Goscelin was born in Flanders but spent most of his life in monasteries in England. He was a great writer of biographies of saints, particularly of early Saxon women. His Book of Consolation is a wonderfully imaginative work addressed to a woman whom he loved after meeting her at Wilton Abbey before she was sent to a monastery in Gaul. Goscelin speaks much of spiritual friendship and the spiritual life, quotes from Christian and classical text and includes fascinating details about medieval life.

Chapter 7 treats the consolatory letter to Marullus, which is provided as an enclosure in Epistulae morales 99. The latest of Seneca’s consolations, this work takes an unusually rigorous Stoic line. Although the deceased was a young child, Marullus is told not to grieve at all: Even the death of an adult friend would not truly be an evil, and the correct response to it is to rejoice in the goodness of the relationship that is now concluded. As elsewhere, however, Seneca concedes that an emotion-like reaction that does not depend on a belief that the loss is an evil is both natural and blameless. That pre-emotional reaction may include tears, as also may the eupathic joy of the Stoic sage. This last claim is paralleled in Philo of Alexandria, with interesting implications for the phenomenology of the Stoic eupatheiai. At the end of his letter, Seneca considers and rejects a consolatory tactic suggested by the Epicurean Metrodorus.

This chapter considers the formal and thematic legacy of Dostoevsky, Proust, Kafka, and Beckett on Kazuo Ishiguro’s late-modernist work. Situating Ishiguro’s lengthiest, most digressive, most formally challenging and funniest novel within the European modernist tradition, the chapter analyses its marked formal experimentation in the light of its idiosyncratic and often highly disturbing blend of humour and mishap, of comedy and adversity. The chapter proposes that The Unconsoled can be considered not only Ishiguro’s but also one of late-modernism’s great comic novels. As such, Ishiguro’s novel may be said successfully to resist the major consolation of meaning-making, parting company with narrative as a calmative and leaving behind the affirmations of consolation and solace.

This chapter draws on a series of contemporary Irish novels, charting the way everyday ‘technological objects’ – phones, laptops, computers – do more than simply sit alongside fictional characters. When we see ‘Connell’s face illuminated by the lit display’ of a phone in Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018), we see a moment of intimacy between the characters. When Sinéad Hynes is shown ‘Googling [in bed]’ in Elaine Feeney’s As You Were (2020), we learn much about the character’s desire for privacy, her realism, her sense of humour. As the boy in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013) hammers the controls of a computer game, or Anne Enright’s Gina in The Forgotten Waltz manages her extramarital affair on her smartphone, we see them finding refuge, expression, and intimacy in the company of their endlessly understanding machines. These are the machines that support their users, distract them, comfort them. The console consoles.

Empathy, the capacity to share and understand others’ states, is crucial for facilitating enduring social relationships and managing ingroup and outgroup dynamics. Despite being at the center of much scrutiny and debate in human research, the evolutionary foundations of empathy remain relatively opaque. Moreover, inconsistencies remain regarding definitions and theoretical models, leading to discrepancies in how to systematically represent and address empathy and understand its evolutionary basis. As a complex, multidimensional phenomenon, certain components of empathy are likely to be evolutionarily ancient whereas others may be more derived. As our closest living relatives, nonhuman primates provide an opportunity to explore the evolutionary origins of empathy and its subcomponents. Due to the rich diversity of primate societies, we can comparatively study evidence of affective responding and empathic behavior within the context of different social dynamics and organization. Although studies have been conducted on individual primate species, especially the great apes, direct species comparisons are rare. Here we examine the literature investigating evidence for empathy among primates focusing on its underlying affective and cognitive components. In reviewing the literature, we also highlight species that need more coverage to enhance our overall understanding of how empathy has evolved within the primate order.

After performing ritual gestures of mourning, Job’s friends sat with him in silence for seven days and seven nights. They ‘thoght that he wolde not have hearkened to their counsel’, the annotators of the Geneva Bible explained.1 Early modern English culture acknowledged bereavement as a harrowing experience and recognised the challenges consolers faced when trying to offer solace. Overwhelmed by the loss of a loved one, grief-stricken mourners might, like Job, be reluctant to accept the remedies of religion and philosophy. To be sure, those who indulged in excessive sorrow were castigated, but so were consolers when their insistence on faith and reason was felt to betray a lack of sympathy for the bereaved. The fictitious author of an answer letter included in Angel Day’s The English Secretorie, a letter-writing manual published in 1586, pointed out the inefficiency of the consolatory epistle sent to him by his ‘brother’, whose severity, he implied, was ill advised: ‘Follie were it for mee to thinke or you to beleeue, that the pensiue imagination of a thing so neere … coulde with the vehemencie of a fewe specches (more of zeale then equitie deliuered) be sodenly remooued’.2 The multiplication of formal templates for such replies shows that in England as well as on the Continent, consolation came to be perceived as a dialogic exchange.3 Epistolary practice and friendly ‘conversation’ opened up a conceptual space for debating the ethical and rhetorical limits of consolation.4

Chapter 3 turns to Manasses’ production of lamentations and consolatory discourses. A model for understanding the occasional text as an expression of a cultural and semiotic relationship between writer and patron, characterised by similarity, is employed. Four texts are examined: the Monody on the death of Theodora, wife of John Kontostephanos, the Consolation for John Kontostephanos (comforting him in his sorrow at the loss of Theodora), the Funerary oration on the death of Nikephoros Komnenos and the Monody on the death of his goldfinch. John Kontostephanos, who is also mentioned in the Itinerary, and Nikephoros Komnenos both seem to have been important patrons for Manasses. The reading of the Monody on the death of his goldfinch underlines the lament’s focus on the literary activities of the narrator, where the bird – a frequent symbol in Manasses’ works – seems to function as a sort of literary muse or even rhetorical alter ego of the writer.

This chapter examines Coetzee’s creative and scholarly engagements with literary style, beginning with his earliest novel Dusklands and moving across his corpus to track his complexly evolving use of style’s emotional, ethical, and political affordances. Apparently distinct, even diverging impulses – one embracing grace and euphony, the other committing to verbal thrift and minimalism – coalesce across Coetzee’s career, soliciting complicated affective responses from his readers to the inflections and connotations of novelistic discourse. It is critically tempting see Coetzee as a kind of stern gatekeeper of formal restraint: a writer who shuns the consolations of style and who forestalls the pleasures his readers might take in elegantly wrought language, by investing instead in a kind of syntactic austerity and bareness. In practice, however, his fiction doesn’t always behave in this manner, as beautifully paced, rhetorically supple sequences from Age of Iron, Disgrace, and The Schooldays of Jesus attest.