The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [32]
As in Rome, however comfortable the bath chamber in a private mansion or castle, the public baths would outdo them when it came to the diversity of the accommodations and the sociability of the experience. In the sixteenth century, Count Froben Christof von Zimmern made a large claim for the bathhouses. It was their attractions, he noted scornfully, that had tempted the German aristocracy down from their isolated castles. “Our ancestors once lived on high mountains in their castles and palaces,” he wrote. “Back then loyalty and faith still existed among them. But today we are giving up our mountain fortresses and dwell in them no longer; instead we wish to live in the plains, so that we don’t have to go far to the baths.”
TUDOR RE-GIFTING
In 1539, after noticing that Philip of Bavaria picked his teeth with a pin, Lady Lisle sent him a tooth picker. She had owned and used it for seven years before passing it on to the Bavarian duke.
Although still tremendously popular, the bathhouses in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were increasingly seen as places that disrupted the peace and encouraged bad behaviour. But, although an unsavoury reputation lost them a certain amount of goodwill, it was disease more than sin that did them in. The disease was the most catastrophic pandemic the world has yet known, the bubonic plague that killed at least one out of every three Europeans within a four-year period in the mid-fourteenth century. The Black Death, as it was called because of the characteristic dark, festering lumps in the groins, armpits and necks of its victims, originated in Asia and was transported to Europe by rats. Beginning in 1347 the Black Death invaded Italy, Spain, France, England, Germany, Austria and Hungary, sometimes travelling two and a half miles a day. By the time its first visitation had ended, twenty-five million people had died.
No one has described the plague’s attack on individuals and society better than Boccaccio did shortly after it devastated Florence. The Decameron’s one hundred stories are so lighthearted and festive that it’s easy to forget that their tellers have fled to the countryside near Florence in fear for their lives, and spin their tales to distract themselves from the surrounding horror. Before the stories—escapist literature in more ways than one—begin, Boccaccio gives a dispassionate, almost clinical account of the disease. In spite of prayers, processions and last-minute attempts at sanitation, it spread through Florence unchecked while doctors and priests stood helplessly by. Patients generally died on the third day after the appearance of the fatal lumps, some of which were as big as apples (they were swollen lymph nodes), and anyone who had so much as touched something handled by the sick person risked infection.
Victims of the Black Death had buboes, dark, festering lumps in their groins, armpits and necks.
The plight of the sick was terrifying enough, but Boccaccio was even more confounded by the plague’s effect on the able-bodied members of society. He watched as a panic-stricken populace rapidly sloughed off civility and something worse than barbarism took its place. Brothers fled from sick brothers, wives from their husbands and even mothers from their own children. The time-honoured mourning observances, in which women would lament in the house where the dead person was laid out, and men would congregate respectfully at the threshold of the house, were abandoned, and corpses were deposited in mass burial pits without ceremony or attendants.
Another Florentine observer, Marchionne di Coppo Stefani, chose an unforgettable image to describe the burials. Every morning,