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.

CONTENTS:

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Readers
2. Conception
Boy or Girl
Frequency of Intercourse
Positions during Intercourse
Setting
Male Impotence
Infertility in Women
Menstruation
Are You Pregnant?
3. Pregnancy and Childbirth
Boy or Girl?
Maybe Twins?
Due Date
Miscarriage
Diet and Daily Activity
Midwives
Anatomy
Labor
Postpartum Care
4. Raising Your Child
Nursing: Who Should Do It?
Nursing: How to Do It
Child Rearing: Physical Health
Child Rearing: Good Character
Children’s Books
5. Adolescence
Who Was an Adolescent?
The Sins of Adolescence
Making Fun
Choosing a Spouse
6. Marital Relations
From the Humanists
From the Church
From the Gentlemen
Widows
7. Then and Now
Female Authorship
The Internet
Notes
Index

AUTHOR:

Rudolph M. Bell, professor of history at Rutgers University, is the author of a number of books in Italian history, among them Fate and Honor, Family and Village: Demographic and Cultural Change in Rural Italy Since 1800, Holy Anorexia, How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians, and The Voices of Gemma Galgani: The Life and Afterlife of a Modern Saint (with Cristina Mazzoni), all published by the University of Chicago Press.