Conserving health in early modern culture

Did early modern people care about their health? And what did it mean to lead a healthy life in Italy and England? Through a range of textual evidence, images and material artefactsConserving health in early modern culture documents the profound impact which ideas about healthy living had on daily practices as well as on intellectual life and the material world in this period. In both countries staying healthy was understood as depending on the careful management of the six ‘Non-Naturals’: the air one breathed, food and drink, excretions, sleep, exercise and repose, and the ‘passions of the soul’. To a close scrutiny, however, models of prevention differed considerably in Italy and England, reflecting country-specific cultural, political and medical contexts and different confessional backgrounds.

Conserving Health brings together scholarship from across the disciplinary spectrum to illustrate the role of preventive culture in early modern England and Italy, its ubiquity but also how patterns of healthy living differed in different countries.

Did early modern people care about their health? And what did it mean to lead a healthy life in Italy and England? Through a range of textual evidence, images and material artefacts Conserving health in early modern culture documents the profound impact which ideas about healthy living had on daily practices as well as on intellectual life and the material world in this period. In both countries staying healthy was understood as depending on the careful management of the six ‘Non-Naturals’: the air one breathed, food and drink, excretions, sleep, exercise and repose, and the ‘passions of the soul’. To a close scrutiny, however, models of prevention differed considerably in Italy and England, reflecting country-specific cultural, political and medical contexts and different confessional backgrounds.The following two chapters are available open access on a CC-BY-NC-ND license here: oapen.org/search?identifier=6331803 'Ordering the infant': caring for newborns in early modern England - Leah Astbury4 'She sleeps well and eats an egg': convalescent care in early modern England - Hannah Newton

IntroductionConserving health: the Non-Naturals in early modern culture and society – Sandra CavalloPart I: A comparative perspective on preventive literature1 Regimens, authors and readers: Italy and England compared – Sandra Cavallo and Tessa StoreyPart II: The Non-Naturals and the vulnerable body 2 ‘What to expect when you’re always expecting’: frequent childbirth and female health in late Renaissance Italy – Caroline Castiglione3 ‘Ordering the infant’: caring for newborns in early modern England – Leah Astbury (available open access)4 ‘She sleeps well and eats an egg’: convalescent care in early modern England – Hannah Newton (available open access)Part III: Airs and places5 Neapolitan airs: health advice and medical culture on the edge of a volcano – Maria Conforti6 The afterlife of the Non-Naturals in early eighteenth-century Hippocratism: from the healthy individual to a healthy population – Maria Pia DonatoPart IV: Spiritual health and bodily health7 Sleep-piety and healthy sleep in early modern English households – Sasha Handley8 English and Italian health advice: Protestant and Catholic bodies – Tessa StoreyPart V: Spaces, paintings and objects: performing and portraying health9 Chasing ‘good air’ and viewing beautiful perspectives: painting and health preservation in seventeenth-century Rome – Frances Gage10 Hot drinking practices in the late-Renaissance Italian household: a case-study around an enigmatic pouring vessel – Marta AjmarIndex