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How to be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity. By Jill Burke.
《如何成为文艺复兴时期的女性：关于美丽和女性创造力的秘史》，吉尔·伯克著。（上）
Three litres of blood from a healthy red-headed man "no older than 25 or 30" could fix bad skin. Eating nettles was a trick for rosier cheeks. A paste made from marble, wheat and bryony, a poisonous plant, could whiten skin.
用健康红发男子（年龄不超过25岁或30岁）的3升血液可以修复受损皮肤。食用荨麻是让脸颊红润的秘诀。一种由大理石、小麦和泻根（一种有毒植物）制成的浆糊可以美白皮肤。
Most beauty products in Renaissance Italy were made from ingredients that seem strange or foolhardy to modern eyes. But in "How to be a Renaissance Woman", a lively new history of beauty culture in 16th- and 17th-century Italy, make-up is a tool to understand society and the female experience.
在现代人看来，文艺复兴时期意大利的大多数美容产品的原料要么十分奇怪，要么过于大胆。但在《如何成为文艺复兴时期的女性》这本关于16世纪和17世纪意大利美容文化的生动新史书中，化妆是了解社会和女性经历的工具。
Men controlled finance and government. Women cared about their appearances because "they had to", not because they were frivolous, argues Jill Burke, a professor at the University of Edinburgh.
在当时，男性控制着金融和政府。爱丁堡大学教授吉尔·伯克认为，女性在意自己的外表不是因为她们肤浅无聊，而是因为她们"不得不在意"。
Beauty and power intertwined: an attractive appearance offered better marriage prospects and social status. Beauty products were no mere frippery. They could be both weapons and shields.
美色和权力相互交织：漂亮的外表能带来更好的婚姻和社会地位。美容产品并非只是庸脂俗粉。它们既可以是武器，也可以是盾牌。
Marriage manuals of the day recommended wife-beating, and cosmetic recipe-books shared tips on how to hide "dead blood" from blows to the face using wild mint leaves.
当时的婚姻手册推崇殴打妻子，而美容指导手册则分享了一些小技巧，教女性如何使用野生薄荷叶来遮盖面部因受到击打而产生的"瘀血"。
Giovanna de Grandis, a woman from Rome, was hung alongside four other women for selling a poison disguised as a blemish remover that killed 46 men. (Ms Burke thinks the men may have been abusing their wives.)
来自罗马的女子乔瓦娜·德·格兰迪斯与另外四名女子一起被绞死，因其将毒药伪装成遮瑕膏进行出售，导致46名男子死亡。(伯克认为，这些男子可能一直都在虐待他们的妻子。)
One dignitary guessed that 500 men could have been killed by de Grandis's toxic mixture, their deaths mistaken for plague fatalities. Cosmetics are a big business--worth $430bn in 2022--but all too often they are dismissed as trivial.
一位政要猜测，可能有500人死于德·格兰迪斯的毒药，却被误认为是得了瘟疫而死亡。化妆品算得上一门大宗业务（2022年化妆品市场规模高达4300亿美元），但却往往遭人忽视，被认为是微不足道的小生意。
"What we do with our hair, face and body reflects and affects our social world," Ms Burke argues. Academic purists may balk at what they perceive as a chatty "history-lite" approach, but Ms Burke draws all her conclusions from primary sources (many of which she translated from the Italian herself).
伯克认为："我们如何对待头发、脸部和身体，既反映了社会现实，又反过来对其产生影响。"学术纯粹主义者可能会认为这是一本漫谈式的"轻历史"书，但伯克书中的所有结论都来自原始资料（其中许多是她自己从意大利语翻译而来的）。
