The Prince's Body. Vincenzo Gonzaga and Renaissance Medicine [I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History] by Valeria Finucci

Abstract

Health & History ● 17/1 ● 2015 99 this text is derived from Worth-Stylianou’s own declaration that ‘it should be read alongside the exceptional contribution by the one professional woman writer, the midwife Louise Bourgeois’ (p.xxv). The exclusion of extracts from Bourgeois’s Observations (1626) was a lost opportunity, for it would have allowed the reader to compare Bourgeois’s findings with the five male-authored treatises included in the volume. JANE BITOMSKY UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND Valeria Finucci, The Prince’s Body. Vincenzo Gonzaga and Renaissance Medicine [I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History] (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015). ISBN 978-0-674-72545-4 (HC). 17 B&W illustrations. vii + 273pp. Valeria Finucci, Professor of Italian and Theater Studies at Duke University, has produced a beautifully written cultural history. What, precisely, it is a history of though takes some time to grasp, because Finucci’s interests are many. She takes her readers down all kinds of intriguing pathways as she explores the health experiences and concerns of an extravagant Renaissance prince, Vincenzo Gonzaga, DukeofMantua(1562–1612),andthepowerandpotentialofamedical world opening up to the therapeutic possibilities of ‘discoveries’from anatomy to the New World pharmacopeia. Finucci argues that Vincenzo’s corporeal problems not only shaped his sense of self, but also his political affairs and strategies (a point demonstrated most convincingly in the first chapter). More broadly, it is a study of what the intersections of one well-documented individual with ‘Renaissance’ medicine can illuminate—about the aspirations and fantasies of an affluent male ruler, as much as medical techniques and political realities. Finucci’s chapters trace a series of ‘cures’ that Vincenzo sought over his lifetime for a variety of health matters he experienced. In ‘The Virgin Cure: Manual Exams and Early Modern Surgeons’, Finucci documents the fascinating circumstances of Vincenzo’s first marriage to Margherita Farnese, quickly annulled after it was concluded (against the bride’s wishes) that her hymen was impenetrable. This case powerfully articulates the impact of cultural 100 BOOK REVIEWS negotiations between the intricacies of anatomy with gendered sexual and bodily assumptions, personal and dynastic honour, and political expediency. In ‘The Aesthetic Cure: Skin Diseases, Noses, and the Invention of Plastic Surgery’, Finucci explores Gaspare Tagliacozzi’s De Curtorum Chirurgia per Insitionem (1597), in particular his innovative rhinoplastic techniques and the early modern meanings of thenoseandelitemalehonourthatunderpinnedcontemporaryurgency for a successful procedure. This chapter is less directly connected to Vincenzo than the first; although Vincenzo appears to have suffered temporarily from unsightly facial disfigurations as a result of skin diseases, there is certainly no suggestion that he required the kind of extensive plastic surgery explored in Tagliacozzi’s text and primarily the focus of this chapter. We return more concretely to Vincenzo’s sufferings and cures in Chapter 3’s discussion of ‘The Comfort Cure: Managing Pain and Catarrh at the Spa’, which considers the prince’s regular use of spa resorts in a wider discussion of the early modern culture of the spa, many of which were targeted for particular matters of contemporary concern, from arthritis, skin, and digestive complaints, to respiratory and joint troubles. Finucci demonstrates how the spa culture of elite European men also provided sources for political achievement and representational display with entertainments of wine, women, and song. Discussion of Vincenzo’s energetic sexual exploits leads neatly on to Chapter 4, ‘The Sexual Cure: Searching for a Viagra in the New World’. This final chapter documents Vincenzo’s search for youth and sexual vigour, from New World materia medica, charting the costly journey undertaken by apothecary Evangelista Marcobruno to South America and, with it, the hopes and dreams of his ageing patron Vincenzo as negotiated through their correspondence. Anchored by Vincenzo’s health experiences and activities, Finucci spirals out kaleidoscopically to far broader exploration of early modern medical ideas and imaginations, political events, and elite male preoccupations. These four absorbing chapters, however, are followed by a short epilogue, ‘Unwrapping the Body’, that feels a little unsatisfactory at tying together the strands of the study. It is not clear that the chapters aim to work together to advance an overarching argument of this sort. There is copious scholarship that sits under the surface of Finucci...