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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 75.3 (2001) 564-565



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Book Review

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

Hygiene in the Early Modern Medical Tradition


Rudolph M. Bell. How To Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xiii + 375 pp. Ill. $25.00 (0-226-04210-3).

Heikki Mikkeli. Hygiene in the Early Modern Medical Tradition. Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae. Humaniora, n.s., no. 305. Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, and the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters, 1999. 195 pp. Ill. $21.50 (paperbound 9-514-10869-8).

Advice books were as eagerly bought in early modern Europe as they are today. Whether one wanted to know how to farm, brew, or run a household, when and how to have intercourse, how to have a good pregnancy and birth, the answers were to be found in the torrent of vernacular books coming off the presses. Such books created a new type of readership: middling to popular, who increasingly viewed the spoken language and the written word as identical, and who ignored the claims of Latin to be the language of books. Advice books, therefore, are highly significant for the histories of reading and printing. They also provide key materials for the cultural and social history of early modern Europe.

Rudolph Bell's How to Do It gives us a sight of these materials. It illustrates how advice books instructed their readers on how to behave and what to do across the life cycle from conception to widowhood. Historians of medicine will find the sections on conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and wet-nursing of particular interest, but I suspect that along with social historians they will also enjoy reading the chapters on raising children, adolescence, and marital relations. Bell's aim has been "to capture the world of knowledge [that was] available" (p. 125), rather than to focus on the origins and transmission of that knowledge. Yet in fact, though wearing his scholarship lightly, he provides a good many signposts on the origins of the advice. In the process of capturing this world of knowledge he supplies the reader with generous amounts of material, in either quotation or paraphrase, mainly from Catholic authors. There is also some excellent contextualization, not only in the opening chapter on the readership of the advice books, but also, for instance, on the significance for the Catholic church of the advice. In passing, Bell makes the telling point that detailed instruction--for example, on sexual intercourse--was much easier to communicate in print than by means of a possibly embarrassed priest. Although the book is written in a breezy, informal style, reflected in its lurid cover, there is a constant and well-informed stream of references to the secondary literature. For instance, when considering the advice given to widows on remarriage (which was usually not to do so), Bell refers at length to Samuel Cohn's research on post-Tridentine Sienese women and to David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber's analysis of the Tuscan census of 1427 to point out that, in practice, widows (unlike widowers) usually did not remarry. However, although the advice books might in places reflect actual practice, it is, as Bell acknowledges, nearly impossible to tell if people changed their behavior because of them. Nevertheless, their ideals and prejudices, their recipes, instructions, and explanations, reflected the interests [End Page 564] and the knowledge of their authors, and the groups they were representative of. Used with care, How to Do It will provide many an insight for social historians and for social historians of medicine.

Heikki Mikkeli's Hygiene in the Early Modern Medical Tradition appears an altogether different book. It is, as Mikkeli writes, "not a social history, but instead an intellectual history of hygiene" (p. 8). It is largely concerned with the elite scholarly and university-based writings on hygiene, which in the early modern period retained the original...

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