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

Passion and Order offers a rich and provocative reflection on the relation between emotions, gender, and state formation in late thirteenth-and early fourteenth-century Italy. The choice of this constellation of ideas addresses a long-acknowledged need in the historiography of late medieval and early modern Italy. In the epilogue to the book, Lansing writes, “despite calls in the 1980s for research analyzing the links between gender and high politics and the state, few studies of medieval and early modern Italian state formation have done so” (p. 217). Drawing on the work of historians like Linzi Manicom and Joan Scott, Lansing argues that an adequate response to this call requires a shift in focus “from looking at what the state actually does to women toward understanding state formation itself as a gendered and gendering process.” As Manicom argues, “what is important is the way in which, historically, pre-existing forms of power and gender relations are appropriated and transformed by the institutions of rule…. At the same time the jurisdictional boundaries of ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ areas of life are ordered and re-ordered along gender lines, such as the shifting public/private divide” (p. 218).

Emotions and passions, or more precisely, the gendered metaphors by which emotions and passions are understood, form the essential link between gender and state formation in this study. An awareness of this connection grew out of an effort to understand some puzzling features of late thirteenth-and early fourteenth-century funeral statutes and court records in Orvieto, Perugia, and Bologna. During this period, it was common for communes to pass legislation against excessive displays of grief at funerals, fearing that such displays could trigger factional violence. Because it is often assumed that these laws targeted histrionic displays of grief by women, these statutes are often understood as attempts to restrict the role of women in civic life. In other words, they have been seen as examples of what the state does to women. Lansing challenges this interpretation with a careful reading of funeral legislation and the court records that document enforcement of these statutes. In the vast majority of cases those fined for violating the funeral statutes were men – often ruling elites and civic officeholders – the very men who passed the statutes in the first place. The conclusion is inevitable: these statutes are about male ruling elites seeking to restrain themselves as public actors. As Lansing argues in the second chapter, these funeral statutes must be understood in the context of a broader body of legislation including sumptuary laws, statutes concerning prostitution and sodomy, and rules restricting access of women to public buildings. The common thread running through these laws is an attempt to create images of order for the male ruling elite through a gendered understanding of the passions.

These statutes, which Lansing describes as “a contradictory intrusion” of male elites into their own mourning practices (p. 2) in essence, constituted an expression of several deeply rooted contradictions and ambivalences in communal politics and culture. First, there were the overlapping yet contradictory values of knights and lay professionals, the two groups that constituted the class of ruling elites. This contradiction finds its fullest expression in the podestà, who was expected to be an expert in guerra, diritto e parola. In other words, the podestà was expected to embody two incompatible sets of values. On the one hand, there was the knightly ethos that fueled vendetta and the factional violence that so plagued communal society; on the other hand there was the lay intellectual culture of law and rhetoric, which sought to assimilate conflict resolution into the public sphere where it could be resolved without violence. As Lansing writes, “it was this contradictory male elite culture that the laws on funeral laments most directly sought to curb” (p. 26).

There are two additional cultural ambivalences that are crucially important for Lansing’s analysis. Lansing writes, “there is a long tradition...