How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians. (Reviews).

Rudolph M. Bell, How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xiii + 375 pp. $25. ISBN: 0-226-04210-3.

Want to keep the romance in your marriage? Wondering what sexual posture is likely to produce a boy? Readily available, relatively inexpensive, and generally easy-to-read advice books are available to answer almost any question. Indeed, the genre has become so popular in recent years that the New York Times Book Review was moved to create a separate bestseller list of the "advice and how-to" manuals that were eclipsing sales of the presumably more serious works of nonfiction with which they had previously been grouped. But advice books -- to say nothing of the questions prompting their creation -- are nothing new; as Rudolph Bell notes in the introduction to his enjoyable and informative study, long before What to Expect When You're Expecting, The Rules and even Dr. Spock, Friar Bartolomeo da Medina, Isabella Cortese, Giovanni Marinello (physician father of feminist Lucrezia Marinella) and a host of other doctors, clerics and quacks were churning out vernacular "guides to good living" for an ever-growing Ital ian audience.

Like so many of the works he considers, Bell has organized his narrative into chapters tracing the trajectory of the life-cycle (conception, pregnancy and childbirth, raising your child, adolescence, marital relations) through a wide range of popular advice publications from sixteenth-century Italy. As he informs us in the introductory chapter, "Readers," Bell's choice of sources was determined not by each authority's place in our scholarly canon, but rather by whether the texts were readily available and widely read in their own time. Accordingly, certain household names -- perhaps most notably, Leon Battista Alberti's -- are excluded (despite its familiarity to Renaissance scholars and anthologizers, I libri della famiglia went unpublished in the Cinquecento) in favor of bestselling authors now largely unknown. Drawing on (and appropriately crediting) the scholarship of other historians, notably Paul Grendler, Bell makes a strong case for the availability and accessibility of the manuals he considers, due t o their relative affordability to working people, their use of the vernacular at a time when far many more adults could read Italian than Latin, and the abundant use of extensive indices as well as marginalia and summaries designed to guide the reader searching the answer to a specific problem. He also suggests that advice, once read, was then passed along orally to illiterate friends, relatives, neighbors and customers.

Bell is casually concerned with two themes: variety and "how the printed word allowed authorities, or writers merely claiming to be authorities, to enter the intimate recesses of private life" (8). But although he points out that the advent of print allowed clerics to give far more explicit sexual advice (or, rather, prohibitions) than might decorously be permitted in a public sermon, he only nods at, rather than analyzes, the obvious difference of those recommendations from those offered by secular authors. Indeed, as he reiterates only too often, Bell's intent is "to let the original texts speak for themselves" (8), something they do intriguingly enough. But while this stylistic choice serves to make his own text, like those he considers, more accessible to a popular audience, his running paraphrase elides the textual intricacies and allusions which make advice literature such an interesting cultural barometer.

Bell obviously enjoyed his research and he has gathered a broad range of recommendations regarding sexual intimacy, childbearing and -rearing, and marital harmony that will prove beneficial both to readers interested in familiarizing themselves with the beliefs of the period as well as to scholars seeking to discover the range of hidden gems available on a given topic. At times, though, the author's stress on entertainment value ("I like prose that gets to the point, makes sense on first reading, and allows for a chuckle," 281) leads him to ignore the more serious implications of the issues under consideration. For example, one of Bell's favorite authorities (and one of the most influential) is the Dominican priest and doctor, Girolamo Mercurio, whose extremely popular La commare (the midwife) was the first such treatise written in Italian. Although the historian emphasizes Mercurio's "benign, supportive attitude toward midwives" (101), he disregards numerous ways in which Mercurio's text raises the specter o f the "bad midwife" as well as the way in which La commare, like others in its genre, contributes to a growing opposition between knowledgeable male physician and ignorant midwife; in my reading, much of Mercurio's text appears directed to the. "padre di famiglia" in a position to choose the midwife, as well as any physician who might be consulted. Similarly omitted is Giovanni Marinello's chilling assertion that out of every ten deaths in childbirth, nine are caused by the ignorance of the midwife ("E certamente non mentirei se io dicessi che delle dieci donne che periscono nel parto, nove per poca scienza e cagione della levatrice si moiono." Marinello, Le medicine partenenti alle infermita delle donne; selections in Maria Luisa Biagi Altieri, et al., Medicina per le donne nel Cinquecento [Turin, 1992], 47).

In general, the author's light tone glosses over the perils which made childbirth something to be truly feared. In keeping with his sources, Bell writes in an informal, almost chatty style intended perhaps to re-create the intimacy of the private conversations in which such material is generally shared in the real world. But the thigh-slapping attitude toward the ignorant beliefs of the early moderners (tie a tourniquet around your husband's left testicle if you want a boy) can be uncomfortably reminiscent of some all too recent responses to the behavior of indigenous peoples, as well as naive in light of the unnecessary yet routine barbarisms that still take place in many American delivery rooms today.

Nevertheless, Bell's is a compendium of always interesting and potentially useful (if sometimes conflicting) bits of information; it is easy to see why these books were so avidly consumed. One wonders, however, how much of the advice was accurately received and followed. Disappointingly, the historian largely begs the question as unanswerable. Yet in one of the most notable sections of the book, Bell, discussing the unequivocal endorsement of maternal breastfeeding by both religious and medical authorities, convincingly calls into question the received assumption that the majority of babies were sent out to wetnurse, as well as concomitant assertions that the children of Renaissance Italy were unloved and neglected. In Bell's reading, the manuals "overwhelmingly support the view that parents... loved their children dearly and tried to raise them with individual, caring attention ... It seems ... highly unlikely that popular-advice manuals could have been popular at all if their message [was] totally out of li ne with ordinary people's thinking on these matters" (136). Intriguingly, he argues that the absence of advice regarding visiting those babies sent out reflects not a lack of compassion but rather a lack of middle-class, book-reading parents who sent their infants away. Given the wealth of information potentially to be gleaned from a close-reading of this genre, one can only wish that the author had spoken a bit more for his texts, but we can certainly be glad that Bell has gathered them in such a ripe display.