My favorite example is when I talk about medieval hygiene and someone replies: “but yes, they were dirty in the Middle Ages, look at the French king Louis XIV for example, he never took a bath willingly for his all life”. And then I look at them with a look that is both dejected and tired and I wait to see if they understands on their own.
I feel like the cross section of “people who knew King Louis XIV refused to take baths” and “people who don’t know even approximately when Louis XIV ruled” would be relatively small. Is that not the case?
Me, seeing this saying “medieval people” and realizing it means “a slice of the world’s population that lived in this (probably western European), but I guess fuck the rest and they don’t count”
‘Medieval’ to refer to societies outside of Europe remains a very contested usage.
Fair point, but that doesn’t stop people using “bronze age” and others (often forgetting that the chacolithic is even a thing) within Europe and a bit beyond without acknowledging that the dates for that (and the “iron age” for that matter) can vary a great deal.
“Bronze Age” and “Iron Age” are not regional in the same way that “Medieval” is. They can be used as global or developmental terms (ie ‘The Bronze Age world’, or ‘A Bronze Age society’), but medieval, by contrast, refers to a specific period of time, and, by origin and usage, generally a specific region - Europe. It would be like complaining that Italy is never mentioned as being part of the Sengoku Jidai in the 15th and 16th centuries AD.
Correct me if im wrong, but what you have to think about is the pest. It was so deadly, because the hygiene (in terms of the streets) was terrible causing massive rat populations and therefore spreading the disease.
That’s more about trash disposal than personal hygiene, though.
Lemmy gets it; on BlueSky there were far too many people being all “but they were dirty tho” when they’re really just mixing it up with Late Renaissance / Early Industrial. London was practically unlivable!
At least into the early modern period they restored the understanding that cleanliness was good, just had a harder time achieving it XD
Explanation: While medieval hygiene was far from great by modern standards, especially amongst the non-elite, it was about normal for pre-modern societies. People took baths - if not always in tubs, then at least in the local rivers and streams. The ‘medieval people didn’t bathe’ myth is actually more accurate to the Renaissance period, when a mixture of urban culture in bath-houses making them suspected as places of ‘sin’, and a strange variation of miasma (‘bad smell’) theory caused ~150-200 years of anti-bathing sentiment. Bathing never entirely went away, but became less popular.
Miasma theory was normally used to encourage cleanliness, but in the Renaissance, a prominent variation of the theory was used to discourage bathing - as bathing would open up the pores of the skin, and let the ‘bad air’ in to the body. As long as the ‘miasma’ was on the outside, it was safe!
I’m going to divorce my wife so that I can start dating again, just to ask their opinions on miasma during first dates.
We’re supposed to take bathing info from a pug? Don’t you guys go for the “licking things clean” method of washing?
