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

How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians was a recent University of Chicago free e-book. Written by Rutgers professor Rudolph M. Bell, it is an academic analysis of how-to guides from the seventeenth century. Then as now, these helpful little manuals covered everything from childhood development to pregnancy concerns to proper deportment of the sexes. The book is interesting, largely as a window into a long-disappeared world (readers were informed by many the sage, for example, that a woman's uterus contained seven distinct compartments: three each reserved for male and female fetuses and the seventh, which was the domain of hermaphrodite babies). That said it is also quite long, and occasionally rather dry. It clocks it at roughly 300 pages; after 200, I determined I'd learned enough about the what and how of living as a Renaissance Italian.