Emotions, Passions, and Power in Renaissance Italy

Emotions depend on language, cultural practices, expectation and moral beliefs. Hate, fear, cruelty and love are always turning history into the history of passion and lust, because emotional life is always ready to overflow intellectual life. This fascinating study of emotion in Renaissance Italy shows that emotions are built and created by the society in which they are expressed and conditioned. The contributors examine, among others, the emotional language of the court, around public execution, religious practices and during outbreaks of disease.

Fabrizio Ricciardelli is Director and Professor of Renaissance European History at Kent State University, Florence campus. His research focuses on Italian city-states when they were strikingly unusual features of the social landscape of late medieval Europe, distinguished by the sophistication of their economic activities, the forms of government they adopted, their rich cultural life and their unusual social structure.