The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy by Douglas Biow (review)

REVIEWS 190 categories, such as gender, by virtue of its apparent distance from our (post?) modern lives. Her book’s penultimate chapter is a rich collection of examples of femininity, gender, sexuality, and the accompanying ambiguities that one finds in the medieval period. A reader might wish Bennett were as willing to acknowledge the range of feminist sentiments among students today as she is the diversity among medieval women’s experiences but this oversight does not ultimately detract from the substance of her treatment of education. Bennett’s extended discussions of her historical work and her analysis of the discipline’s inattention to pre-1800 history is frequently captivating. Similarly, the connections she draws between her chosen period and more recent history, particularly in terms of women’s work and wages, as well as her development of the concept of “patriarchal equilibrium,” give good reasons to pick up her book. Ultimately, History Matters functions at its best as an internal discussion among historians, particularly feminist historians; Bennett herself seems to recognize as much but continually reiterates her claim about the importance of history for feminism as a whole. That claim is never adequately addressed and so the book suffers for its grandiose premise. However, as concerns how a more comprehensive feminist history may be more thoroughly integrated into the discipline of history in general, Bennett’s text deserves careful attention from those who would disagree and the appreciation of those who would not. MEGAN E. GALLAGHER, Political Science, UCLA Douglas Biow, The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2006) xviii + 244 pp., ill. Jacob Burckhardt in his classic history of the Italian Renaissance locates a modern sense of cleanliness as first developing in Italy before anywhere else in Europe. The topic of cleanliness has received spotty attention from scholars of all fields: Simon Schama, Mary Douglas, and Mikhail Bakhtin are just a few who have addressed the issue. Douglas Biow explores how Renaissance Italian writers explored cleanliness in their works of art. Rather than examine one author, Biow gathers together a wide range of writers. Household manuals and ambassadorial reports are combined with Dante, Giovanni della Casa, and Giulio Cesare Croce. This focus on cleanliness allows Biow to explore issues of self-fashioning, self-respect, dignity, self-expression, social distinction, and status. The topic, according to Biow, acts as a bridge between high and low cultures, carnival songs and Latin panegyrics, and modern scholars of the Renaissance such as Burckhardt, Carlo Ginzburg, and Richard Goldthwaite. The book begins with relative cleanliness, households, and cities, and spirals into the muck of soup and washerwomen and ends with the vilest aspects of Renaissance society: the latrine and its cleaners. Biow is very clear about the topics which he does not cover in the book: scatology, religious cleanliness, and antique models of cleanliness. In the chapter on households and cities, Biow examines two dialogues on household management along with ambassadorial reports and panegyrics concerning Florence. Both sets of texts use cleanliness to denote order and filth with disorder. Leon Battista Alberti was concerned with a clean and well-ordered household along with a pure Italian language. The state of vulgar Italian language was often connected to the topic of cleanliness. When discussing REVIEWS 191 clean homes, writers employed a pure Italian, and when describing dirty subjects , authors included obscenities and other lingual impurities. Biow discusses language in the context of each individual writer but does not include a theoretical discussion of the relationship between language and dirt. For his account of the cities, Biow draws upon Venetian Marco Foscari’s ambassadorial report on Florence and Leonardo Bruni’s Laudatio florentinae urbis. Foscari ’s account of Florence emphasizes the filth of the city, which stemmed from the government’s strong ties with the laboring populace. According to Foscari, the city in 1527 had similar social character to a period in 1373 when the wool merchant, Michele di Lando, briefly controlled the city. This is, of course, in contrast to the dazzling architectural display of the city. Bruni’s Laudatio creates an opposite picture of the city, as a place unique in its cleanliness . The panegyric was the first to privilege...