A sprightly cultural history ... She introduces us to women who, through luck and force of will were able to parlay their talents, skills and, inevitably, beauty into successes as painters, writers, performers and courtesans. And it says something about what rare birds these were that Burke is able to identify virtually all of them in one brief book.
A breezy and readable portrait of 16th-century Italy through the lens of beauty standards and practices ... The details are fascinating. The main challenge for this reader is keeping track of the many, many women mentioned, whose names and lives often receive just a few sentences or pages. Burke would have benefited from chiseling more of a narrative from her copious research, and including fewer rapid-fire anecdotes.
Drawing on a huge range of primary sources, and vividly depicting the experiences of real Renaissance women including writers, slaves, street sellers and alchemists, Burke explores everything from hair dye and 'natural' make-up to diets and early modern medicine. In doing so, she shows how beauty culture, then and now, creates, reinforces and subverts ideas of gender, race, class, creativity and power ... As Burke points out in her introduction, the history of cosmetics and beauty during the Renaissance remains relatively neglected and trivialised today. In this erudite, witty and utterly engaging book, she does a lot to redress the balance.
Explores the lives of these women through an investigation of their beauty culture. By taking a fresh, women-led perspective, Burke highlights a rich tapestry of female experience that encompasses everyone from artisans to aristocrats ... As Burke’s book stresses, 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.
Burke's book explores the rich and sometimes strange world of early modern beauty and cosmetics. It is a whistle-stop tour of Renaissance recipe books like Marinello’s, while the individual stories that she uncovers along the way are evoked with lightness and humour. Burke’s tone is breezy, but her argument is profound ... By focusing on Renaissance women’s practical knowledge of the material world, Jill Burke reveals their lives in intimate detail.
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 ... Ms. Burke has written 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.
