How to Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty & Female Creativity

by Jill Burke

Overview

An alternative history of the Renaissance—as seen through the emerging literature of beauty tips—focusing on the actresses, authors, and courtesans who rebelled against the misogyny of their era.

Beauty, make-up, art, power: How to Be a Renaissance Woman presents an alternative history of this fascinating period as told by the women behind the paintings, providing a window into their often overlooked or silenced lives.

Can the pressures women feel to look good be traced back to the sixteenth century?

As the Renaissance visual world became populated by female nudes from the likes of Michelangelo and Titian, a vibrant literary scene of beauty tips emerged, fueling debates about cosmetics and adornment. Telling the stories of courtesans, artists, actresses, and writers rebelling against the strictures of their time, when burgeoning colonialism gave rise to increasingly sinister evaluations of bodies and skin color, this book puts beauty culture into the frame.

How to Be a Renaissance Woman will take readers from bustling Italian market squares, the places where the poorest women and immigrant communities influenced cosmetic products and practices, to the highest echelons of Renaissance society, where beauty could be a powerful weapon in securing strategic marriages and family alliances. It will investigate how skin-whitening practices shifted in step with the emerging sub-Saharan African slave trade, how fads for fattening and thinning diets came and went, and how hairstyles and fashion could be a tool for dissent and rebellion—then as now.

This surprising and illuminating narrative will make you question your ideas about your own body, and ask: Why are women often so critical of their appearance? What do we stand to lose, but also to gain, from beauty culture? What is the relationship between looks and power?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639365906
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	01/02/2024
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	82,471
Product dimensions:	9.50(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Jill Burke is a professor of Renaissance Visual and Material Cultures at the University of Edinburgh, a historian of the body and its visual representation, focusing on Italy and Europe from 1400-1700. She is currently the lead investigator of the Royal Society funded project 'Renaissance Goo,' working with soft-matter scientists to remake Renaissance cosmetic and skincare recipes. She talks regularly about Renaissance bodies on television, radio and podcasts, and she discusses the history of art and beauty on “Jill Burke’s Blog.” She lives in Edinburgh.

Editorial Reviews

02/19/2024

Art historian Burke (Changing Patrons) takes an eye-opening look at the lives of women during the Italian Renaissance. Arguing that the era experienced the first modern wave of unrealistic beauty standards for women, Burke tracks how an upswell of personal beautification methods was tied to developments in art, especially painting and sculpture’s newly popular classical form (an hourglass shape, distinct from the large-bellied Gothic ideal of the preceding era) and new negative aesthetic connotations for dark hair and skin color and positive ones for whiteness that emerged alongside the sub-Saharan slave trade. However, as Burke makes clear, personal beautification methods could also be used by women as a way to increase their influence, maintain their security, or rebel against conventions. Providing vivid descriptions of the practice and origins of beauty methods, such as body hair removal (popular in Islamic-influenced cultures of southern Europe but also a centerpiece of witch trials, where hair was removed from defendants), and in-depth analyses of the beauty guides and diet books that proliferated in this era, Burke convincingly builds her case that “the celebrated poems, plays, and paintings of the time had profound effects on how real people perceived bodies and beauty” but were also in dialogue with women’s attempts to push back against and manipulate beauty standards. It’s a novel and immersive history. Agent: George Lucas, InkWell Management. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Jill Burke's sprightly cultural history is a window on the lot of women in early modern Europe. Also, a gentle reminder that, as complicated as things are for women of the TikTok generation, it's nothing like the fraught terrain confronting the Renaissance woman.

The Star Tribune

"Burke’s . . . argument is profound. By focusing on Renaissance women’s practical knowledge of the material world, Jill Burke reveals their lives in intimate detail.

The Times Literary Supplement

Taking a fresh, women-led perspective, Burke highlights a rich tapestry of female experience that encompasses everyone from artisans to aristocrats ... the everyday women mixing their own beauty products should rightly be considered chemists and botanists. Successfully creating these cosmetics required knowledge of plants and their properties, as well as how to transform them via different techniques. Renaissance women had greater scientific knowledge and experience than they are often credited with.

The Times (London)

Terrific. Drawing on early published beauty pamphlets, letters, poems, songs, diaries and recipe books, not to mention treatises by both men and women and the rich material of Renaissance art, [Burke] has emerged with enough knowledge to open her own Renaissance Body Shop. The book is that rare thing, a serious history that is both accessible and entertaining - no more so than when it comes to the age-old debate as to whether women's commitment to beauty is a sign of weakness, a pandering to male desire or a form of empowerment.

The Literary Review

How to Be a Renaissance Woman brings us a breezy and readable portrait of 16th-century Italy through the lens of beauty standards and practices. There are plenty of noblewomen in these pages, but Burke makes an effort to talk about women of many kinds: domestic help, peasants, widows, courtesans and all manner of sex workers. The details are fascinating.

The New York Times Book Review

In How to be a Renaissance Woman, a lively new history of beauty culture in 16th- and 17th-century Italy, make-up is a tool to understand society and the female experience. Whether with a make-up brush or a paintbrush, women wanted to control how the world would see and remember them.

The Economist

A delightful look back at how the Renaissance changed beauty standards. Jill Burke’s How to Be a Renaissance Woman is full of surprising information about how the era widened self-expression.

Becca Rothfeld

A lively and intriguing exploration of female life in the Renaissance, lifting the lid on anxieties and aspirations that will sound oddly familiar to any 21st century reader. You'll never look at Renaissance portraits in the same way.

Maggie O'Farrell

If you think that pressures on women to look their best, either through chemical enhancements or using filters on Instagram, are a modern invention, then Jill Burke's new book is a timely reminder that our ancestors were undergoing the medieval equivalent 500 years ago. Some of the most compelling parts of the book detail female solidarity and friendship in this visual society. The book finishes with an amusing and engrossing section of real-life Renaissance beauty recipes for the brave to try - from the relatively innocuous honey and egg eye cream to a non-toxic version of the skin lightener that beauties used on their faces. But there's a serious message behind the book: the tyranny of beauty ideals has been with us for centuries.

Mail on Sunday

A lively and compelling account of 15th- and 16th-century women’s obsessions with the appearance of their faces and bodies, the lengths they went to improve them, and the industry that grew up to cater to this ever-expanding market. In How to Be a Renaissance Woman, Jill Burke dispels any misplaced nostalgia for a more innocent past and demonstrates that the pressures on women to adhere to unforgiving standards of beauty are nothing new. Burke does not characterize all beauty culture as oppressive or misogynist. She recognizes that it could also be fun.

The Wall Street Journal

★ 12/01/2023

Burke, a historian of Renaissance visual and material culture (Univ. of Edinburgh; The Italian Renaissance Nude), examines previously underutilized primary-source texts in this extensively researched scholarly analysis of beauty standards for women in Renaissance Europe. It's also about the business of attaining an attractive visage via beauty tips shared between women. Beauty standards were mediated and propagated through the visual arts, with paintings and sculptures making clear which qualities were valued: which hair colors and textures, which particular proportions of face and body. Women's often-undervalued knowledge of and experimentation in biology and chemistry—in the form of recipes for cosmetics and tonics, guidance on maintaining health, and instructions for treating illness or ending an unwanted pregnancy—were immortalized in writing and shared more widely via the printed texts that became accessible in the 16th century. Women had long been viewed as commodities, but the Renaissance saw women gain autonomy through acquiring and sharing such knowledge. Burke's book includes extensive notes and historical recipes for cosmetics. VERDICT This treatise on Renaissance beauty highlights similarities to contemporary beauty standards. There's appeal for casual readers, but the real value is for academics.—Jessica A. Bushore

Library Journal