Title Passion and order : restraint of grief in the medieval Italian communes / Carol Lansing

Published Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2008

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Description 1 online resource (xi, 244 pages) : illustrations Series Conjunctions of religion and power in the medieval past Conjunctions of religion & power in the medieval past. Contents Grief and state formation -- Funerals and funeral laws -- Laments and male honor -- Ancient laments : sexuality, rage, and doubt -- Intercession for the dead and sorrow for sin -- Lay political culture and critiques of the lament -- Emotional order and just order -- The seductive dangers of grief -- Wars and funerals in fourteenth-century Orvieto -- Epilogue : the politics of grief Summary The way in which a society expresses grief can reveal how it views both intense emotions and public order. In thirteenth-century Italian communes, a conscious effort to change appropriate public reaction to death threw into sharp relief connections among urban politics, gender expectations, and understandings of emotionality. In Passion and Order, Carol Lansing explores a dramatic change in thinking and practice about emotional restraint. This shift was driven by politics and understood in terms of gender. Thirteenth-century court cases reveal that male elites were accustomed to mourning loudly and demonstratively at funerals. As many as a hundred men might gather in a town's streets and squares to weep and cry out, even tear at their beards and clothing. Yet these elites enacted laws against such emotional display and proceeded to pay the fines levied against themselves for violating their own legislation. Political theorists used gender norms to urge men to restrain their passions; histrionic grieving, like lust, was now considered "womanish." Lawmakers drew on a complex of gendered ideas about grief and public order to characterize governance in ways that linked the self and the state. They articulated their beliefs in terms of rules of decorum, how men and women need to behave in order to live together in society. Lansing demonstrates this change through a rich combination of sources: archival records from Orvieto, Bologna, and Perugia; political treatises; literary works, notably Petrarch's letters; and representations of grief in painting and sculpture Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 225-239) and index Notes Print version record Subject Mourning customs -- Italy, Northern -- History -- To 1500 Grief -- Political aspects -- Italy, Northern -- History -- To 1500 Emotions -- Political aspects -- Italy, Northern -- History -- To 1500 Burial laws -- Italy, Northern -- History -- To 1500 HISTORY -- Medieval. Burial laws Emotions -- Political aspects Manners and customs Mourning customs Bestattungsritus Politik Stadt Stadtstaat Trauerritual SUBJECT Italy -- Social life and customs -- To 1500. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh98006194 Italy -- History -- 1268-1492. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85068947 Subject Italy Northern Italy Italien Oberitalien Genre/Form History Form Electronic book ISBN 9781501732249 1501732242

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