The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy (review)

This book is first of all a literary study, with generous help from art history and social history. Its subject is cleanliness, and also dirt, in Renaissance Italy. The thesis holds that, as perhaps in many cultures, there was in Italy a dialogue between clean and dirty that, for the Renaissance, mattered much. Cleanliness and uncleanliness, as themes, the book argues, ran through discussions and meditations on godliness and sin, on gender, on family life, on morality and manners, on social station, on public health and city planning, and, often acutely, on language. In structure, the book runs downhill, from clean to dirty. After a long introduction, setting out methods and concerns, come three extensive chapters, the first on cleanliness, the second on laundry and washerwomen, the third on privies and their cleaners. Despite this clarity of structure, of necessity the two polar themes run passim.

Several influential scholars inspire the author and haunt his text. Among the chief is Mary Douglas, anthropologist of "purity and danger," with her useful stricture that dirt is anything out of place and, probably more important, her sense that purity itself is often charged. Another great influence is Mikhail Bakhtin, champion of the carnivalesque belly and of all that was ribald, gluttonous, raucous, and, of course, dirty. A third is Norbert Elias, theoretician of an early modern "civilizing process" that slowly smothered carnival and all other medieval spontaneity, chaos, and easy corporality. Biow's exemplary masters are by now classics, their great work some decades back. Meanwhile, despite the social science in two of his three paragons, the meat of his book is mostly literary, as befits his training in Italian, and his method is classic close reading, looking for texts' themes and internal coherence and tracing their whole shape and feel to their authors' lives. In this diligent attention to the writers themselves, Biow eschews the cavalier light touch of some postmodern scholars. Although mainly literary, the author has read widely, across art history, urbanism, and social and institutional history, and has packed his footnotes with bibliography and energetic discussion of side issues. Scholars will mine the book. Biow has favorite authors: Dante for the Inferno's excremental canto 18 of the flatterers, Boccaccio for his privy pratfalls, Benvenuto Cellini for his anecdotes, Giulio Cesare Conte for a heroic lavandaia, Leon Battista Alberti for domestic ideals, and Giovanni della Casa for his displaying the thematic affinity of clean and filthy, touching both manners and literary style.

The book, though rich, is incomplete. Setting his clean against the privy and the sewer (one important antinomy), Biow often forgets other pairings, and other unclean substances on the Italian mind and scene, like smoke and soot, and the rot, both animal and vegetable, so pervasive in house and market. And, despite some anecdotal corpses, he never highlights the dead's corruption and the ambiguity and ambivalence around their bodies, as with the remains of smelly mortals or fragrant saints. He overlooks entirely reproduction's taboo fluids: menstrual blood, birth's blood and water, and sperm. He also slights manure, at once precious and unpleasant, and omits industrial pollutants. The book looks to some discourses but scants others. Literature, of course, stands out. For religion, the author attends to Dante's pious poem but leaves out most speculative theology, canon law, moral theology, cases of conscience, catechism, applied exorcism, and demonology. He also omits civil and criminal law and attends lightly to the many civic statutes, where dirt and cleanliness were often prominent. As for the moral codes that helped shape Italian life, he is more alert to religion and family ethics than to law or to codes of civil solidarity. And note that he skirts honor, with its many shaming rituals, those attacks on houses, portraits, clothing, and faces that so filled the days and daybooks of the law courts. And he misses the rites of sacrilege, the manure flung at the street-corner...