Amazon.com: How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians: Rudolph M. Bell: Books

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Editorial Reviews

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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larger social concerns that characterize a particular time period, and, as such, they can be read as sociological and historical documents.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.

Product Description

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.

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Inside This Book (learn more)

First Sentence:
Our parents may well have consulted an advice manual telling them how to conceive us, along with information on choosing the right moment for our conception. Read the first page

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
mulieres ferrarienses, errori popolari, secreti naturali, della lesina, infermit� delle donne, medicine partenenti, donneschi difetti, seme della violenza, merito delle donne, stato maritale, scientia universale, del bailo, della vita civile, conjugal debt, cold uterus, advice manuals, honest courtesan, good midwife, notable matters, della controriforma, loving advice, high prelates, scribal culture, birthing chair

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Catholic Reformation, Brother Cherubino, Michele Savonarola, Giovanni Marinello, Moderata Fonte, Lodovico Dolce, Matteo Palmieri, Leonardo Fioravanti, Lorenzo Gioberti, Bill Gates, Cardinal Antoniano, Lucrezia Marinella, Francesco Barbaro, Isabella Cortese, Italian Renaissance, Francesco Tommasi, Ruth Kelso, Veronica Franco, Bernardino da Siena, Catholic Europe, Charles Estienne, Giuseppe Passi, Juan Luis Vives, Monsignor Sabba da Castiglione, Pope Pius

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