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  • Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy: Identities, Families and Masculinities by Sandra Cavallo
  • Anita Guerrini (bio)
Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy: Identities, Families and Masculinities. By Sandra Cavallo. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Pp. xi+281. $30.95.

Sandra Cavallo's book, first published in hardcover in 2007, offers a new professional category of artisans of the body, and a new approach to the role of kinship in the organization of artisanal life. She bases her arguments on a close examination of the city of Turin in northern Italy between about 1650 and 1750, but her conclusions can be applied to a number of other locations, particularly in Catholic countries.

Most historians have looked at early modern surgery as the middle category in a hierarchical organization of medical professions that placed physicians at the top, apothecaries slightly below surgeons, and various unlicensed and folk practitioners below that. In this schema, physicians had the most power and influence and enjoyed the most aristocratic patronage. In place of this vertical hierarchy based on education and social class, Cavallo looked horizontally and found a large group of artisans concerned with various [End Page 396] aspects of the body and its care. These artisans included surgeons, but also such trades as wigmakers, jewelers, upholsterers, tailors, and the various offices in royal and aristocratic households involved with the maintenance of the body, including bathers and other gentlemen (and women) of the bedchamber. She finds that barbers and surgeons remained closely allied in this period, countering the accepted notion that surgeons were separating from barbers into a newly professionalized discipline. All of these professions were linked by ties of neighborhood, kinship, and marriage.

These artisans of the body had a far closer and more intimate relationship with their aristocratic patrons than did physicians, who in this period seldom touched their patients. Humoral theory as applied to hygiene advocated the removal of "excrements" including sweat and hair as crucial to maintaining health, and those who performed these tasks often lived in aristocratic households and therefore established relationships that could last for generations.

Cavallo employs a variety of sources, including works on surgery and hygiene, local records (particularly marriage and dowry transactions), census lists, and city plans. The kinship connections of the artisans of the body went beyond the father-son links that have been generally employed to talk about kinship and the professions. Cavallo uncovers a web of connections among in-laws, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, cousins, and siblings. She traces neighborhoods, apprenticeships, and particularly marriages over generations. Her work calls into question studies of the early modern family that have emphasized its patriarchal character; the families of surgeons, barbers, wigmakers, and gentlemen of the chamber that populate her book are in many ways more egalitarian than this model and certainly more diverse. Influence and positions traveled through daughters as well as through sons. Names changed but family lines remained intact, if not always in a direct line from father to son. Cavallo's biographical method closely examines the lives of several individuals and their families, a painstaking technique of research and reconstruction that yields impressive results.

This book appears in a series on gender, and Cavallo's research overturns several assumptions about the relative roles of males and females in this period. The father was not always the critical individual in the family; professional and material goods could be transferred to family members in a number of ways. Women could be of equal importance in this model of family relations, whether or not they held positions as artisans themselves. Many in fact did, and as other historians have also shown, the household and not the individual practitioner was often the operative unit. Cavallo also looks at the position of unmarried men and finds it differed little from that of married men in terms of their roles in the extended, horizontal family. She emphasizes the uncertainty of father-son succession: children died young, parents remarried. Broader lines of kinship kept families going.

This is an important book that fundamentally recasts our ideas about [End Page 397] early modern artisanal life and the relative importance of the various medical...

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