This informal reading seminar brings together interdisciplinary early modernists interested in the history of emotions, particularly sympathy, empathy, compassion, and pity, to read and discuss relevant source material. We are interested in the double-sided nature of pity: how it can build and establish connection, but also how it can border or other its objects. This subject/object relationship of pity has been of interest to thinkers from Aristotle to Rousseau, but how should we historicize this emotional phenomenon and does doing so help us think differently about early modern emotional regimes, particularly as they related to race-making, and the creation of colonial dynamics? 

This is an exploratory, open-ended workshop. Ahead of the workshop we will circulate two (optional) conceptual pieces of historiography. All participants are then invited to submit in advance or bring a short piece of relevant source material. Interested participants are invited to contact mmor@kcl.ac.uk. Taking place in person at King’s College London’s Strand Campus.

Image credit: The Seven Works of Mercy, Master of Alkmaar 1504, Rijksmuseum.