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

by Rudolph M. Bell (Author)

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.

"Lively and curious reading, particularly in its cascade of anecdote, offered in a breezy, cozy, journalistic style." -Lauro Martines, Times Literary Supplement

"[Bell's] fascinating book is a window on a lost world far nearer to our own than we might imagine. . . . How pleasant to read his delightful, informative and often hilarious book." -Kate Saunders, The Independent

"An extraordinary work which blends the learned with the frankly bizarre." -The Economist

"Professor Bell has a sly sense of humor and an enviably strong stomach. . . . He wants to know how people actually behaved, not how the Church or philosophers or earnest humanists thought they should behave. I loved this book." -Christopher Stace, Daily Telegraph

Front Jacket

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.

Author Biography

Rudolph M. Bell is a professor of history at Rutgers University. His previous books include Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000-1700 and Holy Anorexia, both published by the University of Chicago Press.