1 - The Place of Renaissance Italy in the History of Emotions

Summary

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 any rate, expressed – emotions. This situation is, however, beginning to change. In this paper I will briefly talk about Renaissance theories, spend most of my time on Renaissance practices, 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 relatively recent examples must here stand for all: the 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.

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. 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. And between Petrarch and Filelfo was Coluccio Salutati (d. 1406) and others as well.

When modern scholars of the Italian Renaissance have dealt with its theories of emotions, they have considered mainly grief and consolatory literature. George McClure 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 was perfectly suited to Renaissance values.