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02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 117 Book Reviews Judith C. Brown and Robert R. Davis, eds, Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, London and New York, Longman, 1998; ISBN 0– 582–29326–X; xii + 255 pp.; £40 (hbk), £13.99 (pbk) Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996; ISBN 0–19–512292–5; xii + 371 pp.; £30 (hbk), £15 (pbk) Selected Letters of Alessandra Strozzi, translated and introduced by Heather Gregory; Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, University of California Press, 1997; ISBN 0–520–20390–9; x + 252; £32 (hbk), £12.95 (pbk) Writing to her exiled eldest son Filippo on 7 April 1464, Alessandra Strozzi demonstrated appreciation of the care lavished on him by his slave Marina and the implications of this for perpetuating the illustrious Strozzi name by legitimate means: ‘Hearing such things I find it easy to understand why you want to put off getting married for a year and why they’re so slow in finding you a wife.’ Fifty-nine years later another Florentine patrician, Francesco Vettori, wrote to his friend Niccolò Machiavelli about the latter’s son, whose youthful indulgence was clearly causing his father concern: ‘So Lodovico has a boy with him, with whom he amuses himself, jests, takes walks, growls in his ear, goes to bed together. What then? Even in these things perhaps there is nothing bad.’ In both cases the implication is that the young men will settle down in due course, so why waste time and effort browbeating them now? Questions of morality are overlooked. This tolerance features in the latest outbreak of ‘Florentinitis’ to spread across the library shelves, an outbreak which proves that there is still much mileage in studies of Renaissance Florence, in spite of the healthy and very welcome competition coming from historians of other Italian cities and states. The Strozzi, apparently humiliated in 1434 when exiled by the Medici faction, turned the tables on their political opponents by amassing a vast fortune outside Florence and marking their eventual return to the city by the construction of an exceptionally monu- mental palazzo. Their story and that of the matriarch Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi, who held the fort in Florence in the enforced absence of her sons, is already well known, but Heather Gregory’s bilingual edition of thirty-five of Alessandra’s letters is nevertheless extremely valuable, most particularly for teaching purposes, pro- European History Quarterly Copyright © 2000 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol. 30(1), 117–139. [0265-6914(200001)30:1;117–139;011344] 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 118 118 European History Quarterly Vol. 30 No. 1 viding as it does insights into various family relationships but also such oblique references to Florentine politics as might not attract the censor’s attention. Filippo Strozzi did indeed marry and Alessandra writes with great affection and familial pride of his eldest son, Alfonso. The adult Alfonso has a walk-on part, as an opponent of Savonarola’s crusade against sexual licence, in Forbidden Friend- ships, Michael Rocke’s greatly anticipated and genuinely ground- breaking analysis of Florentine homosexuality. From the records of the Ufficiali di notte e conservatori dei monasteri (Officers of the Night), a magistracy which operated between 1432 and 1502 and was without parallel anywhere in Renaissance Italy, Rocke has reconstructed in immense detail a city-wide culture based on sodomy which linked men from every level of society. Florentines and sodomites were traditionally equated and the 1305 denunciation of male Florentines by the preacher Giordano da Rivalto may well strike the reader as remarkably similar to the comments of Mme Edith Cresson on the subject of Englishmen. The very existence of the Office of the Night was an embarrassing admission that Florence had a problem, one which Rocke subjects to thorough statistical analysis. During the last four decades of the fifteenth century 15,000 Florentines were incriminated in investigations of sodomy, of whom 2,500 were subsequently convicted. Behind the figures a fascinating picture emerges of sodomy as an activity associated with the city’s large adolescent population, tolerance of which in the decades either side of the Savonarolan 1490s is reflected in the attitude of Francesco Vettori, quoted earlier. Its prevalence was such that the authorities sought, by means of the Night Officers, to make money out of that which they could not eradicate. Only ‘inveterate’ sodomites were consistently pursued and seriously punished. Those who denounced themselves to the Officers not only escaped con- viction but, by confessing the names of their various partners, have allowed Rocke to piece together particular networks of sodomites, active and passive. For those who prefer their Florentine history to be political, there is evidence of anti-Mediceans being targeted by the Night Officers in the wake of Cosimo’s return in 1434, and of illustrious names being blotted at various dates out to hide their sodomitical activities. Forbidden Friendships amply proves that there is life in the historical monograph yet. Michael Rocke is also one of the contributors to Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, a volume of essays which endeavours to explain the wealth of recent studies devoted to gender-related issues in the Italian states and to bring them together in something approaching a coherent whole. Any volume which seeks to overcome the ‘local particularism’ of Italian history must be welcomed, though 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 119 Reviews 119 it is equally true that any such collection is prey to charges of unevenness. Major debates are introduced by a distinguished group of scholars, including Daniel Bornstein on spiritual kinship, Stanley Chojnacki on gender and the state, Robert C. Davis on gendered space, most particularly in Venice, Thomas Kuehn on gender and the law, and Katherine Park on gendered forms of healing. While the principal purpose is to synthesize and make a wide range of scholar- ship more accessible to the student, originality occasionally breaks through, Sam Cohn’s work on mountain dwellers in central Italy providing a case in point. S.R. Fletcher King Alfred’s College, Winchester Rudolph M. Bell, How To Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1999; ISBN 0–226–04210–3; xiv + 375 pp.; £19.95 The author of Holy Anorexia has again indulged his whim for draw- ing parallels between the society of early modern Italy and that of the contemporary West, this time exploring the contents of sixteenth- century popular advice manuals designed to assist an increasingly literate and generally urban population through the problems and traumas of conception, pregnancy, childbirth and child rearing, adolescence, courtship, married life and, finally, widowhood, in the process of which the unsuspecting reader is also introduced to the advice literature currently on offer in American shopping malls. When Rudolph M. Bell speculates about the original readership of the sixteenth-century manuals, the reviewer is bound to entertain curious thoughts about the intended readers of How To Do It, re- peatedly addressed as they are with a degree of familiarity surprising in a scholarly tome, given snippets of information about the private life of the Bell family, invited to browse an internet site devoted to the issues raised in the volume, and finally bid farewell with a friendly ‘ciao!’. In view of the fact that the bodies of these menstruat- ing, copulating, lactating Renaissance Italians were apparently being smeared with such a variety of oils and unguents, Bell’s latest offer- ing may well be particularly welcomed by enthusiasts for aroma- therapy and alternative medicine, perhaps the same audience as greeted Holy anorexia with such excitement. The original manuals were generally written by men and presumably read by women: visit www.amazon.com and see whether this parallel persists. 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 120 120 European History Quarterly Vol. 30 No. 1 The best known piece of cinquecento Italian advice literature must surely be Castiglione’s Libro del cortegiano. This is precisely the sort of elite work which Bell chooses to ignore, though the elite/popular divide can be hard to identify when dealing with works, whether weighty volumes or mere ephemera, written by or cribbed from distinguished physicians and clerics but, perhaps with the encourage- ment of printer-publishers, directed at as large an audience as possible. As a genre, popular advice manuals are identified as works written in the vernacular, problem-oriented and scrupulously indexed, offering practical quick-fixes for commonplace predica- ments, often popularizing Latin, Greek and Arabic wisdom in the process, though Bell also becomes distracted by confessors’ manuals and the Catechism of the Council of Trent but is astute enough to acknowledge the looseness of his self-imposed definition. Bizarre though some of the remedies may appear to the modern reader, the practical solutions for quotidian problems are often free from moral- izing: if a child contracts chicken pox it is not attributed to his innate sinfulness, but is simply a challenge to be met by the parents, most particularly his mother. Authors whose works form the backbone of the study include the physicians Giovanni Marinello and Girolamo Mercurio, the latter a Dominican and ‘self-appointed public health officer’, both of whom wrote authoritatively on midwifery, together with another physician, Michele Savonarola, and the latter’s better known grandson Fra Girolamo, advising the women of Ferrara and the widows of Florence respectively. The works of female authors, including the Venetian Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella, daughter of Giovanni Marinello, are highlighted whenever possible.