Reviewed by: The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy David Gentilcore Douglas Biow. The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006. xix + 244 pp. Ill. $35.00 (ISBN-10: 0-8014-4481-0; ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-4481-4). You want to praise a scholarly colleague. So you describe her or him as affable, sincere, brilliant, well-spoken, learned, modest, considerate, and clean. Clean? This last adjective somehow stands out from the rest for its inappropriateness, and yet this is just how Girolamo Lunadoro praised the mathematician Giovanni Battista Raimondi in 1611. How is it that cleanliness, in this case in manner and dress, became such an important idea in Renaissance Italy? In Italian, the word pulito can mean both “clean” and “polished,” and that helps explain the use of the word in this context. But there is more to it than that, as Douglas Biow explains. Biow’s fascinating study examines not only how “cleanliness” became a virtue but how the concept was used in rhetorical ways in both literature and art. He offers a social history not so much of the practical measures Renaissance Italians took to keep their cities and their bodies clean but of how the idea of “clean” (and its opposite, “dirty”) functioned in a range of Renaissance authors’ and artists’ work. This is not a history of public health. The works of historians like Carlo Cipolla are referred to, but plague—in a time and place dominated by its specter—barely gets a mention. The study is best read as an essay on a vast topic or, perhaps, as a work in progress. Biow manages only to dip his foot in it, as it were; and yet he manages to evoke a whole stercorary world we have lost (for better or for worse), both symbolically and socially. The introduction is especially successful, although the three chapters that follow explore specific aspects of the topic with varying degrees of effectiveness. As a result, the book is somewhat uneven. The final chapter, on latrines and latrine cleaners, lacks development and purpose, for all its discussion of latrines full of shit into which people are endlessly falling. We learn too little about the latrine cleaners, whose work was a vile and dirty occupation if ever there was one but whose end-product rendered the market gardens beyond the walls of Italian Renaissance cities so fertile. Elsewhere, however, Biow carefully teases these sorts of cultural paradoxes apart, as in chapter 2, in which he focuses on soap and washerwomen. Soap was widely valued, as was freshly washed linen, but the people who made this possible were considered base and lowly. It was the very process of cleansing—the removal of dirt and stains, the association with dirt—that made theirs a liminal occupation. If the motif of freshly washed linen appears frequently in the art and literature of the time as a value in itself, washerwomen are almost always associated with vice. Giulio Cesare Croce’s burlesque poem in praise of the heroic efforts of the washerwoman Filippa da Calcara is all the more eloquent for being the exception. Biow puts this into context in the introduction by outlining the relationship between the search for cleanliness and the search for order, for putting things in their “correct” place. He touches on the sorts of places where references to the topic of cleanliness can be found, from humanist panegyrics to carnival songs, introducing the sources to be picked up in the following three chapters. In the [End Page 708] course of the book Biow takes the reader on a Dantesque tour—and Dante is a frequent point of reference—of the Renaissance cosmos of cleanliness: from its use as an indicator of virtue (in chap. 1), proceeding on to its liminality with dirt (in chap. 2), and crossing over into the vileness of the cesspit (in chap. 3). The tour may be necessarily selective, and the symbolic too strongly divorced from daily, lived reality, but never has such an unexpected approach proved so insightful a way of exploring Renaissance culture. David Gentilcore University of Leicester Copyright © 2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press...