Diet and Hygiene Between Ethics and Medicine: Evidence and the Reception of Alvise Cornaro’s La Vita Sobria in Early Seventeenth-Century England

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Abstract

Alvise Cornaro’s Treatises on the Sober Life (Discorsi della vita sobria) was one of the most popular books on diet and hygiene across the whole of Europe from its publication in the sixteenth century up to the early twentieth century. In this chapter, I show that the reasons for the success of Cornaro’s work in early modern England lie in the fact that two very different communities of practice saw the work’s conclusions as grounded upon a particular configuration of evidence that resonated with them: one spiritual, where it was used as part of an attempt to forge a via media between Puritans and Anglicans; the other medical, where it served as a case study from which more general conclusions about how to prolong life might be extrapolated. The unique context in which the first English translation of the Discorsi was conceived, produced, and published—involving some of the most prominent intellectual figures of the time, such as Francis Bacon, Nicholas Ferrar, and George Herbert—make this an important case study, useful for the reconstruction of a significant chapter of the history of dieting and hygiene, and the history of conceptions of evidence and their relationship to different communities of practice.
Lingua originaleEnglish
Titolo della pubblicazione ospiteEvidence in the Age of the New Sciences
EditorJAT Lancaster
Pagine251-268
Numero di pagine18
Volume225
DOI
Stato di pubblicazionePubblicato - 2018

Serie di pubblicazioni

NomeARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D'HISTOIRE DES IDÉES

Keywords

  • Bacon, Francis
  • Cornaro, Alvise
  • Dieting
  • Ferrar, Nicholas
  • Herbert, George
  • History of Medicine
  • Little Gidding
  • Mortification
  • Patronage
  • Translation Studies

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