Thomas Tryon and the Seventeenth-Century Dimensions of Antislavery

ISTORIES of the humanitarian sensibility have an unfortunate tendency to gloss rather quickly over the early modern per In one narrative after another, humanitarianism springs up the later eighteenth century as the result of impersonal movem changing configurations of class interests brought on by capitali tamer relations between the genders, epistemic shifts, Enlightenment, or some combination thereof.1With few except these narratives perpetuate a now very old myth of the eighteenth tury as the threshold between a "modern" world governed by disci and a "feudal" one dominated by its exact opposite-harsh and fic violence.As specialists of the medieval and early modern periods shown, however, European subjects living before the magical year actively wrestled with the brutality that confronted them.Concer charity, safety, and order led them to curtail what strife and oppressi they could, either by condemning abuses, exercising clemency, or i vening in disputes.Their methods relied on invective and info arrangements rather than systematic theories and legislative campa