The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [26]
The lore includes plenty of counsel about the relationship between cleanliness and romance. “Do not allow any dirt upon your person,” a character named Love tells a young man, “wash your hands and clean your teeth, and if any speck of black appears in your nails, do not let it stay there. Lace up your sleeves and comb your hair, but do not paint your face or wear make-up: only women do that, and those of evil reputation.” A young woman, for her part, is advised to make love in the dark, to prevent her lover from spotting a blemish or worse on her body: “She should beware lest he find anything dirty there, for if he did, he would be on his way at once, and take to flight with his tail in the air, which would be shameful and distressing for her.” Even more bluntly, the woman is reminded that she must keep her “chamber of Venus” clean.
The Romance conjures up a world of pleasure, in which dainty ladies and elegant gentlemen dance to the music of viols and drums, court over games of dice, backgammon and chess, and feast on exotic new foods such as apricots and oranges. Idealized as it is, the society described in the poem reflects a shift that was noticeable as early as the eleventh century. As Europe organized itself into fiefs and kingdoms, no longer prey to marauding bands of barbarians, and as Christianity’s dominion looked more and more unassailable, both church and state could afford to relax. The new stability made travel less dangerous, and this spurred the development of roads, inns and the importation of luxury goods from afar. Domestic life became more comfortable. Some of the old, austere habits of the early Middle Ages, such as a neglect of personal hygiene, began to strike both clergy and laity as not only unnecessary but undesirable.
An “arsewisp” was what genteel people cleaned themselves with after defecating—a fistful of hay or straw.
CARE OF THE TEETH
“To brush them with urine is a custom of the Spaniards. Food particles should be removed from the teeth, not with a knife or with the nails, in the manner of dogs or cats, and not with a napkin, but with a toothpick of mastic wood, or with a feather, or with small bones taken from the drumsticks of cocks or hens.”
—Erasmus, “On Good Manners for Boys”
Compare St. Benedict’s sixth-century restrictions of baths to old and sick monks with the counsel given in the Ancrene Wisse, in the first half of the thirteenth century. Writing for religious women who had chosen a life of solitude and simplicity, often in small cells positioned near churches, the English author, who may have been a Dominican friar, advises, “Wash yourself whenever there is need as often as you want, and your things, too—filth was never dear to God, though poverty and plainness are pleasing.” There was a revolution of sorts in the quiet phrase “filth was never dear to God.” Scores of early hermits, monks and saints, who cultivated dirt, would have been aghast at this dangerous claim.
Basic behaviour, of course, did not change overnight. Both for lay people and for those in religious life, hands remained the part of the body washed most reliably during the Middle Ages. It was a sensible practice when food was still eaten with the hands, without forks, but its point was also symbolic, as a mark of civility that dated at least to Homer’s day. Medieval paintings of interiors often show a ewer, a basin and a cloth for drying hands in a corner of the room. Encountering people who did not wash their hands was worthy of remark: Sone of Nansay, the wandering hero of a thirteenth-century French romance, for example, notes with dismay