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By Root 737 0

or premises for men and women would be ordered or reinstated. Unlike the south, the countries north of the Alps had an ease about undress that began with the journey to the baths. A miniature in a German manuscript from 1405 shows a woman entering a bathhouse from its exterior staircase, casually holding a sheet to her front, with her derrière fully exposed. Hippolyt Guarinonius, an Italian doctor who lived in Germany, scolded his neighbours for allowing families, including adolescent children, to walk naked and near-naked through town on their way to the baths. Laws were enacted to ensure more decorum in the streets, and sometimes they were obeyed.

A Swiss picture of an outdoor bath at Baden shows bathers in various stages of dress and undress (but always hatted), and their onlookers.

German and Swiss nonchalance about nudity shocked travellers from Mediterranean countries. In 1414, a sophisticated Florentine writer and collector of ancient manuscripts named Gian-Francesco Poggio journeyed to the Swiss baths of Baden, near Zurich. He describes a prosperous city in a valley, where the central square was ringed with thirty magnificent buildings, all public or private baths. To the Italian’s amazement, although segregated into a men’s section and a women’s, naked bathers were clearly visible to those of the opposite sex. In this Edenic scene of apparently innocent pleasure, bathers “contemplate, chat, gamble, and unburden the mind, and they stay while the women enter and leave the water, their full nakedness exposed to everyone’s view.” Windows had been cut into the grilles that nominally separated the sexes, so that bathers on both sides could admire and even touch one another. Torn between surprised laughter, lascivious thoughts and admiration, Poggio marvels at husbands who take no offence as their wives are touched by strangers, and at men who mingle in the nude or near-nude with female relatives or friends. “Every day they go to bathe three or four times,” he rhapsodizes, “spending the greater part of the day singing, drinking, and dancing… And it is charming to see young girls, already ripe for marriage, in the fullness of their nubile forms, their faces striking with nobility, standing and moving like goddesses.”

A woman wants to go to Baden, But does not want her husband to follow her.

—Traditional Swiss song

Contemporary illustrations corroborate Poggio’s goggle-eyed description of the baths at Baden. A French manuscript illuminated for the Duke of Burgundy in the late fifteenth century pictures a more elegant scene, a bathhouse that caters to couples. Turbaned men and women, otherwise unclothed, eat and drink in two-seater tubs. Another couple, still in their turbans, have already gone to bed in an adjoining room. A Polish drawing provides a rougher, satirical look at another side of bathhouse life. A tonsured monk lies in a tub, having his head and body massaged by two young bath maids in diaphanous gowns. A second monk lies at his ease on a bench, his hand on a maid’s breast while she holds a ewer of water.

PRIESTS AT THE STEWS

Methinks it must be a bad Divinitie

That with the stews hath such affinitie.

—Fourteenth-century English ballad

At its most refined, a bathhouse became a watery banquet hall, where troubadours played music and the patrons, nude but wearing elaborate headdresses, jewellery and makeup in the case of the women, ate and drank on floating trays or on boards spread across the bath. Bathhouses were inevitably titillating, and they quickly became known as good places for dalliance. Poggio summed up the erotic possibilities at Baden: “All who want to make love, all who want to marry or who otherwise look for pleasure, they all come here where they find what they are looking for.”

In medieval poems and stories, men and women bent on adultery often use the baths as their meeting place, their alibi or both. In The Romance of Flammenca, which takes place in the French spa of Bourbon-l’Archambault, baths provide the cover for an extramarital love affair. Interesting for its realistic