Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.