Abstract
‘Wine, sex and baths ruin our bodies, but they are the stuff of life,’ according to the tombstone of a Roman freedman at Pompeii.1 It is striking that baths are described as damaging to the body; we might have expected that they were considered an important part of a health and beauty regime, but for the Romans bathing was primarily a social event. Many Roman villas had bath suites, but what is notable about the Roman world is the extent of public bathing. Every city had a public water supply and public baths, and the entry charges were moderate. The baths were open for rich and poor, free and slaves, and maintaining them was a civic duty taken on by public figures. It was normal practice to go to the baths to make and meet friends (and also lovers), do business deals and relax in pleasurable surroundings. The first Christians lived in a Roman culture, and most would certainly have considered both public and private bathing to be usual and pleasurable. The cult of asceticism was not a fundamental aspect of early Christianity, but developed gradually during the third and fourth centuries, and was not general practice.2 Saints who refrained from washing for years — the practice known as alousia — were the exception to the rule; there would have been no point in this renunciation if no one else washed either. Melania the Younger, granddaughter of one of the ascetic Roman ladies in Jerome’s circle, gave up bathing as part of her campaign to persuade her husband to agree to a chaste marriage; she clearly understood that this would make her less attractive.3
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1988).
Stephanie Hoss, Baths and Bathing: The Culture of Bathing and the Baths and Thermae in Palestine from the Hasmoneans to the Moslem Conquest (Oxford, 2005), p. 86.
F. Yegül, Bathing in the Roman World (Cambridge, 2010), p. 202.
Chs 15–17, trans. David Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford, 1995), p. 297; cited by
Virginia Smith, Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity (Oxford, 2007), pp. 139–40.
Louis Réau, Iconographie de l’art chrétien, 3 vols in 6 (Paris, 1956), I.i, pp. 273 and 395.
See for instance J.-P. Leguay, L’Eau dans la ville au moyen âge (Rennes, 2002)
and Peter Cramer, Baptism and Change in the Early Middle Ages c.200—c.1150 (Cambridge, 1993).
John Capgrave, Life of St Katherine of Alexandria, ed. Karen A. Winstead, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, 1999), 3. 1069–73.
Eustace Deschamps, ‘Cent mille foys a vous me recommans’, Eustache Deschamps en son temps, ed. Jean Patrice Boudet, Hélène Millet and Karin Becker (Paris, 1997), p. 156, lines 5–8.
Michael Camille, Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (London, 1998), p. 81.
Roberta Magnusson, Water Technology in the Middle Ages: Cities, Monasteries, and Watenvorks after the Roman Empire (London, 2001).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Elizabeth Archibald
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Archibald, E. (2015). Bathing for Beauty in the Middle Ages. In: Saunders, C., Macnaughton, J., Fuller, D. (eds) The Recovery of Beauty: Arts, Culture, Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426741_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426741_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-57779-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-42674-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)