Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy: Identities, Families, and Masculinities (review)

Reviewed by: Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy: Identities, Families, and Masculinities Elizabeth S. Cohen Cavallo, Sandra — Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy: Identities, Families, and Masculinities. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007. Pp. 281. Sandra Cavallo's fine monograph about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century barber surgeons in Turin, Italy, delivers rich lessons for historians of many interests. With its broad social and cultural compass, the book represents a "new" history of medicine. At the same time, the author boldly takes on several truisms dear to social and economic historians and complicates them with much original insight. Incorporating nuanced ideas about kinship, life cycles, and informal networks, she lays out a lucid picture of overlooked dimensions of an early modern artisan world. Although dense with archival detail and attentive to Italian particularities, Cavallo's vision has broader ramifications. Her comparisons on many points with other parts of Europe enhance this wider relevance. Furthermore, Cavallo infuses these social and professional themes with fresh attention to culture and gender, especially masculine identities. The book's title posits a novel way to conceptualize early modern occupational collectivity. Artisans of the Body were men who practised a variety of, to us moderns, unrelated trades, from surgeons and barbers to wigmakers, tailors, jewellers, and upholsterers. For Cavallo, the Turin surgeons belonged less to a hierarchy of medical professionals than to a horizontal grouping of artisansal occupations that shared a dedication to the care of the bodily health, hygiene, comfort, and beauty of their clientele. To the early modern mind, the inner and the outer person, the healthy parts and the imperfect ones, were best tended together. As Cavallo shows, these allied artisans fashioned extensive social and professional ties — among trades, within neighbourhoods, through marriage, and across generations. Yet, in her view, neither conventional patrilineal families, nor institutions like guilds or licensing colleges, but instead informally mediated cultural affinities created and sustained these critical occupational networks. According to the introduction, a succinct rendering of the book's central insights and methods, the initial project was to put the much-neglected surgeons back into the story of medical practice. Concerning the pre-modern world, the medical historiography distinguishes book-learned physicians, who cognitively [End Page 490] diagnosed the body's inner woes by outward signs, from hands-on barbersurgeons, who pulled teeth, set bones, and treated wounds, as well as shaving and cutting hair. This distinction and the associated hierarchy of status are the first pieces of conventional wisdom that Cavallo unsettles. For the period circa 1650–1750, a differentiation between physicians and surgeons by knowledge and culture seems not to have held. Furthermore, the presumed superiority of the physician's economic and social assets was not clear in Turin, where a prominent minority of surgeons and other artisans of the body regularly served in the several households of the court of Savoy. Nonetheless, the sources show few professional or social links between surgeons and physicians, and thick networks among Cavallo's "artisans of the body." To reconstruct surgeons' professional and personal lives, Cavallo worked from two Turin registers, dating just before and after 1700, and organized her medley of economic and social data biographically. This approach allowed her to track individuals through both time and space, to build genealogies (including women), to recreate residential geographies, and to follow alliances and partnerships, marital as well as professional, with other artisans of the body. The multiplicity of these linkages and their convergence into layered networks provide the evidentiary core of Cavallo's careful arguments. This methodology does not provide statistical averages of "typical" behaviour. Instead, prominent persons in a group appear more often in the documents and so claim the historian's eye. Here, for example, we see much of those men who attended — in rotation — the court of Savoy or held municipal or military posts, these institutions having kept the best records of surgeons' service. We see less clearly ordinary practitioners who never rose to the top of the profession. Nevertheless, patient reconstruction of several-staged careers helps Cavallo fill in the experiences of those of more modest fortunes. Tracing an array of alternative pathways, she seeks to override falsely simple...

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