Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Passion and Order: Restraint of Grief in the Medieval Italian Communes

Passion and Order: Restraint of Grief in the Medieval Italian Communes

Lansing, Carol

Hardcover

Series: Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past

Art HistoryMedieval & Renaissance HistoryDeath & Dying

ISBN10: 0801440629
ISBN13: 9780801440625
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: Jan 4 2008
Pages: 264
Weight: 1.14
Height: 0.94 Width: 6.51 Depth: 9.48
Language: English

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.

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