Translated from the Italian by Angelina Zontine and Chiara Masini.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

List of Abbreviations -- Introduction: Thinking about Tears -- Why Tears? Why France's 'Long Eighteenth Century'? -- Precedents -- Tears and the Emotional Lexicon -- Methods and Innovations -- How the Book is Organized -- PART ONE. THE PASSION OF TEARS -- 1. From Heaven to Earth: Vertical and Horizontal Tears -- The Tears of the Gods -- The Gift of Tears -- The Tears of the Turtle Dove: Seventeenth-Century 'Consolations' -- Crying Between Heaven and Earth: Coeffeteau and Senault -- The Ebbing of Mystic Tears -- 2. From the Man Without Passions to the Crying Hero -- The Dry Eyes of the Wiseman -- Crying as Wrongdoing -- From Apathy to Metropatheia: The Neutrality of Emotion -- The Rise of Crying Heroes -- Crying as Virtue: Disinterested Tears -- 3. Tears and Humours -- Temperament and Character -- Humourism: From Physiology to Emotional Therapeutics -- The Crying Philosopher (and the Laughing Philosopher) -- Between Analogy and Anatomy: Pierre Petit's De lacrymis libri tres -- 4. The Tears of the Soul -- Descartes: The Tears of the Automaton -- Cureau de la Chambre: The Doctrine of the 'Esprits' and the Physiology of the Passions -- Cureau de la Chambre: Les charactères des larmes -- Passion or Emotion? Christian Warlitz's Scrutinium lacrymarum -- PART TWO. THE WEEPING CENTURY: THE RISE OF SENSIBILITY -- 5. Physical and Moral Tears -- The Dual Nature of Sensibility -- The Epigastric Theory of Crying -- Cerebral and Diaphragmatic Tears -- Cold and Warm Tears: Pathos and Passionate Eloquence -- Crying Someone Else's Tears: The Surprising Effects of Sympathy -- 6. The homme sensible -- A Sociology of Sentiments: Rousseau and the Origin of Emotion -- The Normativity of Crying in Rousseau -- Rousseau: The Ambiguity of Moral Weeping -- Tears and Gender (Con)fusion: The 'Invention' of Male Weeping -- A Duel of Tears: Rousseau Versus Diderot -- 7. The Pedagogy of Tears -- The Liquid Communication of Virtue: Sentimental Novels -- Tearful Letters: Contagious Sensibility -- The Ink of Tears: Textual Education -- The Theatre of Sensibility: The comédie larmoyante -- The Theatre of Sensibility: Bourgeois Drama -- The Actor's Tears: School of Vice or School of Virtue? -- 8. The Tears of the Revolution -- The Strength of Tears: Sentimentalism and Revolutionary Rhetoric -- Tears of Reconciliation and Revolutionary Celebration -- Tears of Blood: Sentimentalism in Action -- The Erosion of Sentimentalism -- PART THREE. RIVERS OF TEARS AND DROUGHT: FROM SENSIBILITY TO 'SENSIBLERIE' -- 9. Sentimental Onanism and the De-moralization of Crying -- From the Mirror to the Screen: The Insufficient Nature of Tears -- Goethe's Doll: The Excess of Tears -- The Adventures of the Amphibious Muse: Ridiculed Tears -- Sensiblerie and the De-moralization of Weeping -- A Tear-Jerking Machine: Tears in Popular Fiction -- 10. Pathological Tears -- The Revenge of the Physical Man: The Tears of the Idéologues -- Eyes are Made for Crying: The Swansong of Sentimentalism -- A New Sensibility: Between Sensation and Revelation -- Alienation and the Absence of Tears -- Tears and Vaporous Sensibility: Between Pathology and (Im)morality -- 11. The Strategy of Crying -- True Tears and False Tears -- Crocodile Tears: The Ethics / Aesthetics of Emotional Control -- 'Dérousseauiser mon jugement': The Parricide of Sentimentalism -- The Charm of Aridness: A New Apathy -- Conclusion -- 'The Tears of the Past . . . ': Crying as a Historical Object -- ' . . . Fertilise the Future': Thinking About Tears Today -- Select Bibliography -- Index.

A crucial period for the birth of the modern subject, France's 'long eighteenth century' (approximately 1650-1820) was an era marked by the formulation of a new aesthetic and ethical code revolving around the intensification of emotions and the hyperbolic use of weeping. Precisely because tears are not a simple biological fact but rather hang suspended between natural immediacy, on one side, and cultural artifice, on the other, the analysis of crying came to represent an exemplary testing ground for investigations into the enigmatic relations binding the realm of physiology to that of psychology. Thinking About Tears explores how the link between tears and sensibility in France's long eighteenth century helps shed light on the process through which the European emotional lexicon has been built: from viewing tears as governed by the sphere of 'passions' and 'feelings', thinkers began to view crying as first a matter of sensibility and then of sensiblerie (a pathological excess of sensibility), thereby presupposing an intimate connection with the category of 'sentiments'. For this reason, this book examines not only or even primarily the actual emotion of crying, but also the attempt to think about and explain this feeling. Drawing on a wide range of early modern philosophical, medical, religious, and literary texts-including moral treatises on the passions, medical textbooks, letters, life-writings, novels, and stage-plays-Thinking About Tears reveals another side to a period that has too often been saddled with the cursory label of 'the age of reason'.

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