The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period commonly described as the Scientific Revolution, have been characterized by religious war, seasonal outbreaks of epidemic disease, and an ambitious and expanding sense of what was possible politically, religiously, and scientifically. Lived and imagined longevity pushed the boundaries of what it meant to be human in this dynamic era. This paper takes as its protagonist Alvise Cornaro (1484-1566), a long-lived Paduan nobleman who wrote a series of short treatises in the vernacular extolling the “sober life” as the source of his own longevity. Cornaro revised, expanded, and republished this treatise five times between 1558 and his death in 1566. The treatise sold widely in early modern Italy and is a continued bestseller today. I have examined most surviving sixteenth-century copies of Cornaro’s treatise. Using a bibliographical and book historical approach, I trace readers’ marks and provenance to recover contemporary responses to the possibilities Cornaro peddled. I then situate Cornaro’s treatise and its readers within the context of popular works in dietetics and secrets. Cornaro sold the virtues and possibilities of longevity to a non-elite readership who were accustomed to turning to cheap printed sources that integrated alchemical, occult, and medical ideas for popular audiences.

Despite medical advances, healthy living advice in the eighteenth century conveys a strong impression of continuity with the regimen genre from the late-middle ages and Renaissance. Indeed, most continued to be informed by a Galenic understanding of the body, particularly as regards the framework of the six non-naturals. Drawing on my previous research on the vernacular Italian regimen between the 1480’s and the 1650’s this paper will explore shifts in the genre by examining a number of Italian medical texts published after 1650 and before 1800. These are either explicitly ‘regimen’ or other medical tracts which include advice on how to live healthily, avoid illness and extend one’s life, such as Ramazzini’s much republished and widely translated ‘On the Diseases of Tradesmen’. On the one hand I will aim to explore some of the broader trends, such as the ever-increasing focus on the importance of the air to health, and an apparent decline in the emphasis on exercise. On the other hand I will focus on some more nuanced developments within these broader changes, such as in their understandings of, and advice pertaining to, the management of the air and the role of the skin in health.

This paper examines the relationship between early modern accounts of longevity and the figuring of a new order of natural knowledge as a project of experience prodigiously extended, preserved and accumulated. Focusing on the English case, it examines the reinvention of longevity in the second half of the seventeenth century through reports of long-lived men in the Philosophical Transactions, discussions of the prodigious longevity of the Patriarchs, and natural historical surveys of the long lived. Treatments of longevity in such accounts have been commonly read as anticipating a factual, proto-demographic understanding of longevity. This paper instead proposes that seventeenth-century authors were interested not in the facts of longevity but in its figuring of the extended experience and immunity to decay exemplified by the media in which these discussions appeared. Projects of reporting, recovering, preserving and accumulating were not here passive vehicles for an approach to knowledge that would reimagine the world as information, but the site of a concerted set of performances of the quasi-magical powers of such a condition.

Different forms of corporeal improvement emerged between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Humanists, like Erasmus of Rotterdam, tried to educate the elite and rulers in books like his how-to manual ‘Institutio Principis Christiani’ (1516) dedicated to Prince Charles, the future Emperor Charles V. Ecclesiastics and pious lay people trained their bodies and minds to reach spiritual discipline in order to live more righteously (e.g. Jesuits, Pietists) and possibly achieve salvation (e.g. ascetics, eremites). In the field of medicine, the physician Andrea Vesalius, among others, led the way to modern anatomy with the publication of the findings from his empirical dissections in ‘De humani corporis fabrica’ (1543). Generally speaking, in the Renaissance and in the wake of the New Science, novel techniques of observation and their corresponding instruments evolved, as Gianna Pomata and Lorraine Daston have shown in their work on the ‘Observationes’ and the ‘epistemic genre’ respectively. I argue that these new empirical methods fostered the practices of corporeal experiments and the corporeal experiments in turn contributed to the New Science. My paper will show how the media and methods of observation and improvement of the body intersected in the early modern period.