Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy

Abstract

The books reconstructs in great detail the efforts made by men and women in late Renaissance Italy to stay healthy and prolong their lives. Drawing on a wide variety of sources—ranging from cheap healthy living guides in the vernacular to personal letters, conduct literature, household inventories, and surviving images and objects—it demonstrates that a sophisticated culture of prevention developed in sixteenth-century Italian cities. Based on humoral theory it sought to regulate the factors influencing health. It centred particularly around the home and increasingly informed domestic routines such as sleep patterns, food and drink consumption, forms of exercise, hygiene, control of emotions, and monitoring the air quality to which the body was exposed. Concerns about healthy living also had a substantial impact on the design of homes and the dissemination of a range of household objects. The study thus reveals the forgotten role of medical concerns in shaping everyday life and domestic material culture. But medicine was not the sole factor responsible for these changes. The surge of interest in preventive medicine received new impetus from the development of the print industry. Moreover, it was fuelled by classical notions of well-being reproposed by humanist culture and by the new interest in geography and climates. Broader social and religious trends also played a key role. The most significant element was represented by the nexus between attention to one’s health and spiritual and moral worth promoted both by new ideas of what constituted nobility and by the Counter-Reformation.