Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians

How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians

Bell, Rudolph M.

Paperback

Medieval & Renaissance HistoryGeneral World History

ISBN10: 0226042006
ISBN13: 9780226042008
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: Oct 1 2000
Pages: 389
Weight: 1.30
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.90
Language: English
How to Do It shows us sixteenth-century Italy from an entirely new perspective: through manuals which were staples in the households of middlebrow Italians merely trying to lead better lives. Addressing challenges such as how to conceive a boy, the manuals offered suggestions such as tying a tourniquet around your husband's left testicle. Or should you want to goad female desires, throw 90 grubs in a liter of olive oil, let steep in the sun for a week and apply liberally on the male anatomy. Bell's journey through booklets long dismissed by scholars as being of little literary value gives us a refreshing and surprisingly fun social history.

Lively and curious reading, particularly in its cascade of anecdote, offered in a breezy, cozy, journalistic style. --Lauro Martines, Times Literary Supplement

[Bell's] fascinating book is a window on a lost world far nearer to our own than we might imagine. . . . How pleasant to read his delightful, informative and often hilarious book. --Kate Saunders, The Independent

An extraordinary work which blends the learned with the frankly bizarre. --The Economist

Professor Bell has a sly sense of humor and an enviably strong stomach. . . . He wants to know how people actually behaved, not how the Church or philosophers or earnest humanists thought they should behave. I loved this book. --Christopher Stace, Daily Telegraph

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