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Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy

This is the first comprehensive study of healthy lifestyles in the pre-modern period. Interdisciplinary in approach, combining an array of unexplored textual, visual and material sources, it demonstrates that a sophisticated culture of prevention developed in sixteenth-century Italy which centred particularly on domestic routines. It shifts scholarly attention from treatment of the sick to healthy living practices, dispelling the myth that these are modern inventions, and reveals the impact that health concerns had on the design of homes and household objects, adding an entirely new perspective to explanations of how domestic material culture developed.