The Prince's Body: Vincenzo Gonzaga and Renaissance Medicine (I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History): 15 - Hardcover

Valeria Finucci

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067472545X ISBN 13: 9780674725454

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Defining the proper female body, seeking elective surgery for beauty, enjoying lavish spa treatments, and combating impotence might seem like today s celebrity infatuations. However, these preoccupations were very much alive in the early modern period. Valeria Finucci recounts the story of a well-known patron of arts and music in Renaissance Italy, Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua (1562 1612), to examine the culture, fears, and captivations of his times. Using four notorious moments in Vincenzo s life, Finucci explores changing concepts of sexuality, reproduction, beauty, and aging. The first was Vincenzo s inability to consummate his earliest marriage and subsequent medical inquiry, which elucidates new concepts of female anatomy. Second, Vincenzo s interactions with Bolognese doctor Gaspare Tagliacozzi, the father of plastic surgery, illuminate contemporary fascinations with elective procedures. Vincenzo s use of thermal spas explores the proliferation of holistic, noninvasive therapies to manage pain, detoxify, and rehabilitate what the medicine of the time could not address. And finally, Vincenzo s search for a cure for impotence later in life analyzes masculinity and aging. By examining letters, doctors advice, reports, receipts, and travelogues, together with (and against) medical, herbal, theological, even legal publications of the period, Finucci describes an early modern cultural history of the pathology of human reproduction, the physiology of aging, and the science of rejuvenation as they affected a prince with a large ego and an even larger purse. In doing so, she deftly marries salacious tales with historical analysis to tell a broader story of Italian Renaissance cultural adjustments and obsessions."

About this title

Review:

A complex and nuanced interpretation of the rise of medical science in late Renaissance Italy. Finucci uses the life and experiences of Vincenzo Gonzaga as a connecting thread to allow her to weave together histories of early modern medicine, sexuality, and culture. In four elegantly written chapters, she explores how the drive toward pleasure, beauty, and perfection, as well as the desire for collecting and understanding the new and the 'exotic, ' inspired both famous and lesser-known doctors, academics, pharmacists, and nobles to explore the body and search for new knowledge.--Giovanna Benadusi, author of A Provincial Elite in Early Modern Tuscany

It is no longer news that the body has a history. What Finucci offers, however, in this fascinating account of one prince's body and its diseases, is a revealing microhistory of the noted early modern Italian would-be warrior, lover, and obsessive collector Vincenzo Gonzaga. Chronicling his exploits and his suffering, his illnesses and his diseases, Finucci opens a window on a physical and mental world that is both almost forgotten and yet somehow still with us. Informed by theory, not driven by it, this is a book than swings from the arcane to the profound and to the quotidian with the sure hand of a master storyteller and scholar.--Guido Ruggiero, author of The Renaissance in Italy

About the Author:

Valeria Finucci is Professor of Italian and Theater Studies and Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Duke University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 067472545X
• ISBN 13: 9780674725454
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 260