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

Bell, Rudolph M.

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0226042103 ISBN 13 : 9780226042107

Editeur : University of Chicago Press, 1999

Synopsis

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

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Rudolph M. Bell, professor of history at Rutgers University, is the author of a number of books in Italian history, among them Fate and Honor, Family and Village: Demographic and Cultural Change in Rural Italy Since 1800, Holy Anorexia, How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians, and The Voices of Gemma Galgani: The Life and Afterlife of a Modern Saint (with Cristina Mazzoni), all published by the University of Chicago Press.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of Chicago Press
• Date d'édition: 1999
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0226042103
• ISBN 13: 9780226042107
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 2
• Nombre de pages: 389
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible