Feeling Revenge

Chapter two examines the relationship between civil vengeance and religion. It begins with a corrective, demonstrating that vengeance was not antithetical to early modern Protestant Christianity. Rather, it honed vengeful impulses and redirected them through displays of orthodox behavior. The second half of the chapter examines John Donne’s final sermon, Deaths Duell . Making use of the concept of affect contagion, chapter two hypothesizes that the sermon’s delivery introduced and circulated negative emotion in his congregation through its reliance on content (i.e., rhetoric of the sermon) and atmosphere (i.e., the unperceived smells or signals of emotional distress). To visualize this, the chapter combines contemporary studies on the circulation of emotion with an analysis of early modern medicine. Conceiving of civil vengeance as affect contagion enables us to understand the phenomenon as a disease that might be contracted by and disseminated through the social body rather than directed along an intended trajectory.