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Book SynopsisConcerned about sanitation during a severe bout of plague in Milan, Leonardo da Vinci designed an ideal, clean city. Leonardo was far from alone among his contemporaries in thinking about personal and public hygiene, as Douglas Biow shows in The...
Trade ReviewThe Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy is truly an original work, treating seriously, as it does, the topic of the clean and the unclean from a literary scholar's perspective.... The clean and unclean, the prohibited and the carnivalesque, the filthy worlds of the latrine cleaners and the orderly—or apparently ordered—world of the high Renaissance are all intertwined together by Biow in a book that provides a surprising and vital new perspective on the Italian Renaissance.... Just as Biow appreciates the 'novel' and 'creative' ways Renaissance writers treated the topic of cleanliness and its opposite, the modern reader will enjoy the way this book opens new vistas on how creative and revealing literary criticism can be.
-- Laura Giannetti * Modern Philology *
