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

Bell, Rudolph M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226042103 ISBN 13: 9780226042107

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1999

Synopsis

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

About this title

Review

Bestseller lists routinely include advice books instructing attentive readers on everything from how to create a life of material and spiritual abundance to how to delay the aging process. While addressing specific issues, such how-to books reflect larger social concerns that characterize a particular time period, and, as such, they can be read as sociological and historical documents. Rudolph M. Bell, professor of history at Rutgers University, takes the rare step of investing the genre--usually considered ephemeral or dismissed as "fluff"--with just such historical importance. How to Do It offers an insightful, frequently humorous examination of 16th-century middle-class Italian life as reflected in the abundance of advice books that circulated during the period.

Bell relates, in lively detail, just how obsessed Renaissance Italians were with the same kind of advice literature that proliferates today. How to Do It makes clear how timeless many societal concerns are, and how little the solutions to them have changed over the centuries. He focuses his study on advice concerning interactions among men, women, and their children--beginning by examining advice books on conception--and continues sequentially forward in the life of the parent, addressing issues of pregnancy and childbirth, raising children, adolescence (considered in the 16th century to extend until age 28), and, finally, marital relations. Two secondary themes add depth to his already engaging examination: the confusion of "authorities" resulting from the large number of printing presses that simultaneously emerged in so many places, and the ways in which the printed word allowed these self-appointed experts to enter the intimate recesses of private life.

From the Inside Flap

How to Do It shows us sixteenth-century Italy from an entirely new perspective: through manuals that were staples in the households of middlebrow Italians merely trying to lead better lives. Addressing various challenges such as how to conceive a boy, or what to do should you want to goad female (or male) desires, these booklets give us a refreshing and fun social history.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0226042103
• ISBN 13: 9780226042107
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 389