Many of our smelly 16th-century forebears thought washing was a certain route to illness and death. Certain early and medieval Christians, rejecting the importance of the body in favour of the immortal soul, deemed keeping clean almost completely unnecessary.
She reveals that the Greeks debated whether using hot water to wash up was a weakening and feminizing luxury, while the Romans, with their lavish, multi-roomed steam baths, didn’t seem to have the same hang-up. With significant research and well-placed examples, Ashenburg outlines just how notions of cleanliness have changed and where they intersect with sexuality, social movements, and, of course, hygiene.
Keeping ourselves clean, just like eating, drinking, and socializing, isn’t just a simple everyday activity, but one fraught with cultural and historical meaning. According to Ashenburg’s history of cleanliness in the western world, royalty of that era rarely, if ever, bathed, preferring instead a constant supply of clean linens and perfumes.Īshenburg, the Toronto-based author of 2002’s The Mourner’s Dance: What We Do When People Die, traces the roots of western cleanliness back to its origins in the gymnasiums of Greece and the opulent baths of Rome. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Katherine Ashenburg’s The Dirt on Clean, it’s that 17th-century Europe must have been a pungent place.
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