Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy by Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey (review)

Is fasting good for one’s health? Should I drink wine neat or diluted with water? Is it safe to drink cold beverages? How often should a person bathe or wash the hair? How much sleep should I get? How much exercise do I need? How can I avoid breathing bad air? Most important of all, how can I protect against “perturbations of the soul”?

Early modern Italians worried over these and scores of similar questions aimed at understanding how to prevent illness. And, as Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey explain in their book, Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy, they got plenty of advice from medical professionals and popular writers. Hundreds of vernacular health manuals streamed from the presses in sixteenth-century Italy, providing a rich trove of documentary evidence. The majority of the manuals were written not by academic physicians but by poligrafi, or popular writers. In mining this vast body of medical literature, Cavallo and Storey conclude that by the mid-sixteenth century “a preventive culture had been established and was being extended to a less educated public” (p. 20).

Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy is organized around the six “non-natural” things thought to influence the balance of bodily humors that governed one’s health: air, exercise, sleep, food and drink, managing the emotions, and bodily hygiene. All of this was spelled out in detail in the health regimens, consisting of medical opinion mostly purloined from academic treatises and adapted to a popular audience. Foul-smelling air, for example, should be avoided; as should cold and damp air, which could dangerously alter the brain’s temperature. Leather hats could be worn to protect one from cold air and to keep the brain warm, while perfumes could guard against foul air. The debate about whether one should drink cold beverages pitted medical science against fashion. In the early sixteenth century, doctors advised against it, expressing concerns about the health of the brain. But people found the new fashion of cooling beverages with ice or snow to their liking. Eventually the advice manuals relented and approved the practice, though in moderation. The manuals also included occasional bits of medical science, such as Castore Durante’s quaint explanation of sleep: “Sleep comes from the vapours which rise from foods to the brain and, once in touch with the frigid brain, they freeze and in falling obstruct the sensitive passages, just as rain is formed in the midst of the air through rising vapours.” To Durante’s audience, the concrete images of ice forming and rain clouds building provided a satisfying and comprehensible explanation of a complex physiological and mental phenomenon.

How seriously did early modern people take the advice in the health guides? To answer this question, Cavallo and Storey carefully examined the extensive body of correspondence from the Roman Spada-Veralli family. The Spadas and Verallis migrated to Rome from Romagna in the early seventeenth century and rapidly accumulated enormous fortunes, which they solidified through marriage alliances. Health concerns loom large in the family’s letters, providing a rare glimpse into the everyday life of an aristocratic family—from Giulia Benzoni Veralli’s concern about the unhealthiness of the Lenten diet to Eugenia Spada fretting over her mother-in-law’s propensity for junk food (porcherie).

The intuitive idea of preventing illness by regulating regimen went back to Galenic medical theory and was firmly engrained in medieval medicine. It is, as the medical historian Ludwig Edelstein explained in a classic 1931 essay, a demanding and exacting routine, suitable only for those who had the leisure and wealth needed to follow the regimens—in other words, an aristocratic clientele. While families like the Spada-Veralli could afford to maintain a strict health regimen, it’s hard to imagine many ordinary people following such stringent rules.

In the course of the sixteenth century, the health manuals grew in size and complexity. Cavallo...