In the last few years, the study of emotions and passions has entered the agenda of historians. After the first analysis of the topic by Peter and Carol Z. Stearns in 1985, early medieval studies are now oriented toward the analysis of the so-called “emotional communities,” as shown by the study of Barbara H. Rosenwein (2006). With few exceptions, the study of emotions and passions in Renaissance Italy has not yet been investigated. This book collects the essays presented in the International Conference on Emotions, Passions, and Power in Renaissance Italy held by Georgetown University at Villa Le Balze and Universitá di Firenze on 7-8 May 2012. The conference was the result of a series of meetings we organized between 2010 and 2011. The first meeting was held by the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Venice, where Daniel Smail, Marco Gentile, and Carol Lansing presented their researches on the theme. In winter 2010 Serena Ferente presented a paper on factions and passions at the Dipartimento di studi storici e geografici of the Universita di Firenze. One year later, in Spring 2011, we planned the second meeting as a roundtable hosted by the Spring Lecture Series at Georgetown University at Villa Le Balze. Here Andrea Gamberini, Fabrizio Ricciardelli, and Andrea Zorzi presented another series of essays with the aim of studying the signs and forms of political communication at the light of the history of emotions and passions. The third meeting on the theme of the conference was held by the Universita di Milano in September 2011 inside of the workshop, coordinated by Andrea Gamberini, Jean-Philippe Genet, and Andrea Zorzi, on The Language of Political Society, one in a series of meetings making up the French-Italian research project on Le vecteurs de l’idéel. Le pouvoir symbolique entre Moyen Âge et Renaissance (v. 1200-v. 1640); the proceedings of this meeting were edited by the three coordinators and published, at the end of the same year, by Viella Editore in Rome as The Languages of Political Society. Western Europe, 14th-17th Centuries.