The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [30]
Maddened with suspicions about his wife Flammenca’s virtue, the local lord, Archambault, gives up grooming himself: “With unwashed head, unshaven beard, /An ill-bound oat-sheaf he appeared.” (Significantly, when Archambault recovers his senses at the end of the story, he washes his head.) Kept under lock and key by Archambault, Flammenca is charmed by a handsome, soigné stranger named William whom she encounters at mass. When he urges her to meet him in the bathhouse, she tries the usual excuse with her husband—she has a racking pain that only the baths can relieve. Archambault first suggests a daily dose of nutmeg, but eventually he relents and orders the bath owner, “Clean out your baths and make them fresh.” The baths are drained, flushed and filled with water; Flammenca’s maids pack basins and ointments. Flammenca assumes that her rendezvous with William will take place in a private room in the baths. But William, staying in one of the hotels that sprang up around mineral springs, has cleverly had a tunnel dug from the baths to his hotel room, and there the lovers meet daily.
Medieval Polish monks enjoying the bathhouse amenities.
Flammenca and William never use the baths, but her maids and his servants, conveniently two apiece, do. Flammenca sends them off so that she can be alone with William, and the narrator comments,
They seek the baths for fun and sport,
Which they may find of many a sort
Therein are chambers fair and neat
From which Alice and Marguerite
When they come forth, may be in truth
No longer maids…
Lovers bathe in a story in The Decameron, which furnishes as idyllic a description of a bathhouse, or bagnio as it was called in Italy, as any in literature. Invited to join a wealthy woman named Madama Biancofiore in a private apartment at the baths, a Florentine named Salabaetto finds two of her slave girls bearing a large mattress and a basket laden with gear. They set the mattress on a bedstead in the apartment and make it up with fine sheets, pillows and a counterpane. Then the slaves strip, enter the bath, and sweep and clean it. When Madama Biancofiore arrives, she and Salabaetto proceed to the bath: “Without letting any else lay a finger on him, she with her own hands washed Salabaetto all wonder-well with musk and clove-scented soap; after which she let herself be washed and rubbed of the slave-girls.” Wrapped in rose-scented sheets, the bathers are carried to bed, to sweat for a while. Then, they lie about in the nude, enjoying wine and sweetmeats while the slave girls sprinkle them with waters perfumed with rose, jessamine, orange and citron flower. Finally, Madama Biancofiore dismisses the servants, and the two make love. When it comes time to leave, they dress, enjoy more wine and sweetmeats, wash their hands and faces with fragrant waters and leave this earthly paradise.
From these private indiscretions, it was no great leap to professional sexual services. Reports that prostitutes plied their trade in the places where respectable people, including children, went to wash surfaced almost as soon as the bathhouses reappeared. In addition to hot water and steam, customers could often command food, wine and compliant serving maids. The term “stew” or “stewhouse,” which originally referred to the moist warmth of the bathhouse, gradually came to mean a house of prostitution. So long as the baths’ other customers did not feel inconvenienced or menaced, a quiet, well-regulated sideline in prostitution was not necessarily considered a problem. In fifteenth-century France, for example, there was no particular shame attached to patronizing prostitutes, and a bathhouse often became, in addition to its other functions, a bawdy house or maison de tolérance of a slightly better class than the brothels.
As time went by, stricter standards of morality and recurrent fears about crime and the spread of syphilis made the stews more worrisome. In the second half of the twelfth