The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy (review)

In early 2007, Sen. Joseph Biden referred to rival presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama as "the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."¹ Most commentators viewed his description as racist, implying that prior African-American contenders were not clean. Furthermore, no political figures of any background were ever subjected to such a "compliment." Following the argument of Biow's latest book, Biden was only a few hundred years out of date. The Renaissance sense of "clean" flows from an ideal that sixteenth-century Giovanni della Casa presented in his Galeoto, the "first great etiquette treatise of the modern world" (17). Renaissance clean involved the proper maintenance of social boundaries to insure social status and family honor. Biow begins with the example of Della Casa's book to open the topos of cleanliness in Italian Renaissance literature. The Galeoto instructed readers how to behave in public (any deviation became a threat to the social order) and how to keep one's speech free of corrupted language and one's person unpolluted by vulgar people and dirty things.

Biow focuses on the period from 1300 to 1600, as one long era in which concepts of cleanliness and cleansing became vitally important across all social boundaries. To clean meant to order and to establish or maintain a boundary; it had considerable resonance in literature. To enliven his topic, Della Casa had particularly delighted in describing and identifying what was not clean, and so does Biow. Just as the Galeoto talked filth—better to explain corruptions and polluting things—this book contains hundreds of entertaining stories and examples of boundaries breached. Much of it is either salacious or scatalogical, and a whole chapter is titled "Latrines and Latrine Cleaners." Biow's argument is that cleanliness was a highly creative, ubiquitous and distinctive topic in the Italian Renaissance, as well as a substantial departure from classical and medieval usage of the concept.

The frustrating part of this book is Biow's insistence upon offering an anthropological, as opposed to either historical or traditional literary, framework. Most of the anthropological cast mimics that in Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger (and in more recent iterations describing dirt as "matter out of place"). Biow is not simplistic: The scholarly infrastructure of the book is extensive and useful. Biow announces, however, at the outset what the book is not about: not about filth and ordure as material presences in Renaissance cities and courts; not about religious purity or cleanliness; not about the classical literary heritage; and not about medical ideas on cleanliness. Yet he mercifully undermines all of this boundary work, by including some background on sanitary plumbing and infrastructure, sixteenth-century public sanitation, the making and uses of soap, perfuming, medical ideas of bodily hygiene, and the systematic absence of washerwomen from even detailed treatments of daily life and household management.

The synchronic treatment of his material, to serve his "anthropological" objective, makes Biow's book a little less accessible to those not steeped in traditional Renaissance literature. He ends the book with a comparison featuring Dante (d. 1321) and Boccaccio (d. 1375) on filth, ordure, and latrines; he begins with a chapter meandering from Cellini (d. 1571) to Alberti (d. 1472), to Marco Foscari (d. 1551), then back to Bruni (d. 1444). His point is to celebrate anew the novelty of Bruni's urban panegyric—praising Florence as "clean," though in a material sense it certainly was not. The middle chapter on soap and washerwomen highlights women's invisibility in literature before the late sixteenth century, and soap's restriction to clothes, not bodies. By the conclusion, Biow has demonstrated that the topic is important and fascinating, but what happened, what changed, and when is not so easy to determine.