How To Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians. By Rudolph M. Bell (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xiii plus 375pp. $25.00).

Imagine a book where the author summarizes with long paraphrases and chatty informality the way renaissance men and women read "advice manuals." Imagine that he discovers that the renaissance was really a much nicer time than polemical feminists and cultural historians have argued--aside from a bit of unpleasantness--largely a warm and friendly era with good fathers and happily retiring mothers who loved each other and their children (or at least tried to do so) much as "we" more down-to-earth people might expect. Imagine as well that renaissance people were not all that unlike "us," reading "advice manuals" to learn how to live better, even if they did have some pretty "bizarre" ideas. Finally imagine that all this is written in a style that mimics advice manuals themselves, as if the author was writing an advice manual on how to read renaissance "advice manuals," a conceit pointed out to anyone who might have missed it (pp. 280-81 including a self-critique of that conceit). Imagining all this you will have a pretty good sense of what this book purports to be.

After a brief introduction and first chapter that argue that "advice manuals" were a significant component of the early book trade designed for a market of literate middle and upper middle class men and women anxious to learn from them how to live life, Bell's book is organized around his vision of the life stages where these manuals were most pertinent and useful. Conception, therefore, opens the discussion in chapter two with a quick overview of advice to prospective parents on how to produce boys rather than girls; the ideal times, modes and places of intercourse for procreation; how to deal with male and female reproductive dysfunctions; the meaning of menstruation; and finally how to know if a woman was pregnant. Chapter three deals with pregnancy and childbirth. Again ascertaining the sex of the future child looms large, but even more advice focused on the dangers of childbirth. Childhood dominates chapter four, where Bell argues that historians have overestimated the importance of sending children awa y from home to nurse in the renaissance. Rather he concludes that most children were nursed at home, attacking in the text and more aggressively in the notes those who have been taken in by feminist arguments based on weak evidence. He also argues that children were treated with more love and attention than has been assumed, rejecting those who have suggested that the renaissance ideal was to break childish wills. Chapter five exams renaissance "adolescence," attempting briefly to define what the term meant and looking at the way advice manuals problematized it. Unfortunately, Bell does not really consider the impact of gender and class differences on this presumed stage of life and, although he realizes there is not a complete parallel, tends to see it as analogous to modem adolescence. Thus he misses much of the complexity of the renaissance situation, e.g. the fact that women especially at upper class levels were married very quickly once they reached puberty (and were deemed ready for their primary adult responsibilities--maternity and childrearing) or that for males of the upper classes this period stretched on until their late twenties and beyond, while artisans could gain adult status much earlier. This chapter ends with an optimistic vision of how marriages were arranged where it seems that fathers often took the advice of manuals to marry their children to spouses who would make loving mates, overlooking their financial and familial interests to do so.

The last two chapters consider respectively marital relationships and the issue of why women did not write "advice manuals". As one might expect given the generally rosy picture that Bell has drawn, he finds that although there was no sense of equality in marriage, renaissance patriarchy was relatively benign and that both men and women were generally comfortable within marriage and their separate spheres. Humanists he admits were quite negative on marriage and women, but Church men claimed that women did have souls and a chance at salvation which protected them and created some support for them within marriage. Nonetheless, he gives considerable attention to widowhood, noting that most widows were not anxious to remarry which he sees as partially motivated by a desire to avoid the subjugation of marriage. There follows a brief discussion of why women did not write "advice manuals" which for Bell seems to turn on the fact that women were not anxious to share their knowledge publicly. He notes that there was, in fact, one such manual published by a certain Mrs. [sic] Cortese, but opines that this might have been a ruse--a man could have used the name to gain a wider audience. But if "advice manuals" were really market driven and publishers anxious to publish anything that would make a profit including works by women, the immediate unasked question is why did not publishers create a host of fictitious women writers to satisfy the market if real women were unwilling.

But the deeper problem is Bell's assumption that he is actually studying "advice manuals" that were market driven and served a middling audience seeking advice on how to live much like the modem genre. William Eamon in Science and the Secrets of Nature, a groundbreaking book cited approvingly by Bell, demonstrates, however, that much of this literature is really not about advice at all but actually an educated debate on the secrets of nature and popular errors. A more radical view has been argued by Robert Muchembled who sees much of this literature as part of an aggressive attack on popular culture. Many of Peter Burke's essays on early modem culture present a similar, if perhaps more moderate vision of a literate attack on the mistakes and misunderstandings of popular culture. If we rethink Bell's anachronistic "advice manuals" ("Brother Cherubino gave way to Alex Comfort, Dr. Michele Savonarola to Dr. Benjamin Spock, Antonio Tagliente to Theodore Seuss Geisel, Matteo Palmieri to Richard Ferber, and Cardin al Silvio Antoniano to Bishop Fulton Sheen...." [p. 289]) as part of a broader debate about popular errors and an attempt to integrate culture at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries, the whole artifice of this books collapses. Rather than middle class readers anxious to learn how to live life, we have a literature anxious to inform people (who already know traditional ways of life) how they should live in accordance with the dictates of an educated Christian culture--not so much advice as prescription and not so much how life was lived, but how it was not! Bell, I fear, has reduced a complex and contested series of cultural battles to mere advice, sympathetically given and warmly received.

This means, in turn, that while many of his paraphrases of little known Italian texts are fascinating, his interpretations are problematic. Unfortunately, there is also reason to be concerned about those paraphrases. Bell occasionally points out that his readings go against those of italianists--frequently finding humor or satire where they have found serious discussion. More worrisome yet for his paraphrases are the few times that translations are provided along with the original. On page 172, for example, he translates: "con maschi non lassarla conversare/ne sia lasciva quando fusse a festa/andar nanzi atenda con discretione/ad honesto diletto e oratione" as "With boys don't leave them to joking,/Nor to lascivious misbehavior before Lent./Attend gala dances with discretion,/In honest delights and pious oration." The text should read "Do not allow her to associate or be flirtatious with males when she would go to a celebration; rather she should focus with discretion on honest pleasure and prayer." Of jokin g boys and misbehavior before Lent there is no mention. Further down the page are two stanzas quoted from a poem where a peasant girl complains of others not wanting her to speak--"non vuol pur ch'io favella"--which is translated by Bell as "Unwilling to enter a convent." And at the end of the stanza she reveals, "I am that little peasant girl"--"Io son quella Villanella"--giving her lament a pastoral tone. Bell translates this, "I am that Evil One"! In the face of such translations what is one to make of his paraphrases and his rejection of the interpretations of others?

Finally, Bell has attempted to make social and cultural history accessible to a wider audience by adopting a homey, joking style that often seems counter-productive. Some may be put off by his patronizing when he refers to himself as Rudy or suggests that general readers skip the next few pages because they are devoted to a serious discussion of scholar's issues. More significantly, Bell is too ready to sacrifice a serious consideration of the practices he finds "bizarre" for laughter. Yet rather in the vein of Robert Darnton reversed, one might wonder if such laughter does not say more about life today than about renaissance Italy. Bell is aware that laughing at the past can be dangerous for understanding it and occasionally seems to chastise himself, even as he seemingly cannot resist. In fact, part of his homey style is a kind of running curmudgeonly commentary, where he confides to his reader his reaction to each text--amused, sympathetic or often negative if he finds it heavy going.

It may be that to make history reach a broader audience it will be necessary to cut its nuance and complexity, play to assumptions about the reader's lack of sophistication, and emphasize the humor of the past's "otherness"; if so, this book is on the right track. My hope is that history can reach a broader audience without such tricks by asking engaging, but hard questions and providing complex, interesting answers. If so this book will be useful primarily for the debate it generates on the crucial issues of how everyday life was lived in the renaissance and how this complex and relatively understudied literature should be understood. For all my reservations, Bell's chatty style and strong views will attract attention to important issues and create heated debate.