The consequences of emotions undergird the languages and institutions of society. The physical and mental capacity to have emotions is universal, but the way these are expressed depends on the personal tendencies and cultural norms shared within the social community where they are manifested. Lucien Febvre wrote in 1941 that emotions are constructed, shaped, and shared by the societies from which they arise and have an essential weight in the culture they themselves have generated, so that “emotional life [is] always ready to overflow the intellectual life.” More recently, Barbara H. Rosenwein maintained that “emotions depend on language, cultural practices, expectations, and moral beliefs. This means that every culture has its rules for feelings and behavior; every culture thus exerts certain restraints while favoring certain forms of expressivity … they are created by each society, each culture, each community.” She added, “People lived – and live – in … ‘emotional communities.’ These are precisely the same as social communities – families, neighborhoods, parliaments, guilds, monasteries, parish church memberships – but the researcher looking at them seeks above all to uncover systems of feeling: what these communities (and the individuals within them) define and assess as valuable or harmful to them; the evaluations that they make about others’ emotions; the nature of the affective bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore.”

The language of justice adopted in the political trials that took place in urban society during the age of the communes is one of the starting points for reading the process of disciplining set in motion, beginning in this period, all over the western world. The strongly emotional language found in the sources is aimed at creating consent by repressing dissent. The numerous public trials celebrated in communal Italy, and the exemplary sentences meted out, reveal the necessity of those in power to legitimate themselves in the eyes of all of society. The trials and sentences appear as symbolic acts whose purpose is the control of a city-state in the grip of violent emotions, with a strong impact on the strategies of the political alliances, undermining their stability at its very base.