The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [39]
Even as fashions changed, it remained important to expose your linen. In 1711, the Spectator described an English beau who unbuttoned his chic silk waistcoat in several places “to let us see that he had a clean shirt on which was ruffled down to his middle.” Inventories of wardrobes and wills show that people owned more shirts than any other article of clothing, and the number of shirts continued to grow through the eighteenth century. At the end of that century, Casanova met a young Italian man of letters in England, who summed up a life of frugal self-sufficiency: “I work at literature, am all alone, earn enough for my wants. I live in furnished lodgings, I own twelve shirts and the clothes I stand up in, and I am perfectly contented.” The twelve shirts are a crucial detail, proving that he has enough linen to present a gentlemanly appearance.
At a higher social level, Casanova describes a young man brought up in Paris: “He can ride, play the flute, fence, dance a minuet, reply politely, present himself gracefully, talk nonsense prettily, change his linen every day, and dress himself elegantly.” A daily change of linen required servants, and one of the chief duties of chambermaids or manservants was the care of their employer’s undergarments. A French household manual from 1691 emphasizes at length the maid’s responsibility for her mistress’s linen. As for the skin under the immaculate linen, the servant need only know how to draw a foot bath and make a paste to clean the hands.
Since washing the body happened so seldom, it ceased to be a subject for painters. In place of the medieval woodcuts and illuminated manuscripts that pictured warmly sensuous bathhouse scenes came painterly odes to linen. The seventeenth-century Dutch in particular favoured outdoor scenes of cloth lying in bleaching fields and interiors that celebrated pure white, precisely arranged stacks of linen. In 1663, Pieter de Hooch painted two women carefully depositing such a freshly laundered pile in the chest that stands prominently in the front hall. The painting, called The Linen Chest, is full of right angles, suggestive of the orderly way of life espoused by the Dutch bourgeoisie—the tiled floor, windows, doors and, above all, the inlaid chest and its precious, squared-away contents. In contrast, the round laundry basket by the door, with the dirty linen flung untidily over its rim, symbolizes the squalor and mess that must be avoided.
Naturally, there were national variations and peculiarities that coexisted with the general European distaste for washing with water. In Spain, the early Christian concerns about the corrupting influence of bathing and the late medieval worries about the plague were compounded by the Moorish occupation. Because the Moor was clean, the Spanish decided that Christians should be dirty. Many of the Moorish baths were destroyed by orders of Ferdinand and Isabella after the conquest of Granada in 1492, but enough remained that Philip II definitively banned them in 1576. Moors who converted to Christianity were not allowed to take baths, and a damning piece of evidence at the Inquisition, levelled against both Moors and Jews, was that the accused “was known to bathe.”
Spanish confessors were urged to question their female penitents minutely about private washing and not to absolve those who washed regularly. Isabella, the daughter of Philip II, became a national heroine when she vowed, in 1601, not to change her shift until the siege of Ostend was over. It lasted three years, three months and thirteen days, by which time her white undergarment had turned tawny-coloured.
“To cure the goat-like stench of armpits, it is useful to press and rub the skin with a compound of roses.”
—sixteenth-century French recipe
By contrast, the German-speaking countries, where public baths were a particularly cherished institution, were slower to close them than the Spanish, French and English. This was true of eastern European bathhouses in general, where, in the words of the historian Fernand Braudel,