How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians [Paperback]

Rudolph M. Bell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2000 | ISBN-10: 0226042006 | ISBN-13: 978-0226042008

How to Do It shows us sixteenth-century Italy from an entirely new perspective: through manuals which were staples in the households of middlebrow Italians merely trying to lead better lives. Addressing challenges such as how to conceive a boy, the manuals offered suggestions such as tying a tourniquet around your husband's left testicle. Or should you want to goad female desires, throw 90 grubs in a liter of olive oil, let steep in the sun for a week and apply liberally on the male anatomy. Bell's journey through booklets long dismissed by scholars as being of little literary value gives us a refreshing and surprisingly fun social history.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Bestseller lists routinely include advice books instructing attentive readers on everything from how to create a life of material and spiritual abundance to how to delay the aging process. While addressing specific issues, such how-to books reflect larger social concerns that characterize a particular time period, and, as such, they can be read as sociological and historical documents. Rudolph M. Bell, professor of history at Rutgers University, takes the rare step of investing the genre--usually considered ephemeral or dismissed as "fluff"--with just such historical importance. How to Do It offers an insightful, frequently humorous examination of 16th-century middle-class Italian life as reflected in the abundance of advice books that circulated during the period.

Bell relates, in lively detail, just how obsessed Renaissance Italians were with the same kind of advice literature that proliferates today. How to Do It makes clear how timeless many societal concerns are, and how little the solutions to them have changed over the centuries. He focuses his study on advice concerning interactions among men, women, and their children--beginning by examining advice books on conception--and continues sequentially forward in the life of the parent, addressing issues of pregnancy and childbirth, raising children, adolescence (considered in the 16th century to extend until age 28), and, finally, marital relations. Two secondary themes add depth to his already engaging examination: the confusion of "authorities" resulting from the large number of printing presses that simultaneously emerged in so many places, and the ways in which the printed word allowed these self-appointed experts to enter the intimate recesses of private life. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From the Inside Flap

How to Do It shows us sixteenth-century Italy from an entirely new perspective: through manuals that were staples in the households of middlebrow Italians merely trying to lead better lives. Addressing various challenges such as how to conceive a boy, or what to do should you want to goad female (or male) desires, these booklets give us a refreshing and fun social history.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 389 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press (October 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226042006
• ISBN-13: 978-0226042008
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #862,276 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A new world for c16 Italian scholars, social historians, October 23, 1999

By 

Robert F. Judd (Brunswick, Maine) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians (Hardcover)

It's a privilege to rise to Professor Bell's challenge in the book itself and be the first to drop a public note about this book. It's an impressive distillation of a wonderful body of writing in c16 Italy--he's done a fine job of evenhandedly presenting a very large, notoriously difficult to trace, and sometimes outrageous (and entertaining) corpus of material. Another indication (were one needed) that social context in period studies is neglected to one's peril.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A lively look at 16th century Italy's mores and customs., January 13, 2006

By 

Cas (the Idaho mountains) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians (Paperback)

A very lively and fast-paced look at advice manuals of the 16th century. He takes a lot of different sources, from manuals written by uptight husbands for one specific person, to widely-published manuals from priests, doctors, quacks, lawyers, and women from all walks of life, to show how middle-class Renaissance Italians looked at things like childbirth, conception, raising children, how spouses should behave, and how widows and widowers should live. What I liked best about the book was the wide range of manuals he takes from -- it's a popular history to be sure, but you come away with a pretty good idea of how people were expected to behave and what was normal for the era. The index and footnotes are splendid -- worth the price of the book itself in my opinion.

The informal tone of the writing makes the book a fun read, but the way he can synthesize all these facts he's got is what makes the book worth the money. I certainly would consider this a valuable addition to my history bookshelf.