Introduzione. Ridere e piangere tra Medioevo e Rinascimento.

The introduction to Laughter and Tears between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance offers a comprehensive philosophical and historical survey of the affective expressions of laughter and weeping in Western culture from Late Antiquity through the Renaissance. Far from being merely emotional reactions, laughter and tears are examined as meaningful gestures, laden with ethical, theological, anthropological, and even epistemic significance. They emerge as expressions of the human tension between reason and passion, temporality and eternity, limitation and transcendence.\r\nBeginning with biblical and patristic foundations—which distinguish between derisive and joyful laughter, and between worldly and penitential tears—the essay traces the development of a nuanced Christian semantics of affect. In the monastic tradition, practices of regulating laughter and ritualizing weeping reflect broader concerns with bodily discipline and spiritual formation. Risibilitas, the capacity for laughter, is at times rejected as corporeal excess, at others recognized as a uniquely human trait; similarly, tears become signs of mystical transformation and inner contrition.\r\nWith the Renaissance, a new philosophical attention emerges, in which laughter and weeping are no longer strictly opposed but dialectically intertwined, as exemplified in the enduring contrast between Democritus and Heraclitus. Laughter assumes a critical, pedagogical, and even therapeutic function (in figures such as Erasmus and Joubert), while weeping acquires new cultural and affective meanings that extend beyond religious contexts. The notion of gélodacrye—the coexistence of laughter and tears within the same emotional experience—becomes emblematic of the complexity of human interiority.\r\nThis introduction thus unfolds as an intellectual journey through texts and traditions—from Augustine to Dante, from Francis of Assisi to Rabelais, from Montaigne to Vives—that illuminate the multiple dimensions of two gestures that are not merely opposed, but fundamentally complementary in their capacity to express, shape, and question the human condition.