ABSTRACT
In the Introduction to their collection Reading the Early Modern Passions, Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson talk about the difficulties involved in writing a cultural history of emotion, particularly with regard to the early modern period. It is, they write, a mistake to attempt to talk about the passions as if they could be described as coherent entities, or even as coherent states of being: “they comprise, instead, an ecology or a transaction … [they] transverse the Cartesian division between physiology and psychology.”1 If these dicta apply to a project to discuss early modern passions, then they apply even more strongly to an attempt to write a cultural history of two of the most notable outward manifestations of those shifting and restless ecologies. What follows will move from medical, to religious, to social discourses around laughing and weeping, to build up a sense of the cultural profile of these actions in the period.
