Tea at Trianon: People in the Middle Ages Practiced Cleanliness

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, February 4, 2023

People in the Middle Ages Practiced Cleanliness

From TFP:

One of the most enduring myths about the Middle Ages is that the period was not clean. The conditions of the time supposedly did not allow for personal hygiene and sanitation. Most people assume that cleanliness was, at best, reserved for a privileged few.

History does not support this distorted vision. In fact, The Wall Street Journal (Jan. 14-15, 2023) recently published a story in which author Eleanor Janega admitted in the title “The Middles Ages Were Cleaner Than We Think.” Much cleaner, it seems, than even later periods.

Obviously, the technology of the time did not permit developments like modern plumbing. However, the framework for clean living was in place. There was a universal desire to be clean at all levels of medieval society. Indeed, the Middle Ages might be considered the initiator of the quest for cleanliness.
Like most medieval matters, religion played a great role in securing this civilizing achievement. Dr. Janega claims the medievals took to heart the expression that cleanliness is next to godliness. People associated a clean and ordered body with virtue and purity. Impurity and vice were rightly associated with sinfulness and dirtiness.

The most important concern of most individuals was the state of their souls. A person’s interior disposition toward virtue naturally manifested itself exteriorly in the form of cleanliness. When this concern became generalized, society tended toward purity and cleanliness.
Thus, in almost every field of hygiene and personal presentation, medieval people found ways to be clean. Historians have long documented this fact. Writing in the early twentieth century, renowned Belgian historian Godfrey Kurth affirms, “It was the Renaissance, which permitted the habits of cleanliness of the Middle Ages gradually to fall into desuetude, substituting for them a negligence which degenerated into the most repulsive uncleanliness.” (Read more.)