Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2020
We now recognize that renaissance manuals of conduct, in which thinkers such as castiglione and erasmus sought to encode canons of polite behavior, are a major source of evidence about early modern emotions. But scholarly understanding of the relation between conduct literature and Renaissance society's management of emotions had to wait for the publication of the sociologist Norbert Elias's two-volume work Über den Prozess der Zivilisation (The Civilizing Process [1939]), which only began to reach anglophone critics in 1978.