Why the medieval antipathy toward baths?

Factual Questions
21

[QUOTE=coffeecat]
Maybe not autoclave themselves every morning like we do, but why didn’t medieval Christian Europe get the stink off now and then?
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Again, they did. The people who are quoted as being proud of not bathing (i.e. Napoleon’s letter to Josephine - “Don’t bathe, I’m coming!”) aren’t the hovel dwellers but the really, really rich. That is, the one’s who were proud of the fact that they didn’t need to sweat. So asking why they didn’t bathe is like asking why foot binding was popular or why long fingernails were sexy or pale skin beautiful or tanned skin beautiful - each one was, to its culture, a signal of wealth and prosperity, essentially saying, “I don’t toil in the fields all day like SOME people!”

Most regular folks weren’t THAT adverse to bathing, and they bathed something daily somehow. They just didn’t share the notion that one would even *want *to immerse themselves in water everyday. Neither do a lot of people today.

Didn’t we just have a thread about how disgusting Americans seem to some other cultures because we wipe our asses with dry paper after shitting instead of splashing, spraying or rubbing with water? Same difference of cultural standards.

22

You know, DrDeth, I think I was wrong.

23

[QUOTE=Sampiro]
My own oldest relatives, most of them born in the last 2 decades of the 20th century…
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Your oldest relatives are no older than 27? :wink:

24

[QUOTE=Sampiro]
I have a friend who grew up in a moderately wealthy (by their standards) extended family in rural Laos. The family home consisted of several related immediate families and their servants; one of the servants did nothing but bring water to the house for cooking/bathing/cleaning/drinking/etc. and purify it by boiling. It was a full-time job.

[/QUOTE]
They have (or had) such servants in India, too. In parts of the North, at least, they are called bishtis. Bishti is also used to designate a Moslem caste of water bearers; in some village one or more bishtis have the job of hauling water for the whole village. In Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, the bishti is frequently mentioned as preparing a bath for a British officer or upper class British family.

25

A couple weeks ago I had an unexpected water cut on my apartment, 10 minutes before I had to leave to work; I managed to completely bathe (minus washing my hair with shampoo) with a 2 litre water bottle*. You really don´t really need many buckets of water to get yourself clean.

Oh yes, they restored the water 2 minutes after I bathed, the bastards.

*I got an “Honorary Bedouin” certificate as a result. :stuck_out_tongue:

26

[QUOTE=coffeecat]
Under those circumstances, I’d make a lot of soap every couple of months. Bathing? Maybe a spongebath (ragbath)–all over, not just hands, face, and crotch.

[snip]

but if our ancestors were as lazy as we are, they’d have run around naked eating dirt. I can’t see people used to backbreaking labor for everything saying, “That’s where I draw the line!” when it came to keeping clean, and other cultures with no better technology did somehow manage to bathe. Maybe not autoclave themselves every morning like we do, but why didn’t medieval Christian Europe get the stink off now and then?
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First off they did do that at times. Second, you’re talking about a very dangerous checmical process with no saefty goglles or anything. People routinely died making lye.

Second, while backbreaking labor was not forieng tio them, yes, they were exactly as lazy as we were. Every additional peice of work is more calories to burn and if you just plowed a field that day, you’re not doing anything unneccessary if you can even walk upright.

27

[QUOTE=Zoggie]
We can’t copy/paste from snopes, and I don’t really want to write the whole thing out, so I’m afraid I can’t give you the direct quote.
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Actually you can, with a little work. Just select the whole page with ctl-A, paste it into Notepad or any editor, and delete the bits you don’t want, then you can paste those in here.

28

Kinda makes me wonder why use of the strigil died out.

29

If the hot water does fail you right before you need to wash your hair, a tea kettle will do the job. Full with water, heat up and pour on hair when in he tub/shower or leaning over the sink. The standard kettle holds just enough to wet your hair. Then refill and heat while working in the shampoo, and use a full kettle for rinsing.

30

Many Europeans, poor included, did bathe regularly. The Viking Saturday bath was pointed out above; I’ll also mention that the Finns had their sauna, and the Russians the banya. The sauna was the first building built on any new farm, and the family lived in it while the house was being built. It was kept scrupulously clean, and women went there to give birth, which makes sense, as it was a clean, warm place, with warm washing water available. Even if soap was in short supply, people would get a nice clean pine and birch scents from the wood benches and from the whisks, used to stimulate circulation. Jumping into a cold lake, or rolling in the snow in between getting good and hot in the sauna, stimulates circulation even more.

Even in modern times, the sauna is an important setting not only for getting clean (and after a good sweat in the sauna and a wash, you feel clean inside and out, not like a bath where you marinate in your dirt), but for socialization and business and political negotiations.

Europe is not just the UK and France and Germany.

31

Christians did disapprove of bathing because it had pagan associations, but it had nothing to do with Rome.

In pagan western europe, there were a number of related pagan religions, the best known being Druidism. The Druids practised ritual bathing, and cleanliness was an important part of their culture.

When Christianity was in the process of taking over, they did two things:

  1. They took over some elements of pre-Christian religious practice. For instance, they built churches on the sites of pre-Christian temples and holy places. Yule, the winter solstice, became Christmas. And so on.

  2. They discouraged practices that were identified with the old religions. Druids washed as part of their ritual, so anyone who washed too regularly was in danger of being accused of being a secret pagan.

Simple as that. Since it was literally dangerous to wash too often, it didn’t take long for it to go out of fashion. Culturally, suspicion of anyone who washed too often lasted a lot longer than memories of what led to the suspicion in the first place. We only know about Druidic ritual bathing from written records of Roman era observers. Despite the people who dress up and call themselves Druids in modern times, their beliefs and practices are only known from the records of hostile observers.

32

[QUOTE=WhyNot]
Again, they did. The people who are quoted as being proud of not bathing (i.e. Napoleon’s letter to Josephine - “Don’t bathe, I’m coming!”) aren’t the hovel dwellers but the really, really rich. snip.
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I thought that letter from Napoleon to Josephine was asking her not to bathe because he was sexually excited by her natural odors, and didn’t want them washed away. This would pretty much assume that she was bathing regularly. However, the Bonapartes did not live in Medieval times so perhaps the whole question is moot.

IME, hovel dwellers are rarely quoted on anything. :slight_smile:

33

[QUOTE=djetz]
Christians did disapprove of bathing because it had pagan associations, but it had nothing to do with Rome.

In pagan western europe, there were a number of related pagan religions, the best known being Druidism. The Druids practised ritual bathing, and cleanliness was an important part of their culture.
[/QUOTE]

By the time Christianity became the religion of Rome and was able to use the state to persecute anyone, let alone bathers, Druidism only survived in Ireland, so “We don’t bathe because the Druids did it” might explain why the Irish in the Middle Ages didn’t bathe, but not the rest of Europe.

And, of couse, as previous posters have shown, there wasn’t a particular medieval antipathy towards baths; people enjoyed bathing and bathed when they could. It was just inconvenient to do it too often.

34

[QUOTE=Captain Amazing]
By the time Christianity became the religion of Rome and was able to use the state to persecute anyone, let alone bathers, Druidism only survived in Ireland…
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Much of Poland and the baltic states was still pagan up until the Knights Hospitaller crusaded through them long after the Roman Empire.

35

[QUOTE=Hypno-Toad]
Much of Poland and the baltic states was still pagan up until the Knights Hospitaller crusaded through them long after the Roman Empire.
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Right. But the other poster was talking about Druidism, and how ritual bathing was associated with it, so I was restricting my comments to just that.

36

Going back to the OP, I was under the impression that public baths were common until the Bla Plague. After that, people becaue terrified that a lot of things, and often public baths were seen as causing the menace. While incorrect, it wasn’t a totally off guess, as contaminated bath water can spread some diseases.

37

[QUOTE=Captain Amazing]
By the time Christianity became the religion of Rome and was able to use the state to persecute anyone, let alone bathers, Druidism only survived in Ireland, so “We don’t bathe because the Druids did it” might explain why the Irish in the Middle Ages didn’t bathe, but not the rest of Europe.

And, of couse, as previous posters have shown, there wasn’t a particular medieval antipathy towards baths; people enjoyed bathing and bathed when they could. It was just inconvenient to do it too often.
[/QUOTE]

I didn’t mean pagan ritual washing was the only reason, I meant that it was one of the reasons. The Romans in England wiped out the Druid priesthood, true, but only those Britons that assimilated (and thought of themselves as “Romans”) would have ditched their old spiritual beliefs. The Romans were pretty tolerant of other religions, despite the stories about throwing Christians to the lions.

The Romans occupied England from 54 AD till around the year 400. That’s a long time, but Christianity was only significant there after around 300, and it didn’t really take over as the dominant religion till long after the Romans had left.

So what did the general population worship between the suppression of the Druid priesthood before the year 100 and the takeover of Christianity around 600?

Well, after the Romans left, England was invaded by the Anglo-Saxons. Who were pagans. Who had, in fact, much the same spiritual beliefs and practices as the Druids. And it was only after the Anglo-Saxons - including their religion - took over that Christian missionaries started arriving in force.

As the Hypno-Toad points out, much of northern europe was completely pagan up until the first millennium. And those pagans practised ritual bathing, same as the Druids, right up to medieval times when Christianity became all powerful in Europe.

So, an important fact in the debate about why bathing wasn’t popular in medieval times is that bathing was identified with current pagan practices.

I mentioned the Druids because everybody’s heard of them. I was not saying that there were still “Druids” in the dark ages, I was saying that the spiritual practices of the dominant pagan religions at the time were druid-like.

Ritual bathing was a regular part of pagan practice until Christianity completely took over. It was then suppressed by the Church. This then influenced society’s attitude towards regular bathing. I’m not saying it’s the complete answer, I am saying it is part of the answer.

To quote the original question: “So, why did medieval Europeans hate baths? And why was not taking a bath something to be proud of?”

“Bathing was identified with pagan religions” is an important part of the answer.

38

[QUOTE=djetz]
I mentioned the Druids because everybody’s heard of them. I was not saying that there were still “Druids” in the dark ages, I was saying that the spiritual practices of the dominant pagan religions at the time were druid-like.

Ritual bathing was a regular part of pagan practice until Christianity completely took over. It was then suppressed by the Church. This then influenced society’s attitude towards regular bathing. I’m not saying it’s the complete answer, I am saying it is part of the answer.

To quote the original question: “So, why did medieval Europeans hate baths? And why was not taking a bath something to be proud of?”

“Bathing was identified with pagan religions” is an important part of the answer.
[/QUOTE]

But what I’m saying is, first of all, that the question is flawed. It’s like asking, “Why don’t Americans eat dairy products?” I could probably come up with all sorts of theories as to why Americans don’t, some of them really plausable. The problem with all my theories is that, for the most part, Americans do eat dairy products. It’s the same with “Why did medieval Europeans hate baths?” Before trying to come up with an answer to the question, you need to make sure the assumptions behind the question is true, and in that case, it’s not. Medieval Europeans didn’t hate baths. They liked baths. They took baths. They built public baths. They drew pictures of people bathing. They wrote about bathing.

In fact, here’s a picture from the Manesse Codex of a guy being bathed:

http://www.manesse.de/img/020.jpg

Secondly, where’s your evidence either that other pagan practices were like the Druids, or that the Church condemned bathing for that reason? Some church leaders did condemn bathing, but the reasons they gave had nothing to do with paganism. The main complaints they had about bathing were that bathing too often was indulgent, and that mixed bathing could lead to sex. Nothing about paganism.

39

[QUOTE=djetz]

In pagan western europe, there were a number of related pagan religions, the best known being Druidism. The Druids practised ritual bathing, and cleanliness was an important part of their culture.
[/QUOTE]

Pretty much everything we know about Druids was written by the pagan Romans, and I don’t remember anyhing about bathing.

And, even if you try to cover this with a “well it wasn’t the Druids, it was other pagan religions” :dubious: they were pretty damn different (from what little we know the Celts and Viking pagan faiths were very different)and in any case we know *very little *about their actual religious practices.
So, Cite?