Barbara H. Rosenwein, Loyola University, Chicago The Place of Renaissance Italy in the History of Emotions* The Italian Renaissance continues to hold an important place in historians’ periodization of Western history. Yet Renaissance Italy plays an oddly small role in most histories of emotion. This holds true in two ways: first, in discussions of the history of theories of emotion; and, second, in discussions that touch on the history of felt - or, at rate, expressed - emotions. This situation is, however, beginning to change. In this paper I will briefly talk about theory, spend most of my time on practice, and at the end will suggest how and why it would be good to put the two together when studying emotions in the Italian Renaissance. Theories of Emotion Histories of theories of the emotions generally spend little time on the Italian Renaissance. Two recent examples must here stand for all: the new Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion jumps from medieval notions of the passions to Kant, while Dominik Perler’s treatment of theories of the emotions from 1270 to 1670 leaps over the Italian Renaissance as it spans the period from the fourteenth-century English William of Ockham to the sixteenth-century French Michel de Montaigne.1 Yet Renaissance humanists were often keenly interested in the emotions. Petrarch (d. 1374), for example, treated numerous emotions in his De secreto conflictu curarum mearum and above all in his De remediis utriusque fortune, where he borrowed from but also refocused ancient Stoic theories of the emotions.2 Francesco Filelfo (d. 1481) wrote a systematic treatise on the emotions, De morali disciplina, drawing on Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations and the Peri pathon of Pseudo-Andronicus of Rhodes.3 And between Petrarch and Filelfo was Coluccio Salutati (d. 1406) and others as well.4 When modern scholars of the Italian Renaissance have dealt with its theories of emotions, they have looked above all at grief and consolatory literature.5 George McClure * I wish to thank Damien Boquet, Riccardo Cristiani, John McManamon, Maureen C. Miller, Edward Muir, Jan Söffner, and the participants of the conference for which this paper was written, particularly Professors Stephano U. Baldassarri, Serena Ferente, Marco Gentile, Carol Lansing, and Isabella Lazzarini, for their generous help and suggestions. 1 The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, ed. by P. Goldie, Oxford 2010; D. Perler, Transformationen der Gefühle. Philosophische Emotionstheorien, 1270-1670, Frankfurt am Main 2011. 2 See G. W. McClure, Sorrow and Consolation in Italian Humanism, Princeton 1990, cap. 3. 3 J. Kraye, Francesco Filelfo on Emotions, Virtues and Vices: A Re-examination of his Sources, in Eadem, Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy, Aldershot 2002, article V. For the theory of emotions in the Tusculan Disputations, see Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4, trans. and commentary M. Graver, Chicago 2002. For other uses of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations during the Renaissance, see C. Quillen, “The Uses of the Past in Quattrocento Florence: A Reading of Leonardo Bruni’s Dialogues”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 71, 3 (2010), pp. 363-385. 4 See below, n. 53 for Giannozzo Manetti. 5 The chief literature on the topic up to the mid 80s is cited in G. W. McClure, “A Little Known Renaissance Manual of Consolation: Nicolaus Modrussiense’s De consolatione, 1465-1466”, in Supplementum Festivum: Studies in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. by J. Hankins, J. Monfasani, and F. Purnell, Jr., Binghamton, N. Y. 1987, p. 247 n. 1. See also M. L. King, “An Inconsolable Father and His Humanist Consolers, Jacopo Antonio Marcello, Venetian Nobleman, Patron, and Man of Letters”, in Ibidem, pp. 221-246. Among the publications that have appeared since 1987 are McClure, Sorrow and Consolation; J. M. McManamon, Funeral Oratory and the Cultural Ideals of Italian Humanism, Chapel Hill 1989; M. L. King, The Death of the Child Valerio 1 was no doubt correct when he suggested that the modern focus on sorrow accurately reflected Renaissance preoccupations. Speaking of Jacopo Antonio Marcello, a Venetian nobleman moved by the death of his son to ask various humanists to write works of consolation for him, McClure pointed out that Marcello’s grief was also a source of both pride and fame, and thus perfectly suited to Renaissance values.6 This is important. One cannot easily separate the values - and with them the theories - of any period from the lived experience in the same period. That is why, as I shall remark at the end of this paper, it would be very useful to combine theory with practice in order to explore systematically the emotional expression that we find in non-theoretical materials. Lived Emotions: Historiographical Traditions That consideration brings me to the non-theoretical domain. What have Italian Renaissance scholars said about the emotional lives of their subjects apart from theory? The answer until very recently is: surprisingly little. Nevertheless, there is a limited historiographical tradition. I will here outline four approaches or schools of thought. I call the first the ‘Burckhardtian’; the second the ‘Eliasian’ (after Norbert Elias); the third the ‘performative’ because it sees emotions as acting out, modifying, or even creating social institutions; and the fourth the “linguistic” because it profits from the linguistic turn in historical studies.7 1. The Burckhardtian View Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, first published in 1860, described Italian Renaissance emotional sensibilities as essentially the precursors of Burckhardt’s own Romantic age. For Burckhardt, medieval men were so tied to their group identities and lacking in a sense of their own individuality that they had only the rarest insight into their internal lives. What was the nature of the insight that Burckhardt had in mind? He gives us a hint when he speaks of Petrarch’s “descriptions of moments of joy and sorrow which must have been thoroughly his own, since no one before him gives us anything of the kind».8 Burckhardt looked at Boccaccio, who, he said, “succeeds sometimes in giving a most powerful and effective picture of his feeling. The return to a spot consecrated by love (Sonnet 22), the melancholy of spring (Sonnet 33), the sadness of the poet who feels himself growing old (Sonnet 65), are admirably treated by him».9 Turning to Leon Battista Alberti, Burckhardt found him exploring “the deepest spring of his nature [...], the sympathetic intensity with which he entered into the whole life around him. At the sight of noble trees and waving cornfields he shed tears».10 And so on. Marcello, Chicago 1994; U. Schaeben, Trauer im humanistischen Dialog. Das Trostgespräch des Giannozzo Manetti und seine Quellen, Munich 2002. Related to these studies of dolor are those on humanists’ thoughts about miseria and felicitas: see C. Trinkaus, Adversity’s Noblemen: The Italian Humanists on Happiness, New York 19652; Idem, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols., London 1970. 6 McClure, Sorrow and Consolation, p. 115; on Marcello, see King, An Inconsolable Father, and Eadem, The Death of the Child. 7 There are other approaches. One is literary/Freudian: see, e.g. J. Tambling, Dante in Purgatory: States of Affect, Turnhout 2010. For a useful recent overview of the approaches historians have used to explore the history of emotions, see S. Ferente, “Storici ed emozioni”, Storica, 43-45 (2009), pp. 371-392. 8 J. Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Ein Versuch, Basel 1860, pp. 311-312; quoted here from Idem, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore, New York 1935, p. 311. 9 Burckhardt, Die Kultur, p. 312; Idem, The Civilization, p. 311. 10 Idem, Die Kultur, p. 141; Idem, The Civilization, p. 150. 2 The historiographical tradition initiated by Burckhardt sees the emotions of Renaissance men as expressive of their deepest feelings. That tradition continues to the present day, above all in studies of Petrarch. For George McClure, for example, the young Petrarch fed “on tears, sighs, and swoons, indulging the pleasant pain of romantic longing».11 This was, for McClure, “a new outlook not only on the general psychology of human emotion, but also on the specific challenges posed by the human condition: particularly those of misery, illness, and death».12 McClure contrasted Renaissance sentiments with the “somewhat compartmentalized psychological worlds of the poet, philosopher, priest, and penitent» of the medieval period.13 And when Petrarch’s tone shifted - when, later in life, he came to regret finding sweetness in lamentation and upbraided a grieving father for “immoderate weeping» - McClure saw this as reflecting a Stoic resolve that warred with Petrarch’s “enduring need to weep and to write».14 2. The Eliasian Approach Nevertheless, despite the exceptions noted above, the tradition inaugurated by Burckhardt was long ago more or less snuffed out by the historiographical approach that is here dubbed the Eliasian.15 Norbert Elias’s narrative of the history of lived emotion was set forth in his exceptionally influential book The Civilizing Process.16 This is not the place to explore the theory in detail; suffice it to say that Elias postulated a process by which violent behavior, emotions, and impulses of every sort (which, in Elias’s view were essentially equivalent phenomena) were brought under control.17 The essential trajectory of emotions’ history went from impulse to restraint. Elias’s focus was on France, not Italy. Indeed, he went out of his way to deny the pertinence of Italy to his story. After quoting Gabriel Hanotaux, who thought that French princes learned from the “tyrants of Naples, Florence, and Ferrara», Elias discounted this, arguing that it would require “a precise examination in terms of structural history» - something he was clearly unwilling to undertake - to “determine how far the centralization processes and the organization of government in the Italian city states resemble those of early absolutist France».18 He very much doubted that small city- states could engender a civilizing process.