The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy

Douglas Biow

Published by Cornell University Press 2006

The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy

Douglas Biow

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501726842

Overview
Contents

About this book

Concerned about sanitation during a severe bout of plague in Milan, Leonardo da Vinci designed an ideal, clean city. Leonardo was far from alone among his contemporaries in thinking about personal and public hygiene, as Douglas Biow shows in The...

Author / Editor information

Douglas Biow is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy and Mirabile Dictu: Representations of the Marvelous in Medieval and Renaissance Epic.

Reviews

Laura Giannetti:

The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy is truly an original work, treating seriously, as it does, the topic of the clean and the unclean from a literary scholar's perspective.... The clean and unclean, the prohibited and the carnivalesque, the filthy worlds of the latrine cleaners and the orderly—or apparently ordered—world of the high Renaissance are all intertwined together by Biow in a book that provides a surprising and vital new perspective on the Italian Renaissance.... Just as Biow appreciates the 'novel' and 'creative' ways Renaissance writers treated the topic of cleanliness and its opposite, the modern reader will enjoy the way this book opens new vistas on how creative and revealing literary criticism can be.

Guido Ruggiero, University of Miami:

In a suggestive way this fascinating book reverses Dante's Divine Comedy—starting with Paradise and its immaculately clean dreams of the divine and the perfect, it drops through the circles of the renaissance world ending literally in the cesspool and latrines of Hell, perverse but also intriguing nightmares of the foul for the period. In doing so it develops a stimulating and challengingly different perspective on the time from the perspective of the clean and the unclean at every level from high culture to quotidian practice. At once witty, erudite and clever, it imaginatively and ironically knocks the crap out of many of the classical visions of the period, by literally returning crap (and its culturally entwined levels of the unclean) to its central place in renaissance life as lived and as imagined. Bakhtin, Elias and Burckhardt here are creatively melded with Dante, Boccaccio, Castiglione, Della Casa and a host of lesser known writers to examine a relatively ignored area of renaissance life and to suggestively rethink the renaissance itself. This is history that is definitely fun to think and rethink.

John Jeffries Martin, Trinity University:

Douglas Biow is emerging as one of the most original scholars of Renaissance Italy. Transgressive, witty, insightful, The Culture of Cleanliness will appeal to readers immensely. Who thinks of Dante as someone who writes about shit? Who has noticed how important clean clothes are in Renaissance paintings? Who connects Renaissance literary genres—high, medium, and low—with hierarchies of cleanliness? Probing these boundaries with energy and insight, Biow offers up new perspectives on the culture of both humanists and washerwomen. His writing is excellent, and the conceptualization of his material brilliant.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Note on Translations Publicly Available Download PDF	xxi
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
CHAPTER 1. Households and Cities Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	53
CHAPTER 2. Soap and Washerwomen Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	95
CHAPTER 3. Latrines and Latrine-Cleaners Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	144
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	182
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	187
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	221
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	237

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 280
Illustrations
- Other: 44 halftones
Keywords: History; Italy; Medieval & Renaissance Studies

eBook

Published: July 5, 2018
ISBN: 9781501726842