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

Publication subTitle ：Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians

Author： Rudolph M. Bell  

Publisher： University of Chicago Press‎

Publication year： 2000

E-ISBN: 9780226041834

P-ISBN(Paperback): 9780226042107

P-ISBN(Hardback):  9780226042008

Subject： K History and Geography

Keyword： Family -- Italy -- History -- 16th century., Marriage -- Italy -- History -- 16th century., Conduct of life -- Early works to 1800., Life skills -- Italy -- Handbooks, manuals, etc. -- Life skills -- Italy -- Early works to 1800., Families -- Italy -- History -- 16th century., Life skills -- Italy -- Handbooks, manuals, etc., Life skills -- Italy -- Early works to 1800.

Language： ENG

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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 husbands 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. Bells 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

[Bells] 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

Chapter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Chapter One: Readers

Chapter Two: Conception

Chapter Three: Pregnancy and Childbirth

Chapter Four: Raising Your Child

Chapter Five: Adolescence

Chapter Six: Marital Relations

Chapter Seven: Then and Now

Notes

Index

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