Beauty, Knowledge, Patriarchy, Power: A Book Review of Jill Burke’s How to be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity (Pegasus Books, 2024)
Somewhere in Missouri, Spring 2025: It’s morning, and I’m rushing to pack a stack of books, notes, and binders into my stylishly tiny and oh-so-impractical backpack and get to class. Before braving the local drag race otherwise known as I-64 to zoom to campus, I pause before my bedroom mirror one final time to ensure everything is safely in its proper place. Hair: bushy, but brushed. Teeth sans eggy breakfast remnants? Check. Mascara safely on my eyelashes rather than huddled beneath them in sad, racoonish piles? Check. Given the state of my Facebook feed and the daily devolution of America further into a kleptocratic nightmare, I am perennially surprised to find my reflection hasn’t swapped its Hermione-esque locks for shooting tendrils of orange fire à la the Heat Miser of Christmas movie fame or Moana’s Te Kā. Afterall, the news is chock-a-block with apoplexy-inducing headlines: Birthright Citizenship Under Threat; USAID No More; Mass Firings Coming to the Department of Education. Technically, I should be ruminating on Plato (it’s Allegory of the Cave day in my cosmology class, after all), but these are the things on my mind.
Well, mostly. As I linger by the mirror, an older internal monologue starts playing in my brain, creating a strange, discordant symphony:
Is my fit professional enough?
Yikes, the bags under my eyes are bigger. (Why sleep when you can doom-scroll!)
Is that another new line on my forehead?
I think I’m gaining weight…
As Jill Burke, author of How to be a Renaissance Woman could tell you, worries like these have provided a soundtrack to women’s lives for centuries. Outside, the plague may be raging or a constitutional crisis brewing, but the cosmetic pressures that patriarchal western society places on women to look, dress, smell, and act a certain way endure. With this reality in mind, Burke’s incisive monograph serves as a timely reminder of the mental, fiscal, and labor costs inherent to western beauty culture and the grinding postulation of women’s bodies as “forever-unfinished projects, to be constantly improved and worked upon” (ix).
Popular audiences, students, and academics alike will all find something to appreciate in Burke’s fifteen compact chapters. These are direct, clear, full of humor, and free of jargon. They are also organized into five thematic sections that focus on beauty ideals, judgment, bodywork, the power of nudity, and knowledge communities respectively. Collectively, they illuminate the social, intellectual, and cosmetic worlds of contemporary women who range from fruit sellers to artisans, slaves to courtesans, blushing brides to mariticides. Burke’s academic background is in Italian cultural history, and the book reflects that geographic focus, jumping from the piazze of Venice to the salons of Rome and beyond as it deploys Italy’s rich archival record to unspool female life and the aesthetic pressures that came with it in the years between 1400-1650.
The present too is never far from Burke’s mind, for, as she convincingly argues, the roots of many twenty-first century beauty standards lie in the Renaissance. This legacy is most thoroughly explored in Burke’s opening chapters on contemporary beauty ideals and the Petrarchan babe (think gold hair, pink lips, white skin, hourglass curves, dark eyes, and perky breasts) as well as the sixth chapter on “Whiteface,” or the imperialist European delineation and exportation of pale skin as a desirable (and manufacturable) norm. The link between modern beauty standards and those of the Renaissance is also highlighted in Chapter 8, which focuses on body modification methodologies both temporary (i.e. the wearing of “breast bags” or bras) and permanent alike. As anyone who has paid a visit to a cosmetic dermatologist or plastic surgeon will know, the labor associated with “perfecting” the body can be both violent and expensive; what you may not realize, however, is that surgical body modifications like nose jobs (created with a flap of underarm skin) and labiaplasties date back at least as far as the Renaissance.
While Burke never obscures or minimizes the costs, risks, and patriarchal ideologies often inherent to contemporary beauty practices, neither does she shy away from acknowledging their liberatory potential. As her pages highlight, fashion was one of the few aspects of a Renaissance woman’s life over which she might exert control, be it by purchasing or distilling a mercury-laced facial cream or by carefully dressing her hair in the newest style. Such tasks demanded real investments of time, labor, and resources on one hand, but could also furnish opportunities for self-expression and community building on the other. As Burke explains, the interior physical spaces in which the body work of beauty took place were typically the exclusive province of women and could thus afford opportunities for socializing and sisterhood. Contemporary sources reflect the fact that many women valued the relative freedom available in such gender restricted spaces. As the brigata from Moderata Fonte’s 1600 dialogue The Worth of Women puts it, “Praise God that we are free to do just as we please, even tell jokes like that to make each other laugh, with no one here to criticize us or put us down….to tell the truth…we are only ever really happy when we are alone with other women.”[1]
Body work also offered women the chance to engage in intellectual life. While women were barred from university educations, they could draw on experience-based knowledge, book learning, or some combination of the two to compound medicines, regulate their humors via careful diet and exercise regimes, concoct make-up, and disseminate beauty recipes via female networks of exchange— in other words, to do premodern science. Many such recipes derived from male-authored recipe books like Giovanni Marinello’s Gli Ornamenti delle Donne (The Ornaments of Women); others were the product of women alchemists, pharmacists, and domestic practical scientists such as Caterina Sforza and Anna Ebraea.
Even in 2025, academic studies of premodern women as students and practitioners of science are rare, particularly when it comes to cosmetics. That Burke insists on situating Renaissance beauty culture and the women who were often both its object and executors under the aegis of scientific erudition, then, represents a significant contribution to the fields of women’s history and the history of science. How to be a Renaissance Woman is also, simply put, a jolly good read that will have experts and popular readers alike laughing, raging, and diving for Google to look up one of the many fascinating women, recipes, beauty products, and side effects described in its 318 pages. With that in mind, I’ll leave you with one last question: Have you seen what happens to one’s chompers with repeated use of mercury creams? Read up on Isabella of Aragorn and find out!
Notes
- Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women, ed. and trans. Virginia Cox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 47. ↑
Featured image caption: Portrait of a Lady, said to be Clarice Pusterla, by Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, 16th century. (Courtesy Wikimedia)
Katherine McKenna is a historian of early modern Europe, women, and gender. In addition to researching and writing about early feminism and the literary lives of European women, she is also interested in histories of science and what they can teach us about learning communities and the way knowledge is produced within cultures and contexts. She is presently the Teagle Postdoctoral Scholar at Saint Louis University, where she helps lead the Confluence Project, a timely initiative that seeks to revitalize core education in the humanities through pedagogy design at the intersection of the humanities and STEM.
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