Abstract The essay considers the explosion of medical advice publications in the vernacular thatcharacterises the first two centuries of printing, and in particular their chronology and the different textual genres that made up this literature in early modern Italy. It shows that, in spite of the almost exclusive focus on recipe books in recent scholarship, the composition of this literature was much more varied and regimens of health, food regimens, books about the medicinal properties of naturalia, and compendia of medical information of various kinds (diagnostic, preventative and therapeutic) matched and sometimes exceeded the fortune of recipe books. It then goes on to ask what made some vernacular medical advice books particularly appealing to a wide non-professional and non-Latinate audience,while apparently similar publications attracted little interest. To this end it pays unprecedented attention to the full range of elements that determined the appeal of a book: its physical and typographical features, its contents and implicit functions, its author, patron, publisher and geographical reach.
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