I’m a historian, author, and historical consultant based at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. I work on the history of the body and experiment with historical reconstruction. I believe history can make life better.
My latest book, How to Be A Renaissance Woman is about how women in the age of Botticelli, Michelangelo and Titian creatively responded to a world of new beauty ideals. Can we trace the nagging feeling of not looking good enough back to the Renaissance?
How to Be was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, a Waterstones best book of 2023 and a New York Times Book Editors’ Choice. As well as the UK and US editions, there are forthcoming translations into Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and Polish. The UK paperback will be available in August 2024.
Reviews say it’s ‘terrific … that rare thing, a serious history that is both accessible and entertaining‘ (Literary Review); ‘erudite, witty and engaging (Irish Times), ‘delightful… a veritable repository of arcane, entertaining information‘ (Washington Post); ‘by taking a fresh, women-led perspective, Burke highlights a rich tapestry of female experience that encompasses everyone from artisans to aristocrats‘ (The Times London).
You can read an edited excerpt from my chapter on make up and murder here, or preview on Google Books. Click through to the Listen page if you’d like to hear some recent interviews about my research into Renaissance cosmetics.
I’ve also recently been involved in creating ‘The Beauty Sensorium’ as part of the Cult of Beauty exhibition that runs in the Wellcome Collection in London until April 2024. Working with the artists Baum and Leahy, this showcases the creativity and ingenuity in Renaissance women’s cosmetics and skincare. This collaboration was the result of work I did at the University of Edinburgh with a soft matter scientist, Wilson Poon, in the Royal-Society funded Renaissance Goo project. Our findings were reported in The Guardian and World of Interiors amongst other media outlets.
Elsewhere, this website includes articles and blogposts I’ve written (see below, or click through to the ‘read‘ section), links to podcast and radio interviews, lectures and Renaissance cosmetics recipes. So if you’re interested in whether Renaissance women removed their body hair; how we should respond to mythological rape images in the era of #MeToo, or how the visual arts can help us deal with big emotions in life, such as grief – there’s plenty to read here.
Selected Writing
- Sexual Assault and Hope for the Future in Titian’s Rape of Europe.This is the text of a lecture I gave for a conference to consider the Titian: Love, Desire and Death exhibition at the National Gallery, London. If you’d prefer this in video form, you can see a recording of the lecture on YouTube. There’s a lot of rape imagery in art museums – the rape… Read more: Sexual Assault and Hope for the Future in Titian’s Rape of Europe.
- Overlooking Women’s Labour in Sofonisba Anguissola’s Chess GameTime is a terribly scarce commodity for those of us who spend our skills and labour equally on our families and our own work.Laura Cereta, Letter to Sigismondo de’ Bucci, 1486 It seems terribly modern, doesn’t it, a woman complaining about trying to do (“our own”) intellectual work whilst being constantly pulled back to domestic… Read more: Overlooking Women’s Labour in Sofonisba Anguissola’s Chess Game
- The wordlessness of grief in Michelangelo’s Pietà: Art Pickings 5My colleagues and I have been each asked to choose an object that made us “#hookedonarthistory for the University of Edinburgh’s History of Art department’s social media account. It’s a lovely, fun thing with some brilliant answers from my colleagues, so I hesitated before choosing Michelangelo’s Vatican Pietà. There are two reasons. Firstly, it is… Read more: The wordlessness of grief in Michelangelo’s Pietà: Art Pickings 5
- The Plague, the Self and the Body in Pontormo’s Naked Self Portrait: Art Pickings 4Pontormo drew himself naked whilst escaping from the plague. For a few months in 1523-4 he was holed up in a Carthusian Monastery, the Certosa di Galluzzo, a few miles outside Florence. The first intimations of a wave of plague had come in August 1522, when five officials were appointed to protect Florence from the… Read more: The Plague, the Self and the Body in Pontormo’s Naked Self Portrait: Art Pickings 4
- The Power of Sexual Assault in Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia: Art Pickings 3These thoughts about Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia came about during a discussion at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (UK) for the wonderful Behind the Scenes at the Museum podcast. Thanks to Tiffany Jenkins, Luke Syson and Michael Savage for our conversation – worth getting up at 4am for! I should also warn readers that given the… Read more: The Power of Sexual Assault in Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia: Art Pickings 3
- Clara Peeters’ Still Life with Flowers and the “Feminine” Virtue of Patience: Art Pickings 2.How long do we spend looking at things? Really looking? Early modern women were often urged to be patient, and their skills of slow, close and acute observation can be seen in their naturalistic representation of nature in a variety of media (painting, drawing, needlework and more). The text below derives from a class exercise in… Read more: Clara Peeters’ Still Life with Flowers and the “Feminine” Virtue of Patience: Art Pickings 2.
- Raphael’s Fornarina, Sex Work and Cross-Dressing in Renaissance RomeHalf-smiling, half-naked, her fingers more suggestive than concealing (the risqué”v” of her left hand! The slight give where her index finger presses the soft skin of her breast!), this woman’s warm relationship with the viewer is far from the icy profiles of the fancy high society women portrayed by, say, Domenico Ghirlandaio, or the sometimes… Read more: Raphael’s Fornarina, Sex Work and Cross-Dressing in Renaissance Rome
- Beyoncé, Titian and Me: Pleasure, Drunkenness and Power in the Italian Renaissance NudeThis is adapted from a lecture I gave at the book launch of The Italian Renaissance Nude. Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland, 26 June 2018. As a middle-aged, white, art historian from Leeds, I don’t get compared to Beyoncé as often as I’d like. However, against the odds, I’m going to argue today there’s a… Read more: Beyoncé, Titian and Me: Pleasure, Drunkenness and Power in the Italian Renaissance Nude
- Blade Runner 2049 and the Renaissance NudeI am, perhaps, the only person to see Blade Runner 2049 who was constantly reminded of book 3 of Baldassare Castiglione’s Courtier. It wasn’t the replicants that did it, but the artificially intelligent hologram super-girl, Joi (Ana de Armas), who the hero, Office K (Ryan Gosling) keeps in a device in his pocket and when he… Read more: Blade Runner 2049 and the Renaissance Nude
- How to Get Breasts like Apples: Beauty Tips for the Early Modern WomanOn 27 February 1639 King Philip IV of Spain received a letter from his brother Ferdinand about Rubens’ Judgement of Paris (above). The story of the Judgment of Paris was often represented in early modern texts and images. It’s the one where three Olympian goddesses – Hera, Athena and Aphrodite – compete to be judged the most beautiful… Read more: How to Get Breasts like Apples: Beauty Tips for the Early Modern Woman
- More body hair removal tips for the Renaissance womanI couldn’t resist sharing these thoughts on body hair removal from a Venetian 1562 advice book for women that I stumbled across yesterday (apparently written by a “Greek Queen”, but really by the male physician, Giovanni Marinello). You would have thought that having to deal with scabies, leprosy and “the itch” would have taken up… Read more: More body hair removal tips for the Renaissance woman
- How to see people naked in Renaissance ItalyHow to see naked men Seeing naked or near-naked men in the Renaissance does not seem to have been very difficult. I should point out that looking at naked people is not, necessarily, erotic. Indeed, the word for naked, nudo, in Italian had pejorative connotations, as suggested by the definition of “nudo” in John Florio’s… Read more: How to see people naked in Renaissance Italy
JILL BURKE - Historian | Author | Historical Consultant 