Book at Lunchtime: Compassion's Edge, Winner of the 2018 Society for Renaissance Studies Book Prize. Compassion's Edge examines the language of fellow-feeling—pity, compassion, and charitable care—that flourished in France in the period from the Edict of Nantes in 1598, which established some degree of religious toleration, to the official breakdown of that toleration with the Revocation of the Edict in 1685. This is not, however, a story about compassion overcoming difference but one of compassion reinforcing division: the seventeenth-century texts of fellow-feeling led not to communal concerns but to paralysis, misreading, and isolation. Early modern fellow-feeling drew distinctions, policed its borders, and far from reaching out to others, kept the other at arm's length. It became a central feature in the debates about the place of religious minorities after the Wars of Religion, and according to Katherine Ibbett, continues to shape the way we think about difference today.
Compassion's Edge ranges widely over genres, contexts, and geographies. Ibbett reads epic poetry, novels, moral treatises, dramatic theory, and theological disputes. She takes up major figures such as D'Aubigné, Montaigne, Lafayette, Corneille, and Racine, as well as less familiar Jesuit theologians, Huguenot ministers, and nuns from a Montreal hospital. Although firmly rooted in early modern studies, she reflects on the ways in which the language of compassion figures in contemporary conversations about national and religious communities. Investigating the affective undertow of religious toleration, Compassion's Edge provides a robust corrective to today's hope that fellow-feeling draws us inexorably and usefully together.

About the panel
Katherine Ibbett is Professor of French in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and Caroline de Jager Fellow and Tutor in French at Trinity College. Katherine’s research focuses on early modern literature, culture and political thought. Previous publications have included a book on tragedy (especially Pierre Corneille) and theories of political action; and a coedited volume thinking through Walter Benjamin’s concept of the Trauerspiel and its relevance to a French corpus. Katherine is currently working on a book on the writing of water in early modern France and its territories, from the lyric poets of the sixteenth century to the Mississippi settlements of the 1700s.
Lorna Hutson is Merton Professor of English Literature and a Fellow of Merton College. Her research centres on the literature of the early modern period in England and the complex interrelations of literary form and other forms of cultural practice. Lorna’s books include The Usurer’s Daughter (1994); Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe (2000); The Invention of Suspicion (2007) and Circumstantial Shakespeare (2015). Recently, she edited The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature (2017), which won the Roland Bainton Award for the best early modern reference book. Lorna is also a Fellow of the British Academy and the Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies at Oxford.
Teresa Bejan is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations and Tutorial Fellow in Politics at Oriel College. Teresa’s research brings perspectives from early modern English and American political thought to bear on questions in contemporary political theory and practice. Her book, Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration, examines contemporary calls for civility in light of seventeenth-century debates about religious toleration. Teresa is currently working on her second book, Acknowledging Equality.
Emma Claussen is Career Development Fellow at New College. Emma works on literature and thought in the early modern period, with a particular interest in politics and moral philosophy. She is currently writing a book on sixteenth-century uses of the word politique and attendant conceptions of politics, political behaviour, and correct political action. Her next project will explore the intersection between moral and biological conceptions of life c. 1550-1650.

A panel discussion with Karin Amatmoekrim, Margaretta Jolly, and JC Niala, exploring the politics and poetics of writing an activist life. Karin is an award-winning novelist, and TORCH Global South Visiting Fellow. She will speak about her biography of Anil Ramdas. Margaretta is Professor of Cultural Studies and directs the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research at Sussex. She will speak about her project Sisterhood and After: An Oral History of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement, 1968-present'. JC is an award-winning screen and stage writer, cultural producer and an activist. Her work has been featured on BBC2, BBC Radio 4, CBS in the US, ABC in Australia among other media outlets.

This talk from TORCH Global South Visiting Professor Supriya Chaudhuri will interrogate the temporality of the modern, the aesthetics of the modern, and as a somewhat cryptic afterthought, the mood of the modern, here categorized as melancholy. But it will also ask how this term travels, how it is translated between cultures, and what it means in specific contexts of use.

The terms ‘modern’ and ‘modernity’ are notorious, global itinerants, on the one hand associated with a narrative of power, and on the other with a profoundly asymmetrical reading of history, producing its own internal disjuncture through the tendency of ‘aesthetic modernity’ to deny or refuse history, and to produce a characteristic, melancholic, ‘hollowing-out’ of the world of technological modernization.

How are these terms, and the narratives associated with them, read back in contexts of translation or re-use? Professor Chaudhuri will look at some examples from 19th and 20th century India to examine how the term ‘modern’ is translated, understood, and incorporated into aesthetic and social practice.

Sandra Mayer, author of Oscar Wilde in Vienna, argues it was his willingness to both please and tease his audience. His plays skilfully manoeuvre between conformism and subversion, conventionality and innovation. Her new book investigates the dynamic interplay of literary work, theatre and audience, and is centrally concerned with the question of ‘what makes a classic?’

What has led to a century of almost uninterrupted performance on the Viennese stage of the works of Victorian Britain’s most controversial playwright?

It also asks, what are the factors that transform a theatrical novelty into a time-honoured repertory highlight that may be reworked from different aesthetic and ideological perspectives? What makes (or breaks) a work’s canonical endurance? What does the translation and staging of a play tell us about Austrian culture?

In this first book-length study in English of the reception of Oscar Wilde’s works in the German-speaking world, Oscar Wilde in Vienna charts the plays’ history on Viennese stages between 1903 and 2013. It casts a spotlight on the international reputation of one of the most popular English-language writers while contributing to Austrian cultural history in the long twentieth century.

Drawing on extensive archival material, the book examines the appropriation of Wilde's plays against the background of political crises and social transformations. It unravels the mechanisms of cultural transfer and canonisation within an environment positioned - like Wilde himself - at the crossroads of centre and periphery, tradition and modernity.

Dr Sandra Mayer is a literary and cultural historian whose research interests include literary celebrity and authorship, cultural transfer and reception, literary networks and cosmopolitanism, and the literature and culture of the Victorian Age. Having received her doctorate from the University of Vienna, Sandra has since worked as a researcher and lecturer in Oxford, Vienna and Zurich. Her previous work has focused on Benjamin Disraeli as a celebrity and she has co-edited books on Irish drama. She is currently Hertha Firnberg Research Fellow at the University of Vienna, in collaboration with the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford, working on the Art and Action: Literary Celebrity and Politics project.
A joint event hosted by the Theatre Studies and Queer Studies Networks. Sandra will be joined by an expert panel to discuss the book and its themes: Professor Mary Luckhurst (Head of the School of Arts, University of Bristol), Professor Dominic Janes (Professor of Modern History, Keele University), Chaired by Dr Stefano Evangelista (Associate Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford)