The Dirt on Clean by Katherine Ashenburg
I just finished The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History by Katherine Ashenburg. I love social histories — they help me, as a writer, get my head into different cultures and times. This book is a history of cleanliness in the Western world, from the Greeks and Romans to 2007. It describes the cultural fluctuations in standards of cleanliness in Western Europe and North American, from the Romans spending two hours in the public baths each day to the Elizabethans taking one bath a year, at best, to our current American standards of cleanliness that require an odorless body, regular use of hand sanitizers, and paper-white teeth.
Ashenburg ventures some suggestions about why standards of cleanliness changed over time and between cultures (e.g., Christianity shunned concern with the physical body; Americans had the space and new construction opportunities that made it easier for them to widely incorporate indoor plumbing, etc.), but her book is more descriptive than analytical, written for popular rather than academic reading. It’s easily accessible but points out the impossibility of a writer getting too realistic — can you imagine those historical romances if they were factually accurate? Henri IV of France (1553-1610) is described as notoriously odiferous, and his son Louis XIII is quoted as boasting, “I take after my father, I smell of armpits.” Urk. Or how about this detail: “Shortly before Louis XIV died in 1715, a new ordinance decreed that feces left in the corridors of Versailles would be removed once a week.” Kinda takes the polish off the palace, doesn’t it?
drupagliassotti @ January 28, 2008