How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians

By Rudolph M. Bell

Book Overview

How to Do It shows us sixteenth-century Italy from an entirely new perspective: through manuals which were staples in the households of middlebrow Italians merely trying to lead better lives. Addressing challenges such as how to conceive a boy, the manuals offered suggestions such as tying a tourniquet around your husband's left testicle. Or should you want to goad female desires, throw 90 grubs in a liter of olive oil, let steep in the sun for a week and apply liberally on the male anatomy. Bell's journey through booklets long dismissed by scholars as being of little literary value gives us a refreshing and surprisingly fun social history.

"Lively and curious reading, particularly in its cascade of anecdote, offered in a breezy, cozy, journalistic style." --Lauro Martines, Times Literary Supplement

" Bell's] fascinating book is a window on a lost world far nearer to our own than we might imagine. . . . How pleasant to read his delightful, informative and often hilarious book." --Kate Saunders, The Independent

"An extraordinary work which blends the learned with the frankly bizarre." --The Economist

"Professor Bell has a sly sense of humor and an enviably strong stomach. . . . He wants to know how people actually behaved, not how the Church or philosophers or earnest humanists thought they should behave. I loved this book." --Christopher Stace, Daily Telegraph

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226042103
• ISBN13: 9780226042107
• Release Date: March 1999
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 389 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A lively look at 16th century Italy's mores and customs.

A very lively and fast-paced look at advice manuals of the 16th century. He takes a lot of different sources, from manuals written by uptight husbands for one specific person, to widely-published manuals from priests, doctors, quacks, lawyers, and women from all walks of life, to show how middle-class Renaissance Italians looked at things like childbirth, conception, raising children, how spouses should behave, and how widows and widowers should live. What I liked best about the book was the wide range of manuals he takes from -- it's a popular history to be sure, but you come away with a pretty good idea of how people were expected to behave and what was normal for the era. The index and footnotes are splendid -- worth the price of the book itself in my opinion. The informal tone of the writing makes the book a fun read, but the way he can synthesize all these facts he's got is what makes the book worth the money. I certainly would consider this a valuable addition to my history bookshelf.

A new world for c16 Italian scholars, social historians

It's a privilege to rise to Professor Bell's challenge in the book itself and be the first to drop a public note about this book. It's an impressive distillation of a wonderful body of writing in c16 Italy--he's done a fine job of evenhandedly presenting a very large, notoriously difficult to trace, and sometimes outrageous (and entertaining) corpus of material. Another indication (were one needed) that social context in period studies is neglected to one's peril.