial to the concept’s modern development; in this account, Renaissance thinkers are said to have primarily understood the emotion as ‘an essentially passive phenomenon, in which individuals were affected by physical and physiological processes’ (p. 3). This earliest form of sympathy referred to a largely involuntary correspondence between like cosmic or natural forces; the OED (sense 1a, from 1586) deems it ‘a (real or supposed) affinity between certain things, by virtue of which they are similarly or correspondingly affected by the same influence […] (esp. in some occult way), or attract or tend towards each other’, while Meek further describes it as ‘a physical or occult attraction between people, objects in the cosmos, parts of the body, the body and the soul, or even musical vibrations’ (p. 4). This sense of the term was certainly active in the writings of early modern philosophers and theorists—and it was, as the story is usually told, the dominant sense of sympathy until the long eighteenth century when the word began to reflect its more modern association with the compassionate, empathetic engagement with the feelings of another.