Other languages

• Dutch: regiment, regement 
• French: régime  
• German: Regimen 
• Italian: regimen sanitatis, regola 

Material form

Subject

Description

Often complementary to recipe books are the regimen books. Regimens instructed people in the management of the six non-natural things from which health depends. These are: food and drink, sleep, exercise, the air one breathes, emotions (or ‘passions’) and evacuations (including hygiene, i.e. the cleanliness of the body, understood as removal of various excretions such as sweat, dandruff, mucus, etc..). A healthy life assumed a connection between bodily and emotional health, and often contained advice on both these elements. In many cases however there was not an abundance of religious language, maybe due to the short entries warranted by the genre. Although health and religion were closely tied in the early modern frame of mind, this connection comes to the fore better in the devotional tracts on illness. 

The regimen books instead stayed closely within a Galenic framework of medicine, focussing on the balance between the four humours in the body. Influences on these humours included diet, sleep patterns and exercises. These were also precisely the themes on which the regimen books gave advice. They had their predecessors in the Latin regimen works of the Middle Ages such as the Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum. 

There were specific regimens for specific diseases or situations, for example seasonal regimens, plague regimens, and regimens for pregnant women. 

Related terms

regimen sanitatis, medical literature, how-to book, health rules, materia medica

Sources

S. Cavallo, ‘Early Vernacular Medical Advice Books and Their Popular Appeal in Early Modern Italy’, Nuncius 36:2 (2021), 264-303.

S. Cavallo and T. Storey, Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

S. Cavallo and T. Storey (eds.), Conserving Health in Early Modern Culture. Bodies and Environments in Italy and England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).

A. Emch-Dériaz, ‘The Non-Naturals Made Easy’, in: R. Porter (ed.), The Popularization of Medicine, 1650-1850 (London/New York: Routledge, 1992), 134-159.

M. Fissell, ‘Popular Medical Writing’, in: J. Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 417-430.

M. Nicoud, ‘Chapitre X. Le livre diététique: manuscrits et imprimés’, in: Les régimes de santé au Moyen Âge: Naissance et diffusion d’une écriture médicale en Italie et en France (XIIIe- XVe siècle) (Rome: Publications de l’École française de Rome, 2007).

D.A. Seger, The Practical Renaissance: Information Culture and the Quest for Knowledge in Early Modern England (London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), chapter 1: ‘Regimens and Rules: The Rudiments of Health and Husbandry’.

P. Slack, ‘Mirrors of Health and Treasures of Poor Men: The Uses of the Vernacular Medical Literature of Tudor England’, in: C. Webster (ed.), Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1979), 237-273.

A. Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chapter 4: ‘Preventive Medicine: Healthy Lifestyles and Healthy Environments’.