Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy

Cavallo, Sandra; Storey, Tessa

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199678136.001.0001

Cited by 84 publications

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“…Hence, meat, eggs and butter were considered most nutritious, digestible and 'warming' while grains, fruits and vegetables were dismissed as 'humid' and 'cold' , less digestible or even poisonous. 83 Thus when the post-Tridentine Church reaffirmed its dietary prescriptions for Lent and continued to tighten up its expectations of the faithful that they eat penitential fish and vegetables instead of meat and dairy products, serious concerns were raised about the healthiness of such vegetarian regimes. This was the case not just among physicians and Protestant controversialists but anyone who was concerned to protect their 'weak stomachs' or consciences from such unreasonably rigid dietary prescriptions.84 Eating and dining as he pleased, Doctor Gemma did not hesitate to offer his own medical advice to the Inquisitor who questioned his carnivorous appetite at Lent.…”

Section: Those Who Eat Tripe and Those Who Devour God Whom They Worshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contested Devotions: Space, Identities and Religious Dissent in the Apothecary’s Home

Kostylo¹

2018

Domestic Devotions in Early Modern Italy

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Section: Those Who Eat Tripe and Those Who Devour God Whom They Worshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contested Devotions: Space, Identities and Religious Dissent in the Apothecary’s Home

Kostylo¹

2018

Domestic Devotions in Early Modern Italy

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“…97 Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey have observed that allegrezza (cheerfulness) was understood to be a 'calm, tranquil happiness' which gently lifts and expands the spirits, 'thereby increasing the overall body heat and vitality' . 98 Since the strength of the body was synonymous with the quantity and liveliness of the spirits, the augmentation of these substances automatically invigorated all the faculties of the body. Cheerfulness also helped the body to put on weight, since the newly enlivened natural spirits propelled the digested aliment from the interior organs to the rest of the body, thereby facilitating the process of nutrition.…”

Section: Growing Cheerfulmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘She sleeps well and eats an egg’

Newton¹

2017

Conserving Health in Early Modern Culture

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Early modern diaries and letters are replete with complaints about the state of the body after illness. ' A long sicknes … has much drained mee … and indeed … my feeble hands … can scarce write', remarked Rev. Thomas Lowgh from Cumbria in 1654. 1 A few years later, the London gentlewoman Ann Fanshawe recorded in her memoirs, 'a very ill kind of fever … brought me so low that I was like an anatomy'. 2 In 1697, Elizabeth Freke from Norfolk lamented, 'God raised me up againe a miserable spectt[ac]le … hardly able to goe or stand'. 3 Serious physical illness thus left the body weak and lean, full of the 'footsteps of disease', to use the early modern term. It was not until full strength and flesh had returned that the patient was pronounced back to health. This chapter asks how doctors and laypeople measured the patient's growing strength after illness, and analyses the physiological processes through which this restitution was thought to occur. It shows that both the measures and the mechanisms for the restoration of strength were intimately connected to the 'six Non-Natural things': excretion, sleep, food, passions, air and exercise. Patients' sleeping patterns, appetites for foods, and emotions, along with other inclinations and behaviours that related to the Non-Naturals, were used to track their progression on 'the road to health'. Medical practitioners and the patient's family sought to regulate each Non-Natural in order to promote the body's restoration, and 4

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“…Hygiene in early modern medicine did not just refer to the removal of external 'dirt', but rather incorporated various processes of care that aimed to facilitate the body's expulsion of harmful impurities and residues. 31 Similarly the removal of excrement did not just refer to faeces and urine, but sweat, oil and other waste from the body. For infants, there was an urgent need to manage the excretion of moisture owing to their period in the womb.…”

Section: Searching the Body And Enabling Excretionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Ordering the infant’

Astbury

2017

Conserving Health in Early Modern Culture

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In 1985 in his groundbreaking article, 'The patient's view: doing history from below' , Roy Porter demanded historians re-evaluate their methodological approach to doing medical history and consider patient experience. In his five 'broad guidelines for future investigations', Porter complained that historians were overly concerned with diagnosis and cure. Instead, he suggested scholars turn their attention to the everyday acts of health care; the preventative measures individuals took to ward against disease. Porter opined, 'We commit gross historical distortions if we fail to give due weight and attention to traditional medical interest in the weather, in diet, in exercise, in sleep-or, in other words, in the whole field of "non-naturals". ' 1 Roy Porter's work became field-defining, but while the patient-centred approach has become dominant, few have taken to Porter's other recommendation. Until recently there has been little concerted attempt to redress the relative historical silence on the role of the Non-Naturals in early modern regimes of care, or to properly integrate practices aimed at promoting longevity into extant histories of the way bodies were experienced. 2 The ebb and flow of humours were central to the way early modern people understood the body and the way it functioned. 3 Health was dependent on the air one breathed, how one slept, the movements the body made, what one ate and drank, the regularity of excretion and the 3

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Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy

Cited by 84 publications

References 0 publications

Contested Devotions: Space, Identities and Religious Dissent in the Apothecary’s Home

Contested Devotions: Space, Identities and Religious Dissent in the Apothecary’s Home

‘She sleeps well and eats an egg’

‘Ordering the infant’

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