This is a bold and generous book. Carol Lansing addresses central historical issues-the emergence of the state, the centrality of gender categories-in this wide-ranging and immensely stimulating cultural history of the expression of grief in medieval Italian cities. Her learned and thoughtful exposition will engage both experts and students alike. With Lansing we enter deeply into the pleasures of the ... Read morehistorian's craft: the surprising questions provoked by an archival discovery; the intriguing clues offered by myriad sources in the search for meaning; the immense satisfaction of understanding the medieval world and ours better at the end of a thoughtful and disciplined analysis. One feels nearly guilty for enjoying so thoroughly a book about death and heart-rending grief, but Lansing's humane and searching inquiry reveals remarkable creativity in the midst of searing loss.
Maureen C. Miller, University of California, Berkeley In this brilliantly researched book, Carol Lansing identifies a significant cultural shift in which men gave up emotional displays of grief. In tracing the promulgation and enforcement of the laws in restraint of grief in the medieval Italian communes, Lansing shows how a well-ordered state required political men capable of decorous behavior, and almost by default women came to bear the burden of public grieving alone and to be stigmatized for disorderly displays of emotion that had once been a male prerogative.
Edward Muir, Clarence L. Ver Steeg Professor in the Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University If Carol Lansing is not already the leading Anglo-American historian of the Italian High Middle Ages, her Passion and Order: Restraint of Grief in the Italian Communes emphatically establishes her in that position. Lansing in a tour de force synthesizes vast bodies of ancient and medieval research on such varied subjects as medieval theology, painting, philosophy, consolatory literature, romances, Petrarch, and gender studies. In the end, Lansing examines the role of these changes in laws on grief in the formation of the Renaissance territorial state. This book provides the occasion for non-specialists to discover the best of contemporary reflection on medieval history and its place in Western history. It is also a pleasure to read.
James Banker, North Carolina State University Show Less