Going to Extremes

Abstract

In this shorter chapter I want to indicate the range of pathos to be found in early modern writing. Focusing, initially, on extreme expressions of emotion, and specifically on the crucial opposition of love and hate, should provide co-ordinates for the investigation of intermediate degrees. As a further system of reference, and an additional pointer to the possible combinations of feeling (for example, of personal and political emotion), I have chosen to look at expressions of love or hate on four different ‘levels’ — religion, politics, family, sexuality — within contexts which are either literary in their use of pathos, or addressed functionally to specific topics, audiences and occasions. A further purpose is to foster precision in the reading of such texts, without the additional complication of reference to the critical texts studied in the last chapter, or to the texts to which they refer, which we will look at in the next chapter. It will also be helpful, in a second section, to represent the widely different purposes and occasions to which emotive persuasion was applied, in this case instancing the relationship of preacher and congregation, subject and prince, feminine and masculine. Here extremes of feeling may be combined in a single text to serve its manifest persuasive design.