Abstract

“Sympathy” as a term was introduced to postclassical Latin scholarship from Greek in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. By the mid-sixteenth century, it was in use in several related contexts: works in Platonic traditions, particularly those related to magic; medical and Galenic writings; practical “books of secrets” literature following Pliny; and moral philosophy with a Stoic cast. By the later sixteenth century, it had moved into European vernaculars as a way of identifying the human responses and emotions of fellow-feeling familiar to modern usage. From around 1600 it figured in arguments about the nature of scientific explanations and also about human fellow-feeling, in ways increasingly of interest to moral philosophers and others.