Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Place of Renaissance Italy in the History of Emotions
- 2 The Emotional Language of Justice in Late Medieval Italy
- 3 The Anxiety of the Republics: “Timor” in Italy of the Communes during the 1330s
- 4 Humiliation and the Exercise of Power in the Florentine: Contado in the Mid-Fourteenth Century
- 5 The Words of Emotion: Political Language and Discursive Resources in Lorenzo de Medici’s Lettere (1468-1492)
- 6 Metaphor, Emotion and the Languages of Politics in Late Medieval Italy: A Genoese Lamento of 1473
- 7 Debt, Humiliation, and Stress in Fourteenth-Century Lucca and Marseille
- 8 Renaissance Emotions: Hate and disease in European perspective
- 9 The Emotive Power of an Evolving Symbol: The Idea of the Dome from Kurgan Graves to the Florentine Tempio Israelitico
- 10 The Emotions of the State: A Survey of the Visconti Chancery Language (Mid-Fourteenth-Mid- Fifteenth Centuries)
- 11 Control of Emotions and Comforting Practices before the Scaffold in Medieval and Early Modern Italy (with Some Remarks on Lorenzetti’s Fresco)
- 12 “Bene Comune e Benessere”: The Affective Economy of Communal Life
- Contributors
6 - Metaphor, Emotion and the Languages of Politics in Late Medieval Italy: A Genoese Lamento of 1473
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 December 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Place of Renaissance Italy in the History of Emotions
- 2 The Emotional Language of Justice in Late Medieval Italy
- 3 The Anxiety of the Republics: “Timor” in Italy of the Communes during the 1330s
- 4 Humiliation and the Exercise of Power in the Florentine: Contado in the Mid-Fourteenth Century
- 5 The Words of Emotion: Political Language and Discursive Resources in Lorenzo de Medici’s Lettere (1468-1492)
- 6 Metaphor, Emotion and the Languages of Politics in Late Medieval Italy: A Genoese Lamento of 1473
- 7 Debt, Humiliation, and Stress in Fourteenth-Century Lucca and Marseille
- 8 Renaissance Emotions: Hate and disease in European perspective
- 9 The Emotive Power of an Evolving Symbol: The Idea of the Dome from Kurgan Graves to the Florentine Tempio Israelitico
- 10 The Emotions of the State: A Survey of the Visconti Chancery Language (Mid-Fourteenth-Mid- Fifteenth Centuries)
- 11 Control of Emotions and Comforting Practices before the Scaffold in Medieval and Early Modern Italy (with Some Remarks on Lorenzetti’s Fresco)
- 12 “Bene Comune e Benessere”: The Affective Economy of Communal Life
- Contributors
Summary
The relationship between emotion and language, understood as verbal communication, is both crucial and problematic for historians of emotions. Crucial because written language is for historians the main gateway into past emotions, although by all means not the only one available; problematic because language not only expresses or reflects emotion, but provokes, shapes, simulates, and dissimulates it. Indeed a precise awareness of the power of language over the emotions is the very foundation of the art of rhetoric in the West. Charles Darwin, however, looked not to verbal communication but to facial expressions to find what he called “the language of the emotions.” Throughout The Expression of Emotions (1872) he attempted to find “the innate and universal” signs, common to man and animals,4 that could function as guides to the expression of emotion as opposed to language, which he considered an “artificial,” learned habit. The conventional nature of language and its cultural specificity, indeed, appear to many the ultimate opaque barrier to the historical study of emotions, especially if one understands the latter, commonsensically, as bodily, universal, and nonrational.
Yet, anthropologists first, and historians more recently have resorted to the collection of emotion-words as a privileged tool to describe in a holistic way the emotional categories of the communities they studied. The historian of medieval linguistics Irene Rosier has written interestingly on the way medieval grammarians conceived of interjections in speech. Metaphors, it has been noted, are often used to verbalise emotion. It is also increasingly accepted that the process of understanding metaphors interacts with emotional experience. Far from being mere rhetorical embellishment, metaphor is now recognised as playing a fundamental cognitive role. Two linguists, Lakoff and Johnson, advanced the theory in a book of 1980, that basic metaphors, often derived from bodily experience, are deeply ingrained in all languages (for example “anger is hot” and “anger is like a fluid”). Students of communication theory have suggested that metaphorical language is, under certain conditions, more persuasive than literal language.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Emotions, Passions, and Power in Renaissance Italy , pp. 111 - 128Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2015