A LITTLE ADVICE.

How to Do It

Guides to Good Living for

Renaissance Italians

Rudolph M. Bell

University of Chicago Press, $25, 374 pp.

This is the perfect book for a family vacation. Sitting in your summertime rocker, you can turn to the attendant spouse and say, "Listen to this! You want to know a recipe for male potency? Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1500-77) recommends nasturtiums eaten whole, seeds of nettle mixed with wine, or kidneys of saltwater lizard." Count Giovanni Maria Bonardo's jesting marriage advice (Compagnia della lesina, 1591): a big dowry and a small wife-you can economize by purchasing a smaller bed!

Worried about that surly adolescent lurking about the household? Cardinal Silvio Antoniano has him pegged: "Adolescents are self- indulgent, greedy...often volatile and contradictory, changing from one moment to the next, quickly tiring of the old and ready for anything new...totally impractical, unwilling to listen to advice...easily deceived, malleable as wax, sociable only with their own kind, quick to make friends if it leads to pleasure seeking..." (Tre libri dell' educatione christiana, 1584). Pius XI in his 1929 encyclical on Christian education, Rappresentanti in terra, termed Antoniano's work a "golden treatise."

Rudolph M. Bell has collected 292 pages (plus 68 pages of footnotes) of such sixteenth-century advice on everything from conception to widowhood. Deliberately avoiding the literary monuments of the age, for example, Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, Bell has rummaged in Italian archives and backrooms for the popular pamphleteers of the day. General advice for the (then newly) literate public has a continuous history right down to Miss Manners. As Bell notes: "Brother Cherubino gave way to Alex Comfort, Dr. Michele Savanarola to Dr. Benjamin Spock...Cardinal Silvio Antoniano to Bishop Fulton J. Sheen." (Miss Manners is new, however. With rare exception, it was males who handed out nostrums and admonitions in the sixteenth century.)

Three hundred pages of archaic biology and scattershot advice from an assortment of clerics, moralists, and mountebanks produce significant head-shaking: sometimes in wonder at the daffiness of it all (did males really tie off their left testicles during intercourse in order to produce male offspring?); occasionally with a nod: "It has been always thus!" (adolescents are "ready for anything new"). There is a continuum from the bizarre to the judicious which runs roughly from the biological to the psychological. Renaissance biology was so inaccurate that any advice based on such "science" was bound to be weird and mistaken. Thus, the left side was regarded as the female side leading to the above-mentioned testicular advice and the further caution that the woman should lie on her right side after intercourse so that the male seed would lodge in one of the three right-sided male chambers of the uterus. (The uterus was said to have seven chambers: three left- sided female chambers and one in the middle for hermaphrodites, who must have been more prevalent in the sixteenth century than today.)

In contrast to bad biology, there was generous and loving psychological advice on the raising of children. Both advice manuals and erudite texts gave a "unitary, coherent approach to child rearing...with advocacy of demand feeding for infants...portrayals of the innocent babe in no danger of becoming spoiled...pages on how to encourage the child to choose good behavior rather than punishing him for being bad...." Bell notes the benevolence of the Italian attitude toward child rearing in contrast to later American biblicist justifications for severity and the lash as detailed in Philip Greven's Spare the Child (Random House, 1992).

Modern readers of almost any persuasion will be put off by the dominant, dominating stance of the male of the species in all the texts. Small wonder, then, that when a female voice does emerge as in Moderata Fonte's Il merito delle donne, we hear the young widow Lenora reply to the suggestion that she remarry: "What, me remarry? I'd rather drown than submit again to any man. I escaped slavery and imprisonment. Are you suggesting I voluntarily become enchained again? God watch over me."

I think that Bell gets it right when he confesses at the conclusion that what he would really like to do is "join you [the reader] for an informal chat, maybe over drinks or lunch....I miss knowing what you made of my book." Therein is the limitation of his indefatigable collection: What does one make of it all?

Bell is largely content to present the texts as such with a minimum of conjecture. So that is what the pamphleteers wrote. Why? Do the writings reflect how women did behave in Renaissance Italy or how they didn't behave? People usually write advice books because they think matters need fixing. Were women being less than obedient to their male consorts? If one takes the example of the Wife of Bath who ran through and over five husbands a couple of centuries earlier and in another land, it would seem that women could be pretty feisty in days of yore. As for human sexuality: pious advice often seems as detached today from prudence and practice as when Lodovico Gabrielli da Oggobio suggested that if you desire a woman you should consider how her body will be when she is dead.

Many of the books cited by Bell went through multiple editions and were best sellers. But advice may have a life of its own, floating well above the question about whether it is needed or heeded. After all, books on morality or dieting may be earnestly read in order to improve behavior or as a substitute for actually doing anything about either vice or fat. I am not sure what one might conclude three centuries from now from the fact that The Joy of Sex and Life Is Worth Living were twentieth-century best sellers. All we can be sure of is that some cyber-guru will be busily offering counsel and looking back with some mixture of horror and humor on our pop-philosophers.

Dennis O'Brien, president emeritus of the University of Rochester, is the author of All the Essential Half-Truths about Higher Education (Chicago).