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Douglas Biow. The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy.

Publication: Italica
Publication Date: 22-JUN-08 		Format: Online
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Full Article Title: Douglas Biow. The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy.(Book review)

Article Excerpt
Douglas Biow. The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.

Douglas Biow follows his 2002 Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy (University of Chicago Press) with a work on a similarly intriguing and well-chosen subject: the place of the notions of cleanliness and dirt in Italian Renaissance literary culture. Biow opens with Burckhardt's remarks on the Italian Renaissance concern with cleanliness as presaging modern notions of social propriety, and his treatment of the subject may be described as neo-Burckhardtian in that it does continue, though with due hedging, to locate 'some sort of shift' (184) in the period under discussion. More than actual standards of cleanliness, however, Biow is principally concerned with 'the discourse of cleanliness, as it appeared in high and low culture' and the ways in which it 'allowed writers ... to explore what indeed mattered amid the matter of their world' (185). After an introductory...

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