How to Be a Renaissance Woman

December 1, 2023
Burke, a history professor at the University of Edinburgh, argues that Renaissance Europe laid the groundwork for our modern-day ideals of female beauty. Attributes included an hourglass figure, apple-sized breasts, golden tresses, and creamy white skin. Cosmetics could not only transform a woman's appearance but also provided opportunities for subversion and experimentation. Women squeezed themselves into tight bodices to attain the coveted shape, with a "mono-bosom" which both supported and flattened the breasts. These cloth bodices were a precursor to stays and whalebone corsets. Burke suggests that skin whitening became more popular in the sixteenth century as colonization increased contact with darker-skinned people on different continents. Women were often the purveyors of apothecary recipes, although their knowledge and folk wisdom were sidelined by university-trained, male physicians. Burke concludes the book with recipes for Renaissance-era cosmetics and beauty potions. Although the book's scope is sometimes unclear, the author succeeds in making the case for the Renaissance as progenitor of beauty as artifice. The legacy of that transformation continues to this day. Readers will be both entertained and informed.

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February 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.