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

by Rudolph M. Bell

How to Do It shows us sixteenth-century Italy from an entirely new 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

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Italy, Ebooks, Renaissance, How To

375 pages, Paperback

First published March 29, 1999

Reviews

[Bettie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Free ebook available at The University of Chicago Press Books

Subjects: Life skills -- Italy -- Handbooks, manuals, etc.
Family -- Italy -- History -- 16th century.
Life skills -- Italy -- Handbooks, manuals, etc. -- Life skills -- Italy -- Early works to 1800.
Conduct of life -- Early works to 1800.
Life skills -- Italy -- Early works to 1800.
Marriage -- Italy -- History -- 16th century.
Families -- Italy -- History -- 16th century.

File size: 15.96 Mb

Opening: Our parents may well have consulted an advice manual telling them how to conceive us, along with information on choosing the right moment for our conception. The same little book probably had a chapter about how to influence the likelihood that we would be a boy or a girl, followed by sections telling our mothers how to care for us in the womb, what to expect each month, and how to cope with a variety of physical discomforts and emotional swings.

Page 13: In a city such as Venice in the late fifteen hundreds, Grendler estimates that about one in every three adult males was literate. Approximately half these men could not read Latin, so a text in Italian automatically had double the potential audience of one in Latin. Among adult women, he estimates that 13 percent were able to read, but very few of these knew any Latin.

Wish I could have plucked out some of the diagrams to use as status updates! Some amusing parts but overall you won't be missing much if you let this one float the lagoon.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

It would be a little misleading to label this an exhaustive overview of 16th century Italian guidebooks for households, including such topics as sex, birth, raising children, choosing spouses, keeping house, etc., because the author acknowledges he didn't mention every last such book or pamphlet. But it feels exhaustive. He mentioned most of them. And plagiarism was so common among the publishers that every possible take on a topic got covered, whether original or cribbed. As you would expect, there's a lot of misogyny. Also a lot of home remedies for whatever ails you, whether it's a temporary sickness, or not being able to conceive a boy. Gwyneth Paltrow recently suggested steaming one's vagina, and there's lots of that in here, although involving old shoes and horse's hooves rather than whatever they're using in L.A. spas. There's lots, and lots, and lots, of summaries of guidebooks, and not a correspondingly large amount of analysis. This is the type of social history I was much more interested in years ago than now.

[Laura]

Free ebook available at The University of Chicago Press Books.

[Punk]

University of Chicago Press' free ebook for November. Requires Adobe Digital Editions for download.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Written by Rutgers professor Rudolph M. Bell, it is an academic analysis of how-to guides from the seventeenth century. Then as now, these helpful little manuals covered everything from childhood development to pregnancy concerns to proper deportment of the sexes. The book is interesting, largely as a window into a long-disappeared world (readers were informed by many the sage, for example, that a woman's uterus contained seven distinct compartments: three each reserved for male and female fetuses and the seventh, which was the domain of hermaphrodite babies). That said it is also quite long, and occasionally rather dry. It clocks it at roughly 300 pages; after 200, I determined I'd learned enough about the what and how of living as a Renaissance Italian.

[Geri Hoekz · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting treatise on how middle class Renaissance Italians handled domestic and workplace matters such as child rearing, marital relations, adolescence and a variety of relationships inside the house and out. Interesting and informative but I would have liked to have seen more about the roles of women.

[Quincy Standage · Rating 3 out of 5]

Adequate but a bit unengaging.

[Danielle Sullivan]

University of Chicago's free eBook for the month of November. You need Adobe to read the pdf.

[Emily Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

excellent! bilbiography is leading me to many other good books as well.