Charis Charalampous, Rethinking the Mind-Body Relationship in Early Modern Literature, Philosophy, and Medicine: The Renaissance of the Body (New York, NY, and London: Routledge, 2016), pp. xii + 168, £90.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-1-13-882391-4.

Cavallo and Storey subject much received wisdom to scrutiny. They argue persuasively, for example, that early modern doctors and lay people were less obsessed with putrid air as a cause of disease than with the effects of the coldness and dampness of air. (Thus, the taste spread for canopies of thick curtains around the bed to protect the vulnerable brain.) The authors also revisit the accepted explanation for the decline of bathing in this period, which points to rising prudery resulting from religious zeal. Their close reading of the evidence suggests that anxiety about the loss of vital heat when stepping out of the bath and the pernicious impact of cold led people to abandon immersion. Cavallo and Storey also trace a growing aversion to routines of violent purgation and a preference for the removal of excrement, chiefly from the head, through grooming. Thus, the motivation for the multiplication of toilet articles, the larger number of servants and the increased time devoted to the master’s toilette is disease prevention. This is a book in which the authors ask the hard questions. What happened to the ancient inheritance of medical knowledge based on the humours under the impact of new texts and new audiences? In granular analysis of the details of advice and practice, Cavallo and Storey show that the humoral understanding of health and illness had an elasticity that could accommodate new developments both in media and in taste. What explains this early modern surge of interest in health? The authors give credit to the printing press but are not satisfied with a simple, one-dimensional answer. Heightened attention to social distinctions and a lively consumer economy also played a role. Finally, what was the impact on the relations between doctors and the public of all this new reading matter? Cavallo and Storey give a balanced assessment. On the one hand, the health literature empowered lay people by giving them information about the body that they had not previously had. On the other, as Foucault would have argued without the wealth of empirical evidence mustered here, physicians also benefited as they extended their authority into new domains of knowledge and power.