Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Renaissance Beauty: Snails, Cat Poo & Fatal Make-Up

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

Why did Renaissance women say the Lord's prayer while removing pubic hair?If you're like us you definitely want to know the answer to this, and so much more about beauty culture during the Italian Renaissance between the 15th and 17th centuries.Joining Kate today is Professor Jill Burke, author of How to be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity, to help us find out if beauty culture was oppressive to women, or empowering.Edited: Tom Delargy. Producer: Stuart Beckwith. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.Voting is open for the Listener's Choice Award at the British Podcast Awards, so if you enjoy what we're doing, we'd love it if you took a quick follow this link and click on Betwixt the Sheets: https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/votingEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code BETWIXTYou can take part in our listener survey here.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. I am here to whitter into your lug holes one more time, but before we can get on with it, I have to tell you. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way,

and you should be an adult too. And if you can't tick all of those boxes, then off with you. Just put down whatever you think you're doing and be off with you. Go put the arches on us something much more wholesome. Don't be listening to this nonsense. And for the rest of you, on with the. the show. Oh, hello, betwixters, and welcome to Renaissance Venice. You join me just as I am getting ready, putting my perfume on, putting a bit of slap on. And while I'm doing that, let me tell you

about some of the scandalous rumours of crimes that have been circulating lately. Did you know a network of working class women have been using the poisons found in makeup and bumping off their husbands with it? Well, that's what I've heard anyway. Honestly, if looks could kill. And there is a lot of makeup advice going round at the moment. Not all of it about how to kill your husband, but there are some rather fabulous books like Giovanni Marinello's, The Ornaments of Ladies, which tells us not only how to apply makeup,

but how to make it, which is where I suspect some nefarious women are getting their cues from. It's a fascinating world to explore, so get yourselves ready, ruse those lips, colour in those eyebrows as we get ready to delve in. What do you look for a man?

Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society. With me, Kailister.

In the past, beauty culture is something that historians have, well, turn their powdered noses up at. Not everybody, there's been some fabulous people chipping away at it, but it hasn't had the serious respect that it deserves. And our guest today certainly deserves respect. Beautifying oneself is one of the few ways that historically women were able to express themselves, have agency over something, and for that reason alone, it deserves our attention. Taking us back to beauty culture in Renaissance Italy is the one and only the fantastic Jill Burke, author of How to Be a Renaissance Woman, the untold history of beauty and female creativity.

And she is going to shed light on this fascinating, and often unappreciated history. And if you're curious to hear more about how beauty standards have shaped history, why not listen to our episode on medieval women, beauty work and pubic hair, or our episode on the perfumes of powerful women? Compacted and lippy at the ready, betwixtors, let's do it. Hello and welcome to betwixtor sheets. book, how are you doing? I'm absolutely so happy to meet you and to be here and to talk about

interesting stuff. It's lovely to eventually meet you. I feel like I've seen you on social media for ages and, you know, thinking, oh, she's so cool. I'd love to meet her. Joe, I am a big fan of your work. Your work on the Renaissance nude was just, it was so good. I absolutely loved that book. I was reading it quite recently. But we're not here to talk about nude people, but they might come up. We can talk about nude people. I mean, I'm always available. for that. We're here to talk about one of your many books, How to Be a Renaissance Woman,

the Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity. I love this. The Renaissance is a very beautiful time anyway, but what made you want to write about beautiful Renaissance women? There's a many different things that come together. First of all, I came across this incredible book from 1562, which was a beauty advice book. So it gave women beauty tips about how to look good

and how to make themselves look like one of the paintings that I've been studying. But also, you know, I've been in history and art history for 20 years. And some of the questions that are asked again and again in art history, work questions that meant very much to me and my life. And I think that certainly the question of beauty and cosmetics and makeup and the pressure that particularly women, but men also feel about looking a certain way, just hasn't had a history given to it.

And I felt that with this book, with the fact that there's a lot of material on it that hasn't been locked at by historians, I wanted to, in a way, give people particularly younger women who are struggling a lot with body image and with, you know, constant photography now with Instagram and stuff. I thought I wanted to say, there's a history to this. It's not just an individual thing. There's this context that, you know, people should know about. So that's the two things I had the source and I had the questions. So a real starter question then, I suppose we should cover when is the Renaissance? Because that's, there's a term that we kind of go, oh, the Renaissance. And I wonder, like, when was it? And did the people who were living in it know that they were in the Renaissance?

So I study Renaissance Italy. So my focus is on Italy. And generally it's agreed that the kind of cultural changes that happen in the Renaissance started in Italy. So Italy's a little bit earlier than you might think about Renaissance England. So I would say 1400 to about 1650. That's how I interpret. at it. And the word renaissance is normally related to what people call the rebirth of classical antiquity. So a new interest in all sorts of ancient texts, ancient Greek and ancient Roman texts and artifacts, sculpture. There's not much painting them from that period, but there's a real kind of enthusiasm for it. And that, in turn, makes people question culture more generally, makes people question their relationship to Christianity. It's also a period when the visual arts changes massively. So you get this new emphasis on art that is representational. It copies nature.

It looks like natural objects and looks like things. So that's a big change. You get the birth of portraiture. So people start to paint individual portraits and it's much more diffused. And perspective, things like single point perspective. So people represent space accurately, geometrically. And that leads to things like accurate map making, for example, which leads to massive colonisation. So there's all these things that happen. Oh, and printing as well also happens. So you get the first printed books and has a knock on for literacy rates,

particularly in like Italian cities, women and men of all sorts of classes are starting to be able to read. So it's just this collection of massive changes. But if you're trying to kind of picture it in your head, what I always say to people is imagine work by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Tishin, all these artists. can kind of make people, oh, go, yeah, I know what that is. And the Magidji family are around, the Borgia popes.

So sometimes culturally, it's easier to get people to imagine that period if you name those artists. And of course, Shakespeare and England, Elizabeth I first, all that kind of, that's all in part of the Renaissance period. There is a kind of tendency, or when we think about the rena, when we give periods of history names and we go, that's the Renaissance bit, that bit there. And to sort of view it in blocks, almost as if,

there was like a cut-off point in what we'd call the medieval period where everyone woke up and they went, oh, oh, it's the Renaissance. Oh, hello. And started, but it's much more gradual than that. But you are confidently saying there was enough going on at this point, culturally, intellectually, artistically, socially, religiously that was different to distinguish it from times gone before. Yeah, so it's normally, there's a few things that people pick out to show difference there. So the first one might be printing. Big invention. Massive invention that has massive ramifications in all sorts of spheres of life.

The second one could be the discovery by Europeans that the Americas exists. Right. So that's 1492 or that first contact. That has massive, again, massive ramifications that changes everything. And you could add to that the birth of the contact with sub-Saharan Africa and the birth of the slave trade, which starts from the 50s. 15th century, so late 15th century. So that also has massive impact on the way that, you know, on people's lives.

And then things like the birth of representational images sounds like, oh, that's to do with painting, but it's not, it's to do things like anatomy as well. It's to do with, you know, painting accurate herbles so you can transmit information. So there's this massive information revolution. Because when you think about medieval art, and I'm going to be very careful not to make sweeping generalisations, I don't want the medievalists after me. Medieval art is fabulous. We don't want that. We like the medieval.

Amazing. There's no question about that. But it's not what you would call like accurate depictions. If you think it's something like Hieronymus Bosch or kind of like the marginalia or those kind of like religious iconography. They're beautiful, but they're not like you do look at them and go, why is that boob look like that? Whereas if you're moving into the Renaissance, it's changing. You're completely right. Yeah, completely right.

And I do teach a lecture on this, because why can't medieval people draw as a kind of naive question? I know it's so many times. But it's just a question of what you want from art and what you think art is. The example I always gave is a horse, right? If you look at a symbol of a horse,

it might not look exactly like an individual horse. But you're interested in the essence of horse, right? But the Renaissance artists are interested in drawing, that individual horse and representing something just like it would be in front of our eyes in the world, whereas medieval artists might be more interested, not always, but might be, have a tendency to be more interested in representing a horse as they think God might have seen it. So there's this kind of idea that individual representations are just not as important as the kind of essence of finding out the representation of religious figures, for example, or animals as they were created by God,

whereas in the Renaissance, they're interested in just looking at specific instances and copying. And through that finding out kind of idealised representations, it's just a totally different approach to art that comes up over the 15th century. Now, you made an allusion earlier to sort of how images affect us today with modern beauty standards and your Instagram and your pictures. And I don't think anyone could possibly doubt that is the proliferation of just images on social media massively impact what everyone thinks they should look like. did this happen in its own way in the Renaissance when they're starting to depict accurate pictures?

Because now you've got visual representations of what beauty is supposed to be. That was really the question that I had right in the beginning of the project. And the answer seems to be yes. As historians, we are always affected by what's going on around us, inevitably. And it was interesting because I'm of an age where I didn't have social media at all when I was going up, obviously. Fuck, by the way. Even imagine that having your teenage years. Doc, my God.

My oldest son there was 22. My younger one is 18. So I've seen them grow up with it. And they've seen their friends, both male and female, grow up with it. And it's just adds a different set of issues. So I was thinking, like, it must be similar if you're seeing bodies and faces that are meant to be beautiful, that just hold up beauty standards,

kind of reflected back at you constantly in this period. How does that make women feel? and how can I investigate that? That was one of my major questions. And it started off with looking at body hair, actually. I was thinking, do Renaissance women remove their body hair? Because you know, with Renaissance, a lot of the Italian paintings of nudes, women don't have body hair.

And even the life drawings, the drawings after the models, I go into the nudes, they don't have body hair either. And so I was interested, you know, was this artist, was this just artistic license? And I think that's what people assumed, or is there evidence that women were removing their body hair? And yeah, there's tons of evidence that women are removing their body hair. I'm remembering it now in early modern English pornography where they talk about Italian wenches,

not having any pubic hair, that it's the Italian way of doing it. And they're quite appalled. They're quite like, oh my God. They are. Because in English recipe books, the recipes for body hair removal, they change them. They say, oh, this is for removing their... hair from the chin of boys.

And it's like it's not. It is not. And so they have as completely northern Europe in Germany and England, they have a different attitude towards body hair removal. But it's associated with Islamic bathing culture. Okay. Originally. And so you get the crusaders right in the Middle Ages and saying, oh God, in these

bats, they completely remove all their hair. And then in Spain, you know, in the Middle Ages, that's a large part of Spain is Islamic. And so they have the spay and culture in Spain. And then in 1492, when the Jews are expelled from Spain and the Muslims are also expelled, a lot of Jewish refugees come over to Italy and they bring their razors, bathing cultures with them. It's kind of mainly like, you know, kind of creams and stuff. You know, they advised against razors because they said they made the hair coarser.

Well, that's true, isn't it? They used creams. They use a mixture of arsenic and quick line. No, no, I'll just stay hairy. Oh, no. So you'd go in the baths, so you'd have, you know, it's all public baths at this time. You'd have to get a private bathrooms,

unless you're very, very, very wealthy. And you'd get all covered, covered with this paste. And some of the recipes say, say the Lord's Prayer twice. Or, and take it off quickly before your skin starts to burn. Do you imagine if that was on the instructions of a packet of VAT? I know. Say the Lord's prayer twice.

So this is, you know, because there's no clocks, obviously. So they have to measure times. That makes sense. Yes, okay. But they work in the way that Viet does, in that they're very strongly alkaline and they burn the hair. Obviously, it's exactly the same process. And arsenic was commonly used to whiting skin as well.

They really were without pubic hair. That was, it would have worked. It's mad, but it would have worked. And that was a big thing in Renaissance beauty. Do you think that that became more. prevalent as they were looking at the statues and the paintings that they saw the lack of pubic hair because I'm forever interested in that because pubic hair is supposed to be such a private thing and yet we do have fashions for it. We've learned that you're not supposed

to have pubic hair and where does that come from? Yeah, I think so. Now it's really hard to prove that connection. Yeah. Because people even now don't write down, oh, I'm removing my pubic hair because of this reason. And a lot of people aren't aware that. that this kind of thing has a fashion. Again, you know, if you're a bit older, you can have seen it in your own lifetime sometimes. But it does. Pubic hair removal has fashions and, you know, comes and goes.

And it must be that the prevalence of the nude and all these women with no pubic hair affected, what men's expectations were of women anyway? Because there's this great source called Andalusian Lotzana which is about a Spanish prostitute, probably Jewish immigrant who comes to Rome in the 1520s. And she and her friends actually specialize in removing her from Italian women.

Wow. And they say the Italian women come to them and say, we want to remove our pubic hair because that's how our husband's liking. Wow. So you get this to-in and throwing. The history of women and beauty is never just a history of women. People always say, what about the men? there's a question that comes out.

I don't mind talking about men at all. But it's just like the gender history is always this kind of balance between a lot of different contingencies. It's never just about one gender. But I think so there's this fashion, there's this expectation that women won't have pubic hair. Men aren't seeing many naked women. No. And the emphasis has always been more on women than men to be beautiful. Because in the system that was created, that was a woman's quote unquote greatest weapon.

It was the way she could attract a husband. I mean, it's a shit system, if that's kind of, that's all you're left with. But that's the fact of it is. That is the way it is. You know, if you're in a situation where women cannot earn, it's about money in the end. All about money. Yeah. If you're in a situation, if you're in a patriarchal society where wages for women are

massively less, where women who are childbearing aren't in the position to earn money in the same way, then beauty is one of the ways that women can express agency. and it's still true. That's one of the things that I found some strands of feminist thought that were a little bit patronising about beauty studies. I think that too, you know. I think beauty is often dismissed

as this kind of silly and it's caught up with this idea that if you are a woman that expresses itself through beauty, cosmetics, da-da-da-da, that you're somehow letting the side down. I still see that narrative playing out today. It's massively narrow that tightrope that women have to tread

to be acceptable and to be taken seriously. I mean, and this is one of reasons why beauty studies, even though this is massively important for women's everyday lives, particularly important at certain life stages. It changes through life and more important for some women than others. But it's just so patronising to say it's frivolous. It's deeply important. It can be fun.

It can be felt as a pressure. Beauty in cosmetics, beauty cultures, the way that people treat their bodies, bodywork isn't just repressive. It can be really useful. It can be really fun. And I also think it's really skillful. This is one of my book bears.

That you know when you go to a hairdresser, I always say, oh, I'm just amazed about how amazingly skillful and thoughtful and creative hairdressing is. I just think that it's a profession with beauticians as well. People are really good at makeup. I think it's amazing. I think so.

I think so. Is that like, And beauty at the moment seems to be, it's in a new phase with the proliferation of TikTok and YouTube because you've got the rise of the beauty influencers who I'm so grateful to because when I was attempting to learn how to put eyeliner on for the first time, what did I have like Jackie Magazine and a really crap eyeliner. And now they're just there just like, yes, you do it like this. Yes, you do this. And I'm like, wow. Wow. I know my niece who's really into this is so, and my sister actually is much better at making than I am. but they're so good at it.

And I'm always looking at them and thinking, you're so good at it and so understanding, because it's actually quite more complicated now than it used to be as well, because there's more products and things than there were. But also, because when I was brought up with like kind of 1970s feminism, a lot of it was like, oh, it's all repressive.

Just don't do that. And so you'd go, oh, can I buy your lipstick? Or I'm letting down inside. Yeah. And it's so diminishing. people felt experience that. Especially when you're looking back through history and you can make the case that, look,

the game was rigged, it was a shit system in the first place and the kind of like the emphasis on women's, the fact that pretty much all agency from woman was stripped apart from how she looked. That was like the one realm of power that she had. And we can make the case that it's a shit power because it's actually dependent on male appreciation. But the fact of it was,

that was how the cards were dealt. It was really crap. And beauty could be an incredible. incredibly powerful weapon at this point, as well as a tool of oppression. Thinking of something like the Venetian courtesans of the Renaissance, who tell me about them, these women. So, cortisand culture really is another thing that is a Renaissance culture, really. Not that they didn't exist, but it just becomes really massively important.

It becomes like institutionalised, doesn't it? Yes. Rather than, yeah, like it's a career now. It's an aspiration. You can be a professional cortisand. And people at the time were like, no, who are the people? these new kinds of women, you know, and massively distrustful of them. They're very worried that people would mistake them for respectable women. You know, there's this gatekeeping always who's

allowed to be upper class and Pierre. They actually were trailblazers in that a lot of them were poets, were musicians, were composers, philosophers as well. So you get people like Tullia Darragona writing for publishing, not just writing, but publishing, a dialogue. on the philosophy of love. Veronica Franco writes her collected poems. A lot of musicians, people like Barbara Strotsie, who's one of Machiavelli's lovers, writing her compositions and becoming a really famous musician.

These are really accomplished women. And they're people, and they're often like Veronica Franco, really from a very, very impoverished background. And their letters are incredible, very stirring, very beautiful, very full of classical illusions. They're well educated. And Veronica Franco particularly writes about this pressure of looking a certain way.

She writes a beautiful letter about, you know, speaking with another's mouth, always have to be kind of presenting yourself in a certain way to please men. But her fortunes were completely based on male. On male appreciation. Appreciation. And when her main patron dies, she just kind of fades away. into obscurity again and becomes very poor again and dies at a very early age. So beauty is a very

fickle thing. And it's always the case that women who are beautiful but also rich at the best time. I'll be back with Jill after the short break. Beauty and wealth do go hand in hand historically. Like there's a lot of research that's done on what we innately find attractive. Like if we were just born on an island and grew up with no social influence, what we would find attractive then. And it's things like being healthy. That's kind of like a universally one. But most perceptions of beauty are intimately linked with wealth, usually, like most of the time. Our ideal body beautiful now is one that shows that you can go at the gym and you can get a tan and you can do, you can have work done.

How does that play out in the Renaissance? So you haven't got any pubic hair, but how else are you a beautiful woman in the Renaissance? The emphasis on the Renaissance, there's a lot of emphasis on skin being. pale. Now that is a massive privilege because it means you're inside. You're not working outside. Most women are working outside and it's clear. So there's a lot of issues with skin diseases in the Renaissance or diseases that mark the skin. So you get a lot of lice. Skaibis is a very popular one. But you also get diseases like smallpox that are really very, very scarring. And of course, if you're wealthy, you can sometimes avoid these by going off into your country village. or, you know, avoiding these infectious diseases,

you can get all this kind of all your lice and all your scabies treated. You're not sharing clothes in the same way. So there's a massive secondhand clothes market and scabies is passed on through clothing often. People now get it. I had a friend who had it from buying some clothes from a charity shop. You know, that kind of, you know, when she was, yeah,

so you can still get it via clothes. Wow. Yeah. So you're much more likely to get it if you're using and reusing other clothing. So there's all those things. They're having the clear skin and also being plump, not too fat, not too thin, just kind of round it, perfectly.

Because you could afford food, right? Because you can afford food. Well fed, basically. Absolutely. You're not scrawny. My God, how awful. So there's all these things, again, wealth and beauty go hand in hand. And you can spend your time.

You know, this is a period when people had maids, ladies in waiting, normal to have maids. And so, of course, you can spend your time getting your hair. elaborately fixed, bleaching it because people really like honey blonde hair in this period. So there's all this kind of stuff that just speaks to wealth as well. But there's also that idea that you have to be naturally beautiful. That's the conundrum, in it? That's the no makeup makeup look. You need to look amazing at all times, but not actually look like you're trying to look

amazing at all times. That's what the rules are. No effort. But you just have to get out of bed. Oh, I'm so gorgeous. Lies. It's all lies. We know.

So how would they achieve this then? Because I'm thinking like it's the 15th, 16th century SPF is years off. It's like they can't have decent foundations. What is it that they're using to achieve these kind of looks? And were they accessible only to the rich people? What were poor women doing? Poor women were also using makeup and there's a loads, because one of the things that I did for this project was,

and another project that's ongoing is recreate some of the makeup recipes. There's loads of makeup that's based on plant ingredients and based on non-nasty ingredients. So if you look at these makeup recipe books, some of the recipes involve things like human blood, we're not going to use that. Dead pigeons, not another. Cat poo, no.

What were they using that for? All sorts of stuff. There is stuff in poo, particularly bird poo that's still used in makeup. I did not know that. I'll introduce it. Yeah, they use it in. It's got ingredients in that we now know work. I mean, one of the things that we found out through the recipes that we used is that, wow,

there's a massive amount of knowledge in these Renaissance recipes. So it sounds bonkers, but it actually does work. Oh yeah, a lot of this stuff that sounds bonkers works. That's amazing. This is something that is definitely true. And so they did have moisturiser. So we made a. a really interesting recipe from mutton fat.

Sounds awful. I know, just got to bear with me. The thing is, I would put that on my face, though. If that's all that was left, if that was the best, it was an offer, I'm afraid I would. What was amazing is I made this recipe. I got this, I used mutton fat and egg white it's third, and it has these tree gums in it, mastic and incense, fricense, and you mash it all up and you put it together. And honestly, I could not believe what it was like when it came out.

It was this light moisturiser. It felt like had the text. of kind of nivia, you know, not a very fine moisturizer, but a kind of maybe a thicker moisturizer, like an old-fashioned one. And it wasn't like just a grease at all. It was really light. It was spreading the skin. It smelled really nice. Wow. That's incredible. They had things like skin tonics, stringents. They had antirinkle creams. They used face masks. They used exfoliance, they had hair conditioner, they had all the things that we have. They made eyebrow colour, for example, out of sot and walnut oil that works really well. They had blusher and

lipstick that they made out of sandalwood. We've tried that. That works really well and it dyes the skin so that you can get up in the morning. Like a stain. Yeah, it's like a stain and it lasts a few days so you could put it on and then you would be oh i'm so loving fresh and have a lovely blush in the morning yeah and there's also they use things like marble dust as a foundation as well as lead white which is um light reflecting so it's like you know the foundations that can get the scatter light yes that are blurring yeah that's similar kind of effect it's much more sophisticated than people think It's very cool. And they had everything, you know, breath freshener, everything that, most of the stuff that we can think of that you could just buy from the bootsers or whatever, they did have.

They weren't interested in eye shadow at all in the European Renaissance. Eye shadow and mascara, they weren't that interested in. But everything else they used to use. So with their obsession with whiteness and pale skin, which seems to crop up all over the place, like the paler, the better. how does that work with women of colour who weren't white? Did they get a look into this beauty world at all? How did they access this? It's a really interesting question.

I think there's a lot more work that needs to be done on this area, actually, because it's only recently that people have said, oh, my word, you know, pretty modern year, it wasn't completely white after all. And they've found these, that's certainly been in the last few years, the amount of work on this has been wonderful. And actually the whiteness is in relationship. to this new amount of non-white people in Europe.

So you start to get a lot of black people in port cities in the 15th and 16th centuries. So things like some of some port cities in Spain, particularly, you know, something like one in 10 of the population was originally held from subsection to high in Africa. It's not a small and like amount of population that isn't seen. It's like often. And what you see in the early 16th century, is Titian,

paints a portrait of Lara De Antichus in the 1520s, with a black servant. So the black servant is there in order to contrast her white skin. And at the same time, in northern Italy, people like Isabella Desti, he's quite a well-known now for her art, Patriarch, actually and her mother

start to try and collect black servants, not necessarily slaves, but servants in order to kind of have them at court with them. So there's that kind of really awful set of relationships with white beauty and blackness. But there's also a celebration of black beauty amongst some European artists and poets, male European artists and poets. You do things like write poems about My Love is Black but Beautiful. They're still steeped in colonialism and racism, to be honest. There's also a recognition that dark skin is also beautiful.

So it's a mixed, it's a bit of, it's a bit of, it's a, a mixed story. A lot of what's happening with the way that black bodies and non-white bodies generally are talked about is the justification of colonialism. So there's like reports back from letters that you get of travellers in sub-Saharan Africa. You talk about black male bodies as being very strong and very well made. So that sounds approving. But then you think that's also a precursor to saying, oh, let's have these people working sugar plantations. It's always a really complicated set of questions. But I think really the take-home is that they need and can be more work done on

this area because I also have that feeling from some of the sources I've read that a lot of North African Muslim women are really important in the beauty industry. Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah, and because of this Muslim inheritance of medicine and cosmetics is part of that, the important inheritance that Europe has of Muslim science and, and all this kind of thing. I'd love to do more work, for people to do more work on that. You need languages that I don't have, like Arabic.

But I have a feeling that's happening in Venice anyway. So, yeah, that's another study to be written, really, but it's important. Tell me about the book of beauty tips, the 1526. I'm going to butcher the Italian here. Venusta? Venester. Venester. Fabio.

Spoken like a native, Kate. Well done. Yeah, yeah. So it means Venus-like. So this is a tiny wee pamphlet. It's like about 24 pages, and there's copies of it scattered across different, you know, locations across the world.

There's a few handfuls left. This kind of pamphlet, people just throw it away. They were bought very cheaply, bought on market squares. So they don't exist, and people haven't really looked at it. And that's why it's interesting, because it's not a fancy book. It's a book that's aimed, at a popular audience.

It's the first book of beauty tips that I know that's been published. To our knowledge, we always have to say in case something else has found out. And it's aimed at really squarely at women who are poorer and women who don't necessarily read. It talks about hearing the recipes because, you know, although women didn't read, doesn't mean they don't have access to texts. It's an oral culture of texts, really until the 19th century or something. People read out texts and texts are expected to be read out. And the recipes in it are the things like,

so the first recipe is snails in it again, something that is still used in beauty. It is. I'm thinking of the snail facial and the snail's fine moisturiser. Oh, they were clever, weren't they? They really were. But they're also cheap snails, right? And readily accessible.

So it's really, it's a book that's full of recipes aimed at non-elite women, aimed at working women. And it would have been bought in market places. And they'd have sold it alongside. some of the made-up cosmetics as well. So, yeah, it was a really important source. It's been known, kind of,

but I don't think anyone's recognised its importance before this project. I mean, it's an incredibly important source, isn't it? Because that shows that working class women and poor women were accessing these kind of treatments and products, and that reveals a different kind of culture than perhaps we would have previously thought, because it's very easy to think that beauty and things belong to the elite and to the people that have leisure time and can afford it.

But that isn't the case. It's never been the case, has it? It's never, ever been the case. When are women who don't have much money ever thought, oh, fuck it? I mean, and I think also for all women of whatever social class you are, looking good and looking the best that you can, has a premium is important if you're interested in attracting a husband. And that doesn't change if you're poorer.

In fact, it might be more important. It shouldn't entirely be surprising, but it was good to find, because I was starting with this big book in from 1562 is my starting point. And then to actually realize, oh, no, there's these other little tiny cheap pamphlets really added a kind of whole new and dimension to the kind of work I was doing. Because I never wanted, there's two things I didn't want to do in this book. I didn't want it to be a story of elite women, just elite women. And I didn't want it to be a story of men talking about women. I wanted women's voices to come through. And when you're dealing with non-elite women,

that is incredibly difficult to find in the 50 and 16th centuries. And in any point, actually, I suppose if you're working on history, finding those voices of non-elite women is tough. So tough. But one of the things that cosmetics did do, and probably still does if we actually bother to read the ingredients list, is it does give women access to highly toxic materials, arsenic is used quite a lot in these recipes

with a frequency that's like, oh, okay, okay. But I did mean that these women had poisons, access to poisonings. And that was one of the reasons why people, one of the many reasons why there's a lot of anti-cosmetics discourse. First of all, because it's, you know, to do with female vanity, they spent too much money on it. All the stuff that still comes up now was present in the Renaissance,

but also what doesn't come up now is a worry that women might poison their husbands and kill them with makeup. And that was something that was a real and founded fear. The main poisons that were used in cosmetics were lead, which poisons you slowly. So you can't kill people really with lead. Arsenic, which you absolutely can kill people, of course. And things like quick climb as well. And in the 17th century, there was this very famous at the time trial.

in Rome where I think seven women were executed in the end because of they had a ring of poisoners where they'd share this poison and the guise of it being a cosmetic in order for women to kill their husbands. Was that called Aquitaphana? Was that the one? Aquitifana. That's it. And it's a really fascinating story, not least because the trial evidence, because there's a lot of insight into how working class women, because these weren't particularly elite women, would share ideas about things like recipes, but also share complaints about their husbands and share tips about how to get out of the terrible situations

because some of the husbands that they talk about are terrible. And there's no way out of this, is that? They can't get out of it. They can't divorce them. Some Italian states like Venice, you're a little bit better off because you could leave your husband on the basis of things like extreme violence and rape and things, you know, but you couldn't enroll.

And so for some women, the only way out was to murder their husbands. What they did with Aquitifana was this recipe. So people get arsenic. They'd send often a man to an apothecary and say, I need arsenic for a face whitening cream. It was mainly face whitening, but there's other things that they asked for as well that they're on the pre-test of making cosmetics. And then they'd make this preparation with it and slowly poison their husbands.

So they'd put a bit in their food. like every over a period of a week and then they'd die. And because this was a time when they were just coming out of a plague epidemic. That's convenient. Yes. So they don't know actually how many husbands were poisoned. Do you know when you actually look into that, the husband poisoning syndicates, they were still being exposed in the 19th century.

Like across Eastern Europe, there was a really big case in like the 19 something something. And they were known as the angel makers. and it was exactly the same thing. Women who were stuck in awful marriages would go to them and they had such expert knowledge of poisons that they would tell you exactly what you needed to take how to make it look like an accident. And these are just the ones that we found.

Yeah, because that's the thing. You think, what about all those women who kill their husband? Who wrote court? And the thing is that, you know, murder isn't, is wrong, right is off, we shouldn't murder people. But then you read about the husband and you really understand how desperate their situation were in.

These women were getting their, you know, arms broken. They were being raped constantly by these horrendous men and they couldn't do anything about it. And we're not condoning murder, but we will say mitigating circumstances. I'm sure it's the same with the later ones as well. When you read the stories of these women behind it, you just totally understand how they were driven to these awful things. I've often wondered how widespread was this, this husband poisoning syndicates?

Because as you said, with like, you know, plagues and diseases and things going on, it's so easy to just, no one really knows what people are dying of all that well. And if that's the only way out of a situation and they were still being discovered up in the 19th century, I've got to wonder how widespread that was. But I love that they were sort of posing as makeup providers. Because there's also a bit where you think, oh, men go, oh, there's women in their stupid makeup. And they don't look into it that closely. So then it's kind of missed and people miss it.

But yeah, it's impossible to know. I mean, these women, the Aquitifana murders, were discovered by a very early kind of sting operation where someone posed as one of the women who were interested in buying the cosmetics. and, you know, basically they had some... I love it. I just... It's a really fabulous story. But yeah, and then they were actually discovered, red-handed, they were caught red-handed by the police effectively.

And then they got a witness who turned, who was offered clemency, if she told the police what happened. And they also did very early forensic investigation of the poison. They fed it to dogs to see if they would die, this kind of thing. Yeah, this whole story, the Aquitifana story, the story is just fascinating.

It really is. It's a final question, although I could talk to you forever and ever and ever, of all the makeup tips and all the recipes and everything that you have collected, is there any that you might actually continue doing in today with all the modern stuff around? Anything that you've thought, actually, that was quite well. Yes, absolutely. Because what Renaissance women did was used what was around to make themselves beautiful or make themselves smell nice.

And they did things like make rose oil from roses that they collected in their garden. You just use that kind of nature to make themselves better. So I know this sounds ridiculous in a way. But since I've written that book, you know, I go for walks with a dog or look in the garden and have a completely different attitude to what I see around me. I'm like, oh, maybe you could use that for this.

You could use that for a perfume. You could use nettles for a face tonic. You could, you know, make all these things and you can make cosmetics at home that you can just make just in the way you want. So it's not even just a specific cosmetics. It's just about how you can use nature that's around you to kind of improve your life and have fun and tweak things just the way you like them. So I think that's a main difference.

That would be what I'd suggest to people to do just to have more fun and experimentation with the cosmetics like the Renaissance women do. But don't poison your husband. No, I love my husband. Jill, you've been wonderful to talk to. Thank you so much. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? It can send you some homemade beauty recipes. Absolutely. I honestly, I'm, you know, normally when I'm given talks, I do bring along some of these samples. So I do come along if I'm around. I'm at the Edinburgh International Book Festival with Emma DeBerry. He's amazing as well. And my book, Khadabry, Renatesus, woman, is about to come out in paperback in August from Profile Books. Yeah. So do buy it? Do. It's fabulous.

And thank you so much for coming to talk to us today. You've been marvellous. Oh, so wonderful to me. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Jill for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like with you and follow along whatever it is that you get your podcasts.

If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hi, then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. We've got episodes on everything from life lessons of historical women to the real princess Diana. all coming your way. If you're curious for more historic tales from this period,

why not check out our sister podcasts, gone medieval and not just the Tudors. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie and produced by Stuart Beckworth. The senior producer is Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit.

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