Secrets to Healthy Living: The Revival of the Preventive Paradigm in Late Renaissance Italy

The last few years have seen an extraordinary increase in the interest in recipe books, also known in Renaissance Italy as books of secrets. ¹ In the Italian peninsula the first books of secrets began to be published in the 1520s, and some of them, such as the slim Dificio di ricette or the more substantial Secreti del reverendo donno Alessio Piemontese (hereforth I secreti), went through several editions. ² But there was also a handwritten tradition of collecting secrets that did not die out with the advent of print, and numerous exemplars of these domestic manuscripts are preserved in family archives and libraries. ³ These printed and handwritten collections of recipes contain both medical remedies for the treatment of a variety of health disorders and instructions for making a range of products for daily care of the household and the body. While recipes for preserving food are also common, in sixteenth-century Italian texts culinary recipes are notably absent.