Concepts of cleanliness: changing attitudes in France since the Middle Ages

In 1914, Sir Edward Grey saw the lights going out all over Europe. Rather similarly, George Vigarello's latest book opens, at the end of the Middle Ages, with the bath-houses being closed down all over Europe. Therein lies, of course, a studied evocation of dejai vu for the AIDS-obsessed present. But Vigarello's image also encapsulates one of the key ironies of the history of cleanliness, which his rich and subtle book is so successful in exploring. A Whiggish history of hygiene might anticipate finding a "filthy" Middle Ages being superseded by a somewhat less grubby early modern epoch, prior to the triumph of our enlightened, hygienic present. Yet, prima facie, Vigarello's vignette seems to be presenting us with the exact reverse: a medieval era in which public bathing was commonplace, giving way to a Renaissance and a Baroque in which baths, public and private, became a great rarity. Was the waning of the Middle Ages, then, a hygienic disaster? But this would be a question malposee, as Vigarello convincingly demonstrates. Every age, he insists, gives radically different meanings of its own to such culture-dependent categories as clean and dirty, and invents special technologies of its own for securing its desiderata of hygiene. The medieval bath-houses were closed, not because people became indifferent to cleanliness, but because these institutions came to be perceived-in the age when syphilis was raging uncontrolled throughout Europe-not as loci of cleanliness but as sinks of filth, medical and moral alike. Thereafter, in the succeeding centuries, the pursuit of hygiene was to be carried on less through public works than by private endeavours: personal grooming, the individual cultivation of good manners (use of handkerchiefs, etc.), and so forth. And-another shock to any remaining Whiggish preconceptions we might entertain-it was to be achieved through minimizing recourse to water, which early modem cosmology, drawing especially upon the new science of microscopy, saw as an animalcule-riddled pollutant which all too readily seeped into the body through the gaping pores of the skin. Associated with odalisques and exoticism, the water of the bath became conflated with sensuality and hence filth. For this reason, it was the achievement of the seventeenth century to perfect "dry cleaning": brushing, friction, combing, applying essential oils and powders. The age of Louis XIV was to identify the "clean" person with the man who was neat and tidy (propre) and sported fresh linen: it was the linen …