The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [0]
FINALIST FOR THE NEREUS WRITERS’ TRUST NON-FICTION PRIZE
NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY “BEST BOOK”
Praise for The Dirt on Clean
“A terrific history of personal hygiene… Ashenburg has produced a wonderfully interesting and amusing book.”
—Daily Mail
“Utterly charming… Ashenburg’s achievement in this book is to put the daily shower in historical context, and not by chance show us that clean is always relative.”
—The Vancouver Sun
“Ashenburg is a lively and entertaining guide… A sparkling, discursive and witty history: good, clean fun.”
—New Statesman
“A smart gallop… Katherine Ashenburg has unearthed marvellously jaw-dropping material in her research… This is a rich, messy stew of a subject, often irresistibly yucky, and Katherine Ashenburg does it proud. The Dirt on Clean is stuffed to bursting with highly memorable stories and characters.”
—Literary Review of Canada
“The only possible complaint about Ashenburg’s exceptionally enjoyable book is that, being beautifully designed and illustrated, it is not suitable for reading in the bath.”
—The Sunday Times
“Brimming with lively anecdotes, this well-researched, smartly paced and endearing history of Western cleanliness holds a welcome mirror up to our intimate selves, revealing deep-seated desires and fears spanning two thousand-plus years.”
—Publishers Weekly
“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… The book successfully lays bare the fact that our idea of cleanliness is a haphazard construction. By the end, you’ll look at your bathroom a little differently.”
—Quill & Quire
“Katherine Ashenburg has a real gift for making the abhorrent utterly irresistible… We shouldn’t be surprised by her ability to wring eloquence out of something as foul as perspiration, soot and plain old grime.”
—Toronto Star
“Ashenburg rolls up her sleeves and takes us on an engaging tour of hygiene through the ages. Her masterful mix of erudition and anecdote makes this a fascinating, fast-paced read… More than just a witty insight into washing, her book confronts our obsession with preening, plucking and perfuming our bodies so that we smell less like humans and more like exotic fruits… Thought-provoking, charming and great fodder for dinner party chat, this is a memorable read.”
—Time Out
For Kate and John,
who love their bath,
and for Alberto,
always immaculate
“But Didn’t They Smell?”
ONE
The Social Bath: Greeks and Romans
TWO
Bathed in Christ: 200—1000
THREE
A Steamy Interlude: 1000–1550
FOUR
A Passion for Clean Linen: 1550—1750
FIVE
The Return of Water: 1750—1815
SIX
Baths and How to Take Them: Europe, 1815—1900
SEVEN
Wet All Over at Once: America, 1815—1900
EIGHT
Soap Opera: 1900—1950
NINE
The Household Shrine: 1950 to the Present
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Text Permissions
Image Credits
“BUT DIDN’T THEY SMELL?”
For the modern, middle-class North American, “clean” means that you shower and apply deodorant each and every day without fail. For the aristocratic seventeenth-century Frenchman, it meant that he changed his linen shirt daily and dabbled his hands in water but never touched the rest of his body with water or soap. For the Roman in the first century, it involved two or more hours of splashing, soaking and steaming the body in water of various temperatures, raking off sweat and oil with a metal scraper, and giving himself a final oiling—all done daily, in company and without soap.
Even more than in the eye or the nose, cleanliness exists in the mind of the beholder. Every culture defines it for itself, choosing what it sees as the perfect point between squalid and over-fastidious. The modern North American, the seventeenth-century Frenchman and the Roman were each convinced that cleanliness was an important marker of civility and that his way was the royal road to a properly groomed body.
It follows that hygiene has always