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 Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy. A concern for cleanliness, he argues, was everywhere in the Renaissance.

Anxieties about cleanliness were expressed in literature from humanist panegyrics to bawdy carnival songs, as well as in the visual arts. Biow surveys them all to explain why the topic so permeated Renaissance culture. At one level, cleanliness, he documents, was a matter of real concern in the Renaissance. At another, he finds, issues such as human dignity, self-respect, self-discipline, social distinction, and originality were rethought as a matter of artistic concern.

The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy moves from the clean to the unclean, from the lofty to the base. Biow first examines the socially elevated, who defined and distinguished themselves as clean, pure, and polite. He then turns to soap, an increasingly common commodity in this period, and the figure of the washerwoman. Finally he focuses on latrines, which were universally scorned yet functioned artistically as figures of baseness, creativity, and fun in the works of Dante and Boccaccio. Paralleling this social stratification is a hierarchy of literary and visual artifacts, from the discourse of high humanism to filthy curses and scatological songs. Deftly bringing together high and low-as well as literary and visual-cultures, this book provides a fresh perspective on the Italian Renaissance and its artistic legacy.

About the Author

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

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.

-- Laura Giannetti * Modern Philology *


Awards
Winner of A 2007 Choice Magazine "Outstanding Academic Title.



Book Information
ISBN 9780801444814
Author Douglas Biow
Format Hardback
Page Count 280
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 907g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 155mm * 22mm