Thursday 1 April, 6pm
Book presentation: Emotional Arenas: Life, Love and Death in 1870s Italy by Mark Seymour (Oxford University Press 2020)
Emotional Arenas uses the records of a dramatic 1879 Roman murder trial to investigate the social history of Liberal Italy and to develop a new paradigm for emotions history – the ‘emotional arena’. Through close examination of the physical spaces in which lives, loves, and deaths unfolded, the book explores the role of social ‘arenas’ in shaping emotional cultures.
The narrative is driven by the failed marriage of a decorated but impotent Risorgimento soldier, his wife’s affair with a virile circus acrobat, and the illicit lovers’ murder of the hapless husband. During the trial, over one hundred witnesses – from professionals to circus clowns – offered their views on marriage, sexuality, and infidelity, to a crowded and sometimes shocked court room. Secret love letters, family correspondence, and other sources provide further peepholes into little-known areas of Italy’s social history. The result is a rich portrait of life, love, and death in 1870s Italy.
Mark Seymour is Professor and Head of the Department of History at the University of Otago. Mark was co-editor of the journal Modern Italy from 2015-2020. He specialises in Modern Italian History and his first book Debating Divorce in Italy (Palgrave, 2006), analysed the long struggle to reform marriage law in Italy. Mark is currently working with Milena Sabato (University of Salento) on an analytical primary-source collection, Italy from Risorgimento to Refugee Crisis: A History in Documents, 1815-2015, for Bloomsbury Academic.
Barbara Rosenwein is Professor Emerita of History at the Loyola University of Chicago. Barbara has written extensively on medieval history and the history of emotions, in which field she has published a number of highly influential works including Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions 600-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Anger: The Conflicted History of an Emotion (Yale University Press, 2020. Her Love: A History in Five Fantasies will be published by Polity Press in September.
Lucy Riall is Professor of History of Europe in the World and Director of Graduate Studies at the European University Institute, Florence. A former chair of ASMI, her many publications include Garibaldi. Invention of a Hero (Yale University Press, 2007) and Under the Volcano: Revolution in a Sicilian Town (Oxford University Press, 2013).
John Foot is Professor of Modern Italian History at the University of Bristol. A former co-editor of Modern Italy his publications include: The Man who Closed the Asylums: Franco Basaglia and the Revolution in Mental Health Care (Verso Books, 2015), The Archipelago. Italy since 1945 (Bloomsbury, 2019) as well as books on Italian football and cycling.
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