The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [24]
Following Christ’s example, monks greeted guests to the monastery by washing their hands and feet. For themselves, they performed their ablutions—in some monasteries, a painstaking cleaning each Saturday—without resorting to a full bath except on rare occasions. Monks troubled with carnal desires were prescribed cold baths, and warm ones were given to the sick. The ninth-century monastery of St. Gall, in Switzerland, provided baths in the infirmary as well as a bathhouse in the cloister. But baths and the monastic code of virile abstinence made an uncomfortable pairing. The Rule of St. Benedict, written about 528 for an order that combined manual work with contemplation, reserved them for the old and ill: “Let baths be granted to the sick as often as it shall be expedient, but to those in health, and especially to the young, they shall seldom be permitted.”
“As to our baths, there is not much that we can say, for we only bathe twice a year, before Christmas and before Easter.”
—Ulrich, a monk of Cluny, ca. 1075
The baths taken before Christmas at the Canterbury monastery sound more tense than festive. The monks gathered in the cloister and were summoned to the bathhouse in groups. They bathed in silence, alone, in a cubicle surrounded by a curtain, and as quickly as possible. “When he has sufficiently washed,” according to the monastery constitution, “he shall not stay for pleasure, but rise, dress and return to the cloister.” Other orders allowed three baths a year, before the feasts of Christmas, Easter and Pentecost, but monks whose holiness trumped cleanliness could decline any or all baths. Three a year represented a level of cleanliness that was probably below the upper-class standard of the day but above that of the peasantry.
According to that rule of thumb, some of the cleanest people in early medieval Europe were married Jewish women below the age of menopause. A niddah, as a menstruating woman was called, had to purify herself by immersing herself in a ritual bath called a mikveh. That happened seven days after the end of her period, and only after that was she able to resume a sexual life with her husband. (The mikveh had other uses—converts were immersed during the initiation ceremony, and especially religious Jews took a ritual bath on the eve of the Sabbath and holidays. Glass and metal dishes and pots that had been made by non-Jews also had to be purified in the mikveh before they touched food.)
The mikveh itself did not make the woman using it clean so much as did the preliminary bath in warm water that had to be taken before the mikveh. The niddah, including her hair and nails, had to be physically immaculate when she entered the ritual pool so that nothing came between her skin and the mikveh waters. Barring infrequent periods, pregnancy and lactation (and the prescribed resumption of sex midway through a woman’s monthly cycle must have ensured a high rate of pregnancy and lactation), that meant that a woman took a minimum of twelve serious baths a year—an impressive number for the day. It seems that many women developed a liking for baths and took them even more frequently: a rabbi in the Ashkenazic community of northern France and the Rhineland complained that women had made washing a “permanent practice,” not the scrupulous, pre-mikveh cleansing but an altogether more carefree endeavour. And because they had washed a few days before the mikveh, the rabbi wrote, they assume it’s sufficient, but meanwhile “all their scales and scabs have dried on to them and block the water of immersion from reaching their skin, and thus their immersion is not valid.”
A sixteenth-century painting of Bathsheba and her servants at a mikveh. The placement of the ritual bath in a basement is accurate, but the headdresses worn by the bathers would have been forbidden, as nothing could come between the water and the woman being purified.
Although Jewish women had the most clear-cut obligation to bathe, all Jews were commanded by the Talmud