The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [36]
Those were the prescriptions. How much did people heed them? The minimal, mainly dry hygiene recommended by authorities must have suited the vast majority, since washing water was still difficult to come by. We have only a few descriptions of routine washing at home, and those mostly come from the elite. Travel memoirs and correspondence are usually a good source of descriptions of daily life, at least of those aspects that a traveller finds unusual or interesting enough to note. But, given the general European inattention to hygiene at the time, memoirs of Continental journeys pay more attention to the state of the bed sheets and the presence of bedbugs than the availability of water for washing.
“I walk’d allmost all over the Town Yesterday, incognito, in my slippers without receiving one spot of Dirt, and you may see the Dutch maids washing the Pavement of the street with more application than ours do our bed chambers.”
—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters, Rotterdam, 3 August 1716
When the English traveller Fynes Moryson toured Germany in 1592, he was amused when the servants at a village inn proffered some sheets they considered clean, since, as they assured him, no one had slept in them recently except for a ninety-year-old woman. On the other hand, the only places where Moryson was given water to wash his feet were in Lübeck and the Prussian towns of Danzig and Elbing. Travellers agreed in finding the streets and houses in the Netherlands and Switzerland the cleanest of all, but Dutch and Swiss bodies did not receive the same attention. The Dutch, for example, scandalized French visitors by eating without first washing their hands.
A DIVINE BATH
When an Englishman fell overboard one day, a Turk said, “Now God has washed you.”
It was when they travelled to the Levant that Europeans encountered bathing customs so strange that they inspired accounts in fascinated, almost anthropological detail. A Swabian doctor, Leonhard Rauwulf, who visited Tripoli in the 1570s, describes the elaborate cleansing procedures he endured in the public bathhouse. After sweating, bathing and undergoing a strenuous massage that ended with the masseur standing on the prone Rauwulf’s shoulder blades, he was taken in hand by an attendant. First, the attendant applied a depilatory concoction of arsenic, quicklime and water to Rauwulf’s superfluous body hair. Then, using a rough cloth made of rope fibres, the attendant washed him all over with soap, finishing with his head. The final touch was the addition of malun, an ash-coloured dirt that cleaned the hair as well as encouraging its growth. Rauwulf’s comment on this remarkable experience distances him from the people who cleaned themselves so thoroughly. Muslims, he explains, have a religious obligation to bathe often, especially before going to the mosque, “to wash themselves clean from their manifold sins which they commit daily.” Either their religion is strangely scrupulous, he implies, or they are extraordinarily sinful—or both.
Surprised in her bath, but not much is revealed. A fine lady’s ablutions in the seventeenth century were limited to hands and occasionally feet.
The Englishman Henry Blount, whose Voyage into the Levant was published in 1636, had a similar reaction to Turkish standards of cleanliness. The first thing the Turks did upon occupying a town, Blount reported, was to erect public baths, which they subsidized, so that any man or woman could wash there for less than two pence. Blount noted, as an unusual fact, “Hee or she who bathe not twice, or thrice a weeke are held nasty.” After urinating or “other uncleane exercise of nature,” these extremely particular people washed their genitals. If a dog touched their hand, they washed it; before