Okay, so the Middle Ages aren’t known as the high point of human cleanliness and hygiene. Quite the opposite. The vast majority of the population seemed to be mortally afraid of even the thought of using water to bathe themselves, and hence the vast number of people went their entire lives without a single bath, unless it was accidental, ie; being caught outside during a rainstorm or having to ford a river.
So people were filthy. And stinky.
Actually that doesn’t even come anywhere close to covering it, but suffice to say that if you were somehow instantly transported from the present day back to a medieval village, you’d puke and then likely pass out from the stench of the people around you.
But, those living during that time probably grew used to their own stink, and it soon faded into the background. Ah, but what about sex, specifically oral sex, explicitly, cunnilingus. Having gone down on a woman or two who’s place could best be described as smelling like an overflowing prison toilet and tasting the same*, one can only imagine how pukingly awful the cooze of the Middle Ages smelled and tasted. So how did guys and women manage to stand to do it?
Also how is it that STD’s weren’t running rampant what with no one taking baths or showers or cleaning themselves or wiping very well, if at all?
No, I don’t consider the plague to be an STD, though I have some semi-whack job friends who do.
*The cunnilingus in question lasted no more then 20 seconds, after which I got up, went to the bathroom, brushed my teeth and left.
Do you have evidence that STDs weren’t running rampant in the Middle Ages?
Do you have evidence that oral sex occurred with any regularity in said era?
Just because people didn’t take baths on a regular basis (and even bathing wasn’t as rare as it’s made out to be) that doesn’t mean they didn’t wash their hands, faces, privates, etc with a washbasin.
Yes, your claims about stinkiness are way overblown. I’m no expert in the time period, but I can’t imagine it would be any more stinky than any current third-world country today… Do you have a cite?
I can’t imagine that the men of the time were any less odoriferous, being uncircumcised for the most part, and having 20 years of accumulated ballsack-funk.
Seriously though… I remember reading somewhere that people weren’t as filthy as you might think- they washed & stuff, but just didn’t have much in the way of soaps or anything like that.
In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Miller’s tale details a prank that a pair of lovers play on a man who is outside their window begging for a kiss from the woman–she sticks out her rear end, and he kisses her other lips. He’s disgusted when he realizes what he’s done.
So, doesn’t bode well for oral sex being an accepted practice.
I’m not particularily weel-informed about this issue, but I would want to mention a couple points :
-Actually, what you’re saying about personnal hygiene would rather apply to a later period. During the middle ages, bathing was quite common, at least in the upper classes and urban population. Towns had public baths (that often doubled as brothels) for instance. It’s later on that such an activity began to be considered as both somehow immoral and, surprisingly, detrimental for one’s health. The worst level of hygiene was probably reached during the 17th century or so, not during the middle-ages.
-Also, very generally speaking, and despite a quite surprising level of tolerance for sexual activity of at least young males (women and older married men were another matter entirely), “deviant” sexual practices tended to be very strongly frowned upon and punished. For instance, prostitutes were expected to report to authorities any unusual request (and unusual would include pretty much eveything) and did so. So, oral sex migt not have been as common as you might think it was. Actually, it’s only very recently that oral sex stopped being viewed as a deviant and disgusting practice in the general population.
Also, being filthy and stinky doesn’t mean you’re more likely to have a STD, anyway. You don’t get one just by not bathing.
As far as STDs, syphillis was pretty much unknown in Europe until 1494. There’s debate on whether it existed before that (it’s possible the disease came from the Americas via Columbus’s crew), but that’s the date of the first epidemic.
Gonorrhea did exist, and it was probably known it was transmitted sexually. But people didn’t care. They just lived with it.
Then, the second time he comes for revenge, and instead of her, her other lover sticks his ass out, farts in the guy’s face after he kisses his ass, upon which the fartee shoves a hot poker right into it.
All the while, her husband is asleep… in a suspended tub, as it turns out.
Wait, since when do STDs have anything to do with cleanliness? I thought they were, well, sexually transmitted (or through mixing of the blood from a needle or some such).
Just a WAG here, but isn’t the body self-cleaning to an extent? Standards for personal hygiene are so high nowadays that people can’ t get away anymore with bathing less then three-weekly. But in times when standards were lower, the natural cleaning processes of the body might have been enough.
Dirt dries on the skin and gets rubbed off or falls off when dead skincells go away; dirty hands get clean when the person deals with water.
Even vagina’s clean themselves, and the blood or discharge that the vigana pushes out dries up and gets rubbed off, either by clothing or, if no underwear is worn, by the skin of thighs rubbing together.
I guess what I’m saying is people dont get much dirtier after a certain level of grime. Clothes that weren’t aired out or washed probably stank more then peoples bodies. At least for young and healthy people; I recall that older and sick people are more often mentioned to smell unpleasantly by their temporaries.
People in the Middle Ages may not have bathed in the sense of fully immersing themselves in water (though **clairobscur ** has a good point about baths in the cities), but they did wash. They also laundered their clothes, though obviously not as often as we do.
Someone may correct me on this, but if I recall correctly, somewhere along the line, the Church prohibited oral sex, since it couldn’t result in pregnancy. Not saying it didn’t happen, but I doubt it was as common as it is today.
Even then, they wore shirts/chemises next to their skin, which were laundered regularly. People no longer wear underclothes of that style (with the exception of men’s undershirts and the occasional woman’s slip), so all the body odor/sweat rubs directly on the outer layer. The shirts/smocks take most of the abuse of the body and save the outergarment. This continued right up to the 19th century.
From The Tudor Tailor*, which covers late 15-century and 16th-century England (the reigns of Henry VII and Elizabeth I):
“Linen was worn next to the skin because it was washable. Every baby, child, man and woman, regardless of rank, would have worn a shirt or a smock beneath their other clothes, forming an absorbent barrier between the body and the more expensive outer garments. Apart from linen stockings, these were the only garments that could be washed regularly in hot water. The more shirts and smocks an individual owned, the less frequently washday came around (fig 20 ). The wealthy owned such garments by the dozen and even the poorest of the testators in the Essex wills who left shirts or smocks owned at least two or three. When travelling from Italy to the French court in 1536, the Italian nobleman Ippolito d’Este took the best part of his household with him. The journey was arduous . . . yet Ippolito still wore a clean shit every day and even his stable boys, the lowest ranking of all the servants, were given changes of shirts during the journey.” (pp. 45)
I seem to remember something from an article about medieval sexuality and prostitutes about fellatio, but I might be conflating it with all the sodomy we were reading about. I’ll have to dig out the article on nuns to check out the status of cunnilingus.
[sub]*This is an absolutely amazing book, and if you care a whit about Tudor clothing, you should buy it.[/sub]
