Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

There’s a missing bold tag somewhere in that post…

Sarah, I have been searching for AGES for historical information on leg hair removal! The covers don’t bother me so much - because heck, they didn’t have purple eye-shadow back then either, but bring it on on the covers - but why do we never have a scene with the hero running his hands through her hairy calves? WHY? WHY???

Some of these can be done you know - Elizabeth Chadwick and Sharon Penman both write historical novels that have a fair amount of decidedly authentic detail, including the public washing thing and dealing with facilities, and other odours, and still manage to create decent romances.

Rats, how’d my post get chopped off like that?

One of my favourite icky bits is the hanging of clothes in the garderobe to deter moths. *shudder*

Heh, the lack of mention of hair gets me too!  We often hear about how hairy the hero is, but never the heroine.  No one was hairless then, though, as shaving legs/underarms only became popular in the 20th century, so obviously our medieval hero wouldn’t care if his lady had furry legs.

Most things with regard to smell and hygiene I ignore.  We don’t hear them much in contemporaries because such things are normal to us.  This would be normal to medieval people too.

I love this post!

And then there was the siege of Chateau-Gaillard in 1204 where some guys noticed they could get into the latrine drain, so they climbed up through the pee and crap to storm the castle. Yeah, the smell and sight of them would make me surrender. Excellent post, Kris!

Thanks, Kris, for taking us through a day in the life of Medieval Times (not as glamorous as the dinner theater).  My husband and I are Anglofiles, so he indulges me in yearly trips to the UK.  I prefer the crumbing castles to the restored manor houses because their eeriness gives me a better perspective on Medieval Life.  Readers and writers should check out the websites for National Trust, English Heritage, National Trust for Scotland, Historic Scotland, and CADW (Wales) for more info on Medieval sites. 

Thanks, Sarah, for inviting Kris to blog on your site.

The hero in The Key by Lynsay Sands only bath twice a year, in January and July.
The heroine complained about his B.O whenever the hero tries to seduce her but
never mentioned about his breath. I kept thinking that if he doesn’t care to take a
bath or wipe himself, he wouldn’t bother with cleaning his teeth. So, wouldn’t kissing
the hero be yucky as well?

Great info, Kris, and very comical. And they say romance writing is such a
glamorous job! If only they knew! Nice to see you here.

Thing with the BO issues was if everyone had the same general level of stink they became inured to it. So even with the less frequent bathing, lack of deodorant, etc. it wouldn’t have been that big a deal between people of the times.

Also worth noting that the places where public bathing was still in existence became hang-outs for prostitutes, and general lewdness, because there were lots of naked people about. The Church decided this was Very Sinful and turned the notion of bathing into a Bad Thing among the faithful.

I’ve also seen references to body hair removal. Apparently the Saracens practiced it, and they thought the Europeans who came to the holy land on crusade were barbarians because they were so hairy (among other things—they were also less educated). It would be possible for a knight to come back from crusade having developed a taste for a less hairy female, but would said female want to submit to that sort of thing? Because they didn’t stop with the legs.

I have pointed this out at various times on various forums, and here I go again.  :-)

All of us unconsciously filter out sounds, sights and smells that form a constant background to our lives.  Our eyes, ears and noses give us the information, but our brains decide how to interpret it. 
How many of us who live in cities today are constantly aware of the vile stench of vehicle exhaust fumes?  One might notice it fleetingly when just returned from a holiday somewhere with noticeably pure air, but otherwise, it simply does not register on the 21stC city-dweller, because it is ‘background’.  Same with the noise of motor traffic.
The same would have been true of the more organic (and less harmful) odours of previous generations.  The personal smells of humans and other animals and of waste and ordure of various kinds would just not have been noticeable.
Anyone who has spent time in countries and cultures that still have elements in common with earlier generations in Europe and North America (e.g. the widespread use of horses, donkeys and cattle for transport), can testify that at first they notice that life smells different,  but after a few weeks, they cease to notice.  The brain starts to class the smells as ‘background’, and omits them.
As an historian, I like to see accurate and well-researched detail in historical novels, but in imagining the context of a medieval (or, come to that, an 18th/19th century) way of life, it is perfectly reasonable to omit any general reference to organic odours, for the good reason that the inhabitants of that time and place would not have been consciously aware of them.

One of Kris’s points that I should like to challenge is this one:  the alleged use of spices and seasonings to disguise the taste of tainted meat.  This is often stated, but I believe it to be completely untrue.  The social classes that would have had to eat poor-quality food certainly could not afford imported spices, which were very, very expensive status symbols.  The social classes that could afford them were in a position to ensure that their basic foodstuffs were fresh.

“Then again, there were no processed foods, no pesticides/herbicides/antibiotics/etc being ingested by plant or beast, so I suspect the odors were much less . . . well, odoriferous. “

I’m sorry, but this is pseudoscientific quackery and total nonsense verging on a malicious, dangerous lie.

Processed foods do not automatically make you smell worse, and neither do additives. The pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics in food are in such tiny, minuscule amounts that they have no effect on body odors. If anything, the preservatives in food make life less smelly because they stop food from rotting before it’s eaten. They also make it less likely that people will get sick and die from eating preserved foods, something often forgotten by the pampered who take sanitation for granted.

And processing does not instantly turn food into artificial, unnatural frankenfood any more than cooking it does. (In fact, cooking is a form of processing.) This is a dirty lie spread by corporations who sell overpriced “natural” food and quack medicines to the gullible. Processing in and of itself is value-neutral; processing cheese, for instance, just makes it smoother and easier to melt. It’s when processing uses too much fat or starch that the food becomes less safe to eat in large amounts, but only because it contains more calories than the base food would otherwise have contained.

And washing wasn’t just considered wrong because of the connection of prostitutes with bathhouses; it was also considered dangerous, and rightly so. Swallow a mouthful of that wonderful cleansing bathwater and expect to be very sick in a week from cholera, typhoid, or dysentery.

I suppose my pet peeve is when people think that modern innovations like food processing, preservation, and immunizations are somehow dangerous because they’ve been led to believe that the good old days were safer and healthier than they were.

Thank you AgTigress!

I was just going to mention that…. After Maggie Ostrand’s head-desking use of “history” for her humor column at HuffPo last week, I was wondering what was going on in the Zeitgeist this month.

Here’s a great source on myths in medieval cooking:
http://medievalcookery.blogspot.com/2007/10/medieval-food-myths.html

Not a romance, per se, but the film The Lion in Winter (the Peter O’Toole/Katherine Hepburn one; I haven’t seen the more recent version) includes a lot of these details.  Henry breaks ice to get to his wash water in the morning, and there are dogs everywhere, and it really shows that in the medieval period, even kingship was pretty grubby by our modern standards.

Plus it’s a fan-freaking-fabulous movie.  Brilliant script, and amazing performances all around.

Check out “Knight Errant” by R. Garcia y Robertson.  A War of the Roses trilogy featuring a Hollywood producer who is very very new to witchcraft and ends up back in time and hooking up with an eighteen year old Edward Plantagenet.  And what with Robertson being a history prof somewhere out in the Pacific North West, it’s filled with lots of excellent details.  Fleas for example.  And teeth and the food.  Totally appalling.  Good stuff.

Reviews are mixed.  Romance is not the main thrust (sorry) of this tale, adventure is and so is all the serious political unrest of 15th century England, but I really liked it.  Robertson really did his homework about Wicca, natural magic and their historical/religious antecedents as well as England.  All that stuff really pops off the page.

The heroine has an engaging go-with-the-flow attitude, which makes the reader treat the yuck she experiences like the worst car crash you’ve ever seen—you just can’t look away.

Great post!

I should also quote Eleanor’s speech in The Lion in Winter, about the great beauty of Rosamund: “Her eyes in certain light were violet, and all her teeth were even. That’s a rare, fair feature: even teeth. She smiled to excess, but she chewed with real distinction. “

One of my favorite scenes in a Roberta Gellis medieval is when the heroine is using a fine-toothed comb to delouse her husband.  Authentic and loving.

I agree with everyone else who mentioned the BO issue (“Bring on da funk!”), and it’s one of the things that bothers me the most in historicals—when the author makes a point of how clean and shiny the heroine is.  Your nose filters those scents that are “normal” to your environment.  If not, our senses would overload and we wouldn’t be able to spot the alarming scents we need to spot, like gangrenous flesh or the smell of a wild animal.  Just as some of us are more sensitized to the smell of animal manure than someone who lives on a farm or ranch, medieval types would have had to be truly rank—or ill—for someone to notice the smell.

i love medieval romances, but i haven’t read many of them because i can’t seem to find them :(  i’ve got For My Lady’s Heart open in front of me now, yet again (privy! garderobe!), and while i can’t smell anything, the sights and sounds are vivid and that’s what matters to me.  i’m really not interested in hygiene practices.  in fact, i find them jarring, especially in the novels i’ve read where the hero and heroine bathe in every chapter.  there’s no reason to go there unless they’ve had some adventure that involves mud or excrement.  i can enjoy a novel where there’s no mention of bathing just as much as one that insists the heroine smells like jasmine the hero smells like sandalwood if the story is good, if it’s intriguing and the characters are engaging.

I am tired of two-child families.  Not that they didn’t exist, just that probably more of them started as six- or seven-child families.  And childbirth!  With the dying!

Thank you, AgTigress. I was going to jump in to challenge the meat/spices mention, but you got there first.

I think the worst ‘facts’ list I have seen is “Life in the 1500s”. It’s such a joke that I still can’t believe some believed the list. I feel sorry for Medieval historians sometimes. :D Let me find the list as I think some here would like to read it. 

Found it. Someone’s kind enough to debunk each on the list, too. Yay!  Life in the 1500s.

Hi Kris,

Great post, and lots of fun!  Along the lines of missing body parts are health issues, in general.  Heroes and heroines rarely are scarred from the pox, or suffer the ailments that would have dogged them on a regular basis.  The one that really springs to mind for me is the good, old-fashioned bladder infection.  Now, we know how much those manly heroes like to claim their heroines from, er, behind.  Often in fairly unsanitary conditons.  Can you imagine how many bladder infections those poor women must have had?  Yikes!  I only hope they knew about cranberry juice.

As for the odors in general, I’m going to have to be a bit indelicate.  I know that when I eat meat (and I notice it with my husband), my body odor is stronger the next day.  The same thing happens when I take antibiotics.  My perspiration smells different.  The skin is the largest organ in our body, and it helps to process out what goes in.  So it makes sense to me that people in different time periods probably smelled differently than they do now - washing aside.  That’s neither good nor bad, just different.

You know, I read historical romance for the emotion, the love story, the adventure, the triumph of good over evil, of the ability of courage and determination to overcome the challenges that separate the hero and heroine.  I want the history to be accurate and evoke the period, but I’m not reading it as historical fiction.  I’m not interested in smells or missing body parts, unless they serve the story or setting.

Re the “tainted meat” medieval urban legend:  there were extremely strict laws against selling spoiled meat or other foods, and very nasty punishments meted (hah!) out to those who broke them.

One book I can think of that mentions the lice and fleas is a YA titled Catherine Called Birdy (forget the author’s name.)

And second the shout-out to Sharon Kay Penman, who writes very detailed, meticulously researched medieval historicals.  I really wouldn’t consider her a romance author; though she does include the occasional love scene, you won’t find any HEAs in her books.  She writes about the lives of actual historical figures, most of whom came to unpleasant ends.

Thank you AgTigress. That bothered me too. Also, there were times and places when everything was going well and meat was more generally available so that even the peasants got their sausages. It didn’t balance out the hungry times, but there were good moments at the table.

The point about the cold is a good one. Indeed, before the advent of central heating, everyone was cold in the winter. The rich may have been less cold than the poor, but they weren’t warm. Anyone who has ever lived through a winter power outage and tried to heat the house (or even just a room) with a fire in the fireplace knows whereof I speak.

I visited an old castle in Ireland a few years back and got a detailed “life in the castle” lecture from the tour guide.

Ick.

One thing they certainly don’t mention in romance novels is how short-lived these people were. Half the children died before the age of five and an adult who lived to the ripe old age of 40 probably counted himself lucky.

Not something I want to think about after the happily-ever-after.

Anony Miss~
  You know, I DID have a section about hairy legs.  Then I pulled it, as I was trying to cut space.  But you’re right!  Smooth silky skin might be something a romance hero notices, but I’m not too sure it’s an accurate.

  Then again, an author-friend Kim Killion was reminding me that women have been getting wax jobs for thousands of years, so there’s the flip side, too.  Not sure they were doing their legs tho.  :-)

FD~
I don’t think I know about clothes in the garderobe to deter…moths. Tell me more!

Re processed foods: I generally see the term used to refer to a food object that has been refined a great deal, not necessarily any food that has been modified from its natural state, such as a cooked veggie. Following that, if “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan is anything to go by, usually the reason something edible lasts a really long time is that the parts of it that are “alive” and therefore nutritious have been taken out, which leaves the edible thing not so nutritious or useful. Grocery-store bread, highly processed, has had the living part of the wheat stripped from it, which is why those horrid unprocessed-food-advocating liars warn against it so much: all of the nutritional value has then been artificially added back in, apparently inefficiently.

Whether that makes us smellier or not I don’t know.

I have one nitpick, as a paleoclimatologist—the Little Ice Age didn’t start until the 1600s. Before that, in the period we’d commonly call the Middle Ages, was the Medieval Warming Period, from 800 to 1300. That’s why they were able to grow grapes in England and the Vikings colonized Greenland—it was a lot easier to farm at higher latitudes then!

Regarding the use of spices in medieval cookery: others have already pointed out that it wasn’t about concealing rancid food, but I recommend checking out the book Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants for a look at the use of seasonings as status symbols, among other things. (It’s a very good read.)

In the 1500-1700s, Edinburgh was one of the most densely populated cities in the world.  Because of the city wall, they built up (6-7 stories) with very narrow pedestrian walkways (closes).  And of course, no sewers or plumbing or other sanitation.  So what did they do?  Toss the slop out the window with a cry of “Guardie Loo!” into the closes, where it would hopefully wash down to the Nor Loch (now Princes Street Gardens).

And of course, when the plague came through, they boarded or bricked up entryways where the infected were located until the plague passed.

Re: B.O. 
  You all are totally right, that people become sensitized to whatever surrounds them.  When I’m with horses, I’m not smelling the manure.  I don’t think there’s a hero in a romance who would think his heroine smells bad.  :-)  And thus, as you say, AgTigress, we don’t include it.

  As far as pesticides/etc, I definitely didn’t want to imply processed foods are ‘frankenfood,’ so much as whatever we ingest will come back out through our bodies, one way or another, for good or ill.  When I eat garlic, I can smell it.  When my hubby does too.  :-)  And highly processed food, with its artificial additives and hard-to-digest ingredients and antibiotic use in animals, will affect odor.  Especially when it’s makes up a predominance of a diet.  Just like meat.  Just like garlic.  In and of itself, that statement isn’t a value judgment.  But I definitely hope no one was taking my article as medical advice!  :-)

@earthgirl—Although the minima were in 1650, 1770, and 1850, temperatures did a sudden downturn in the early 1300s, and it could be argued that the Little Ice Age began then, or even with the advance of pack ice in the mid-13th c. In fact, Brian Fagan includes that time in the period in his book The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850.  A sample timeline (laid out on Wikipedia) is

1250 for when Atlantic pack ice began to grow
1300 for when warm summers stopped being dependable in Northern Europe
1315 for the rains and Great Famine of 1315-1317
1550 for theorized beginning of worldwide glacial expansion
1650 for the first climatic minimum

That early, generally cooler weather is clearly what Kris Kennedy was referring to in terms of the chill in the air and the problem of famine and so on. Combined with the arrival of the Plague a few years later, it made the high middle ages a truly horrific time for both rich and poor.

Suzie~
  On a heroine noticing the hero’s B.O. but not bad breath…
  I feel the same way!  I just stay away from the whole issue of toothbrushing /dental hygiene.  It’s not that contemporaries of the characters would have a problem with it, but readers will. (I will.  LOL)

Theresa~
  Ohhh, I totally forgot to put in about emptying chamberpots onto the streets!!  Thanks for mentioning it.

Maili, that link is full of win! Thanks for sharing.

I remember hearing that those big collars that Elizabeth 1 made so popular, were to catch lice. Anyone know anything about that?

Also, whenever I read an historical or medieval, or any non contemp, I always wonder what women did when they had their period? And cramps? The only book I remember that even mentioned cramps was a Loretta Chase (I forget which one). The heronie and hero are in Egypt on a boat and she has cramps for 2 days and the hero eventually goes in to comfort her.

only28: hah! I WISH my period came only 28 days, instead of 20.

Fabulous! Great list and hilarious to boot!

Re: spices and meat . . .
  Shoulda been clearer.  Yes, you ladies are right, meat was a luxury, as were many spices (I left out a little piece about how costly spices like pepper were), and therefore the people eating meat were also the ones who had the resources to purchase more than the diy-grow-it-in-your-backyard-croft spices. 

  I meant to indicate (and see I did a poor job with it) that spices could be used to cover up the taste of a food that had gone past its prime time. (It wasn’t always done, nor was it the main point of seasoning.)  But being such an important resource, if the meat had turned a bit, they didn’t chuck it directly into the . . . moat.  it was too valuable.  Seasoning helps in such cases.  I wasn’t clear.  Sorry.

First, CONGRATS ON THE BOOK!

And second the shout-out to Sharon Kay Penman, who writes very detailed, meticulously researched medieval historicals.  I really wouldn’t consider her a romance author; though she does include the occasional love scene, you won’t find any HEAs in her books.  She writes about the lives of actual historical figures, most of whom came to unpleasant ends.

You do see HEAs in her books, but always for minor characters who you find out in the Author’s Note are ones she made up. *sigh* I was really bummed the first time this happened (after being elated that someone got a happy ending).

I remember hearing that those big collars that Elizabeth 1 made so popular, were to catch lice. Anyone know anything about that?

I’ve certainly never seen or heard this before. I’d want to see some serious documentation before I bought in . . .

And washing wasn’t just considered wrong because of the connection of prostitutes with bathhouses; it was also considered dangerous, and rightly so. Swallow a mouthful of that wonderful cleansing bathwater and expect to be very sick in a week from cholera, typhoid, or dysentery.

Not sure about England, but public bathhouses were very common in the German Duchies. Not only did people go there to get clean, but it was where they socialized (very much like the Romans) and where they were treated by barber surgeons.

I’ve always thought the connection to prostitutes was more of a 17th century development . . . at least that’s where I really start to see it (post Cromwell).

Randi~
  As far as menstrual cramping . . .herbs and other ingredients (barks, flowers, etc),  can be pretty potent stuff, so without having researched this, I’m guessing they took their equivalent of Motrin as needed.  :-)

Kalen~
  Thanks for the congrats!  :-)

  About the public bathing . . . I certainly haven’t studied medieval bathing/hygiene, but while I agree, that there were dangers, people have been doing it throughout various civilizations and over many eras, so there is certainly precedence for it.  Even with the dangers.  And some of it was a sweat, wasn’t it?  (Again, haven’t research this—just thinking out loud . . . )

@Randi and Kris—yes, but what did they do for periods? Did they stick moss in their underpants?

@Lisa—Thanks for clearing me up.

I remember hearing that those big collars that Elizabeth 1 made so popular, were to catch lice. Anyone know anything about that?

I did some research on ruffs while I was looking into Shakespeare’s London.  The big starched ruffs started as just the edge of your undershirt showing at your neck.  Over time they got longer, more elaborate, more starched, etc. etc. until they were these huge purgatorial pie-frill things you could hardly eat over.  I never heard anything about lice, though!

Kalen: I can’t remember where I heard/read that. It was probably over a decade ago. But this is what Wiki has:

They served as changeable pieces of cloth that could themselves be laundered while keeping the wearer’s doublet from becoming soiled at the neckline.

It’s not a lot, and it’s Wiki, but…

earthgirl: exactly! AND, most bloomers or their ilk (like a combination), had the seam open at the crotch, so…how does that work when you have your period?

@Randi and Kris—yes, but what did they do for periods? Did they stick moss in their underpants?

Ok, I’ll step up to this one since I have done a ton of research and I get asked this question every time I give a workshop on the history of underclothes: THERE IS ZERO DOCUMENTATION ABOUT WHAT WOMEN DID BEFORE THE VICTORIAN ERA.

Zero.

As in Nada.

None.

Whenever the topic gets brought up there is a ton of speculation, ranging from “nothing, they bled on their shifts” to “rags” to “Pessiaries” but the plain, simple truth is that there is not one shred of documentation before the 1850s.*

As it’s never been germane to any story I’ve written, I just leave it behind the veil (along with the toothbrushes). 

*If you have something, I’d LOVE to see it.

I personally would be quite happy if I never had to read another description of any character’s smell in a romance novel. Do I need to know that the hero smells like leather and “male”? Do I care if the heroine smells of lavender? Not really. Certainly I don’t go around describing people’s smells in real life. Oh lord, and Julie Garwood’s medievals always mentioned somebody (usually the hero, I believe) smelling like the sun. WTF?

Different strokes, I guess. I’m trying to think of an instance when the smell description really added something to the story…I did enjoy the description in Not Quite a Husband of the heroine’s soap smell, only because it was so different from the usual, but in general I find any mention of smell or hygiene pulls me out of the story because I start to wonder what life was really like Back Then.

Great post, though! I’ll definitely look for The Conqueror—I love medievals and wish there were more of them these days.

Medieval gentry actually did not go around stinking to high heaven and throughout a great deal of the period were actually very concerned about personal hygiene.

One has only to read medieval manuscripts like The Babees Book or some of the many medieval herbals available today to know that.

Kalen: I can’t remember where I heard/read that. It was probably over a decade ago. But this is what Wiki has:

They served as changeable pieces of cloth that could themselves be laundered while keeping the wearer’s doublet from becoming soiled at the neckline.

It’s not a lot, and it’s Wiki, but…

This is what all shirt collars and ruffs did.

Earthgirl~
  Again, not something I’ve studied in any great depth (or any depth at all) but I think they used, essentially, tampons.  A small rag rolled up and inserted, with a thread tied around the end, to assist in removal.  I assume they didn’t use a rag like we might a pad, as there wasn’t ‘underwear’ as we know it. 

  And perhaps, thus, the phrase, ‘on the rag’?

earthgirl: exactly! AND, most bloomers or their ilk (like a combination), had the seam open at the crotch, so…how does that work when you have your period?

Both of these garments are Victorian, and we know that they used sanitary belts and washable rags/pads. Underpants for women in England dates to the early 1800s (before that they’re all going commando).

I’ve seen images of German women wearing underpants, but all of the images are allegorical and are making a point about the woman “wearing the pants in the family”, so they can’t be taken as proof that German women were actually wearing underpants as men did.

I’ve always liked how people assume that the swords and stuff were so dang heavy.

Really, I’ve seen numbers as high as forty pounds.

As much as my internet researches can tell me, the heaviest double-handers still around today are, like, 12 pounds (not an exact figure). For a weapon that’s big because it’s ceremonial and meant to be impressive.

The business items were smaller and lighter.

I mean, really, like eight pounds. Even lighter for something that’d allow you to, I don’t know, carry a shield or the flailing maiden of your choice over your shoulder as you fought off the Green Priests of the Mad Snake God.

And don’t get me started on the armor.

A suit of plate mail isn’t significantly heavier (and may not be at all heavier; my memory’s going on me) than what some of the soldiers in Iraq are carrying on their back. And, furthermore, it’s spread all over the body. Sure, your range of motion is a bit restricted, but after a while it apparently wasn’t hard to move in.

Next Episode: Why Armor Won’t Stop An Arrow.

And Kalen again has the dirt on the research, which is awesome.  :-)

I didn’t know there wasn’t any research on periods/ underclothes prior to the Victorian era, but I assume they did something for their periods.  Rags make the most sense to me, but as Kalen says, if it doesn’t serve a story point, why put in something that isn’t researched? (Or at least has been suggested and theorized about by 1-2 credible sources).

That being said, I know, in my heart of hearts, women did not go around bleeding on themselves for 3-7 days a month.  Holy cow.  Aside from any other considerations, there would have been riots.  Men would have run screaming down the streets, jumped into the nearest sea, and drowned en masse.

Whenever the topic gets brought up there is a ton of speculation, ranging from “nothing, they bled on their shifts” to “rags” to “Pessiaries” but the plain, simple truth is that there is not one shred of documentation before the 1850s.*

And I will now contradict myself (sort of). While looking for a date for “on the rag” (which I pretty much knew had to be Victorian or later; and it is 1939 ‘JUSTINIAN’ Americana Sexualis 34 She’s got the rag on) I found this in the OED:

1606 R. FIELD Of Church I. xviii. 35 The Prophet Esay pronounceth, that all our righteousnesse is like the polluted and filthy ragges of a menstruous woman.

So there we have a 17th century comment on how women dealt with menstruation! Yea!!! I love finding new info to add to workshop.

OMG, Kris, you rock!

Especially over the whole “bathing” thing. The practice of the roman style communal baths and bathing in general only became thought of as harmful when one version of the plague hit. I think the one in the mid 14th century. And even after that, it wasn’t uncommon for a priveleged (aka rich and titled) person to travel with his personal bath in tow.

JennyME~
  LOL on not wanting any more descriptions of character smells!  :-) 
  Such descriptions have become invisible to me now in books.  I don’t read them; I skim.  I didn’t even realize it until you said this.

We need to go back to the furry legs. All this waxing is exhausting.

This reminds me of a secondary character in Sarah Bird’s The Boyfriend Club [terrible title, good book] who was a medieval romance writer attending a Luvboree in Texas.

Earthgirl,

I’m not a paleoclimatologist, just an interested layperson, but I’ve seen quite a few scientific sources that state that the Little Ice Age began as early as 1250, and usually the time frame is given as from 1300-1850.  The first obvious sign, the Great Famine, occurred in 1315.  It’s true that the coldest periods didn’t start till the 16th century, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the Little Ice Age didn’t start until 1600.

And don’t get me started on the armor.

A suit of plate mail isn’t significantly heavier (and may not be at all heavier; my memory’s going on me) than what some of the soldiers in Iraq are carrying on their back. And, furthermore, it’s spread all over the body. Sure, your range of motion is a bit restricted, but after a while it apparently wasn’t hard to move in.

Next Episode: Why Armor Won’t Stop An Arrow.

Having worn a suit of plate, I can tell you it’s damn heavy, and don’t forget that there’s chainmail under large parts of it (which is really heavy!) as well as padded arming doublets and clothing. It’s certainly much heavier than cameos, a chemsuit, and body armor. And yes, you do get used to moving in it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still heavy (and jousting armor was even worse).

Most plate would stop an arrow (and why you wore chainmail in the spots you couldn’t cover with plate). In fact, it would stop a bullet (that’s why many suits have a dent in the breastplate, that’s the proof that it had been tested). This is not to say that arrows didn’t get though, but they shouldn’t have (and in most cases they didn’t).

@ Kalen

Re: Bathhouses in Medieval German Duchies

I don’t know if this is right, but off the top of my head- strangely this was discussed in history lessons in school, when I was a teenager in Germany- bathhouses were closed down eventually, beginning in the 16th century with the advent of syphillis. Since public baths were often used for prostitution and maids that worked in bathhouses had a reputation in accordance, as far as I remember, they earned a reputation for spreading ‘The French pox’, and closing them down was a way of trying to keep the disease from spreading. At least I remember my history teacher telling us that, and I vaguely remember reading somewhere about it too, but hands down, have no idea where to start looking for my source.

*returns back to lurkdom* :-)

Kalen~
Realized my response to you about public bathing didn’t come through as clearly as it sounded in my head.  My post implied, via a few misplaced commas, you’d made a point about the dangers of public bathing, when in fact the opposite was true.  I was was agreeing with (& expanding on) your point that there was public bathing in various cultures, despite any risks. (Ah, the joys of non-nonverbals and speedy cut-&-pastes)

  And yes, public bath houses were closed down for public health reasons at times.  And they always opened back up again. Interesting.

Scrin~
  On armor . . .
  You make a good point.  Like Kalen said, I think it was pretty heavy, but then, these men trained with it, and wore it a lot, so to them it wouldn’t seems as heavy as to us.  They carry it better, and I’m guessing not notice it as much (which doesn’t mean not at all).  Armor did become heavier, to the point of ridiculousness, later on, when used for tournaments and other ‘show’ events.  But you make an excellent point: armor worn for battle had to be light enough to be useful.  Knights had to be able to move and ride and fight in that armor.  It couldn’t so heavy it was cumbersome or unwieldy.

  And…it was HOT.  People could die of heat stroke and dehydration as a result of wearing armor, especially in the heat.  And that’s usually when they’d be fighting: the ever-popular summer battle season.

Chris~
  LOL—oh yes, let’s go back to furry legs!  :-)

On believing that bathing was dangerous…
“Swallow a mouthful of that wonderful cleansing bathwater and expect to be very sick in a week from cholera, typhoid, or dysentery.”

Actually, the bathwater would be just the same sort of water that was used in cooking, brewing, or to water the wine, so you were exposed to the germs in the water quite regularly. But the belief that bathing was dangerous comes in in the late 1500s and flowers in the 1600 and 1700s, when you have rich people wiping with clean dry linen cloths and changing shirts but not washing, believing that dry rubbing was as cleansing but much safer.

(Cholera, by the way, came to Europe from India, in the 1800s.)

On the other hand, human-produced gas (burping and farting) was a major problem if the health manuals, manners manuals, and cookbooks can be believed!

And it’s conversations like these that make me love this site and all of you Bitches. :D

@growly cub: Yeah, the Little Ice Age isn’t my area of focus. I’d just heard enough about it and the Medieval Warm Period to think Kris’s timing was off, but I was schooled by Wikipedia above.

  On the other hand, human-produced gas (burping and farting) was a major problem if the health manuals, manners manuals, and cookbooks can be believed!

What do you mean WAS a problem!?!? STILL IS!!

At my house it sure is.  And provides almost-endless entertainment for my preschooler son and husband.

Great post! Farting heroes are a bit too much like real life ,leave them out!!

Overall though life back then doesn’t sound much different than living in rural Kentucky in the 1960s .
Outhouse perched over a creek. Didn’t stink but I don’t remember if anyone lived down hill? Enameled tin pee pot under the beds.
Saturday night baths in a metal tub on the porch where the cleanest person went first. (gotta smell good to gotomeetin)
Daily washing of course but in winter, yes you had to break ice to get to the water. The soap would burn a layer off our skin.
There was one laundry day and it took ALL day.
Standard medication was castor oil,  not leeches.
If we didn’t grow it, we didn’t eat it. I think we were what the hippies wanted to be.
Coca cola , not beer, was like THE BEST TREAT EVER!
God I’m old.

I just finished Loretta Chase’s The Last Hellion and there’s a scene where the heroine browbeats the hero into being leeched.

I love this list!  There is one thing that always gets me in just about every romance I read.  Picture it, hero and heroine touching stuff- babies, lakes, farm equipment, guns, horses- and then suddenly, her magic hoo hoo takes over and they are suddenly having sex.  He’s sticking fingers in her, she’s rubbing his stick of love and then putting it in her, and no one ever seems to wash their hands.  It really upsets me!  They did a study and found that’s really gross.

Sad to say, common folk get short shrift in medieval romances, which all seem to twirl around the upper classes and royalty.  I’m sick to death of knights. 

Two terrific nonfiction studies of the mid-medieval period (specifically, the fourteenth century) are Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror and John Kelly’s The Great Mortality, which focuses on the Black Plague.  The latter in particular offers glimpses into daily life, and it’s eminently readable.

Kalen, yeah I know those terms are Victorian (and I learned about the combination from the latest Sherry Thomas); I just couldn’t recall what they were called prior to that time period, and figured everyone would know what I was talking about. Which, basically, everyone did. ;)

[ arrows wouldn’t pierce plate armor…]

weeeelllll, not quite right.  The English longbow was actually pretty good at punching holes in plate when it was weilded by a pro.

From: A Short History of the Longbow by C. Anton -

Such was the power of the Longbow, that contemporary accounts claim that at short range, an arrow fired from it could penetrate 4 inches of seasoned oak. The armored knight, considered at one time to be the leviathan of the battlefield, could now be felled at ranges up to 200 yards by a single arrow. One account recalls a knight being pinned to his horse by an arrow that passed through both armored thighs, with the horse and saddle between!

Modern tests have verified that this was indeed possible. A 700-800 grain arrow can pierce 9 cm of oak at close range, and 2.5 cm at 200 yards. No armor up to plate was proof against an arrow at less than 200 yards, and even plate could be penetrated at less than 100 yards.

Earthgirl,

Not sure I’d trust Wikipedia, but I think there are plenty of scientific texts out there on this topic.  The Fagan was already mentioned.

Have you read William H. Calvin?  If I remember right he had a bit about the Little Ice Age in ‘A Brain for All Seasons’.  His comments on the Atlantic conveyor belt and the current slowing of it scare the dickens out of me and that was in 2002.  I haven’t dared to look into what’s going on right now.

FYI for everybody, ‘A Brain for All Seasons’ is looking at human evolution and abrupt climate change (aka the major ice ages) and I highly recommend it.  It’s very readable and utterly fascinating.

It’s been so long ago that the details are hazy, but I remember reading Grace Ingram’s RED ADAM’S LADY and being enchanted with the footnotes about historical details, the one that stuck with me was that certain establishments (tanneries? soapmakers?—I said the details were hazy) had receptacles at the door for urine deposits, since urine was used in whatever they were doing.

I am endlessly fascinated at the education to be found here.

Where do you think the saying “three dog night” came from? If it was a bitter cold night and no covers would help, you dragged your dogs onto the bed with you. Thus, it was cold enough to have three dogs sleeping with you = Three Dog Night.  :)  (or one, or four, but three is the common phrase)

Egads, we of the Eternal Bitchery KNOW our medieval stuff!

Roberta Gellis (one of nine names in my personal pantheon of writing mages) wrote THE ROPE DANCER some years back because there was so little medieval-set romance among the lower classes. A fascinating book, though all of hers are wonderful.

Ladies in the 14th century were aware of halitosis. According to the herbals, they often chewed various herbs to sweeten the breath. One tooth-cleaning agent (assume they used a finger or a rag) was sage mixed with rock salt. I wouldn’t want to try it, give me the stuff in a tube anytime.

The spoiled-meat-and-spices theory has already been well debunked, but I submit also the following: if you could afford meat, it came to your table fairly fresh from the hoof. There was no way to slaughter goat, pig or steer and keep it fresh for next week. Therefore if you were having a feast, you sent out your hunters and commandeered your provisions fresh. The spicing was more a matter of taste than preservation, although salting was heavily used. The spicing may have resulted from a desire to disguise the taste of salted meats, not spoiled ones. And as far as fish, google “stockfish” and see how they dealt with salt herring and cod during Lent.

In my medieval time-travel romance (out next spring, thanks for asking), I had my time-traveler heroine remark on some of these nastinesses, but only once. One can afterward assume she became 1) inured to the various smells, although she does notice the pleasant absence of cigarette fumes and jet fuel); 2) accustomed to the sanitary facilities; and 3) inventive at concocting 14th century approximations for 21st century conveniences. I trust it works.

Brava, Kris, for crafting a book I now want to read. And just WHY is his sword turned that way on the cover? I fear for his neck.

K.Z.

I’ve only read a few medievals where both main characters were non-nobles and they were by Roberta Gellis, so you know they were high quality all the way around.  I enjoyed them, but they are not the ones I tend to re-read.  I might just have to break out Roselynde and Alinor again. :)

I just think besides minstrels and traveling folk the lives of the peasantry and/or serfs were so circumscribed that there isn’t a whole lot of room for interesting stories.  Get up, work the fields, eat, have sex, repeat, die.  And quite honestly, if somebody wrote a story about an exceptional serf my anachronism meter would probably go off the scale.

You know, I DID have a section about hairy legs.  Then I pulled it, as I was trying to cut space.  But you’re right!  Smooth silky skin might be something a romance hero notices, but I’m not too sure it’s an accurate.

Hairy legs can be smooth and silky. Stubbly, short hair on legs won’t feel either smooth and silky, but if someone never shaves their legs, the skin and hair do feel smooth and silky. I suppose it might depend a bit on the texture of the individual’s hair (some cats and dogs, for example, have rougher coats than others), but still, I see no reason why one couldn’t describe hairy legs as smooth and silky.

Deb Kinnard~
  btw, when is your time-travel medieval romance due ou— oh, wait, next spring?  Cool.  I’ll be all over it.  :-)  Title? 

  LOL on his sword.  Yes, it is interesting choice the Art Dept made, isn’t it?  And a bit dangerous.  Promise, there’s not one scene in the story where he holds his sword like that. (snort)

Modern tests have verified that this was indeed possible. A 700-800 grain arrow can pierce 9 cm of oak at close range, and 2.5 cm at 200 yards. No armor up to plate was proof against an arrow at less than 200 yards, and even plate could be penetrated at less than 100 yards.

I’m going to guess that it depends on the era and the armor. My experience is mostly with 16th century plate, and if it withstood a bullet fired from fairly close range, it would have withstood an arrow as well. The main danger was an arrow finding an unarmored spot on the man (or busting through a link in his mail).

Can I pass along a few thoughts about bathing and human smells?

You got yer three sources of human smells ... the body, the clothing and the latrines.

When you are walking into an LDC village in the heat, the ‘smell of humanity’ you notice at the outskirts is the gentle rotting of human excrement in latrine pits.  For good evolutionary reasons, humans are programmed to particularly notice the smell of human scat. 

But villages in the Third World today know how to deal with human wastes.  There’s no reason to believe 1500s folks wouldn’t know how to use and maintain latrines and wouldn’t be sensitive to a badly kept outhouse.

ISTM, in 1550, outside the cities, you’d get
—the stink of urine in odd corners.  (Not unknown today.) 
—In the summer, in a village or castle, you’d get a strong whiff in particular spots when the wind blew wrong. 
—Using the outhouse, you’d hold your breath. 

But ‘odeur d’outhouse’  would not be a constant companion at the dinner table any more than it is today in African villages without public sewerage.

The whole ‘washing the human body’ thing . . .

A sizable portion of the human race —a third?—does not have water in a tap inside a whole room devoted to bathing.  They do not tote twenty buckets inside to fill up a tub and then haul it out to empty it.
They wash, perfectly well, from a clay pot dipped out of the river or a jerrycan filled at the pump.  They don’t smell. 
Full body immersion is only tangentially related to cleanliness. 

Clothing, though,  is the real kicker.  And here, in 1550, I think we got a class thingum.

Linen undergarments would be intrinsically expensive.  They’d take time and effort to wash.  Folks who couldn’t afford to change into a clean shift or a clean shirt every day or so would smell like stale sweat until they did.

OTOH, rich folks could afford all that washing and changing of linens.  They would smell of lavender and clean linen and a body that had been sluiced down that morning from a basin of scented water.  Why would they stink?

The fine silks and velvets they wore on top were protected from body dirt by those linen undergarments.  They’d be sponged down and hung to air out.  It seems to me they’d smell to roughly the same extent your good cashmere cardigans do when you’ve worn them a lot.   

One indication that folks in 1550 did not routinely smell bad is that the distinct minority of people who avoided bathing for religious reasons are remarkable in contemporary terms in that they did smell.

LOL on his sword.  Yes, it is interesting choice the Art Dept made, isn’t it?  And a bit dangerous.  Promise, there’s not one scene in the story where he holds his sword like that. (snort)

At least he’s not wearing jeans and a button down shirt like poor Kathrynn Dennis’s hero.  :(

The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History, by Katherine Ashenburg is a pretty readable and entertaining survey of European attitudes on bathing in medieval times (also covers some Greek & Roman precedents, and the invention of showers, and all kinds of British weirdness on cold baths).

One thing I remembered reading about this whole washing thing, and maybe someone can chime in…

I read somewhere that Romans (and maybe Greeks?) didn’t use water for cleansing. That they, instead, oiled themselves up and then… oh what’s the word?...took like a flat edged object and…holy hell I’m screwing this up…squeegeed..OK NOT the right term, but hopefully you’ll get the visual…themselves.

Does that make sense, at all? LOL.

Joanna Bourne~
And in re: to clothing and odors…the natural fibers used in the medieval era would have helped to reduce body odors as well.

Randi…

“I read somewhere that Romans (and maybe Greeks?) didn’t use water for cleansing. That they, instead, oiled themselves up and then… oh what’s the word?...took like a flat edged object and…holy hell I’m screwing this up…squeegeed..OK NOT the right term, but hopefully you’ll get the visual…themselves.”

Scraped is the term you want; the instrument was a strigil. The Romans did bathe in water along with this process; they didn’t use soap, though. In fact, the Romans were among the most enthusiastic bathers in history. :)

SCRAPED!!! ROFLMAO. Right. Clearly, I am losing my mind.

Thanks for confirming, Jenne.

Well, I don’t know about people not smelling in medieval times or otherwise.  I live one county over from one of the poorest in the nation where conditions range from outdoor plumbing and no flowing water to fully functional bathrooms, and some of the folks one encounters in the grocery store can be smelled from pretty far away and it’s not their clothing alone that smells, it’s their persons.  In a society in which the idea that bathing and washing is pernicious is prevalent I’d imagine that this situation would be exacerbated quite significantly when you see smell issues in our current society that puts tremendous emphasis on hygiene and daily showers.

RE: Smells

Personally, I know that when I smell my boy, I recognize the scent as distinctly HIM.  I often try to define it in words in my head, but I can never get the description right - however, it would be a blend of various scents.  To me, his smell is one of the things I strongly identify with him.  So I can see the importance.

It does bother me in medievals when she smells clean - unless she’d recently bathed, of course.  I much prefer moments where she smells like hay, or food, or something that connects to her everyday life - if she had just been gardening, I might expect her to smell like freshly tilled earth.. or something. :P

RE: Hair

I try to ignore it, but every so often I get that niggling thought that they DIDN’T shave or wax then.  Instead of talking about her smooth legs, how about her smooth shoulders?  Shoulders are sexier anyway. ;)

A few comments:

1 - Use of spices.  I have to thoroughly disagree with Deb Kinnard.  Unless there was a great feast, a beast was rarely slaughtered and consumed in its entirety.  The “leftovers” which were the provisions for the castle inhabitants, needed to be preserved.  Some meats were salted, some were pickled, and others were left to age.  The term “gamey” - that funky, three-day-old gymsock smell we all know and loathe - was coined about meat (usually game birds, boar and venison) that was left to hang and age, i.e., to soften up and basically ROT.  This was a common practice well into the late 19th century, before the invention of refrigeration.  In fact, this is still done today - albeit under better conditions.  Top tier steak houses serve dry aged beef - 21 to 45 days, and the longer its aged, the more expensive it is.

2 - Bathing.  This one’s all over the map.  In rural England in the late Middle Ages (1200 - 1450 CE), peasants bathed twice a year, in June and December.  They were actually sewn into their clothes.  This is backed up by castle records - the lord provided two sets of clothing for his tenants and dependants - one in June and one in December.  Nobles didn’t bath frequently either, and knights rarely.  However, many knights would shave their heads - not because of lice, but to keep from pulling it out when removing chain mail. 

One accounting I read, years ago when working on a Master’s degree in Medieval and Early Modern Social History, was of knights who were permanently stained with rust marks from their armor.  No stainless back then!  Steel and iron rusted, and chainmail particularly in the warm months.  Although there were layers of wool padding between the skin and the mail, body sweat would wick through the wool into the mail.  Rust would become embedded into the wool and eventually begin to soak into the skin. 

Armor is actually my biggest pet peeve about most medieval romances.  Until the late 14th century, knights didn’t wear full suits of plate armor, which is featured in so many badly researched books - the stuff is all from the late Medieval and Early Renaissance era.  Plate armor was made popular in response to the advancements in long range weapons - first the crossbow (arbelast and ballista) and then the English longbow.

I think we all can agree that life in the Middle Ages was, to quote Thomas Hobbes, was nasty, brutish and short.  It was, compared to today, smelly, gross and disgusting, hygiene was as non-existent as privacy.  But who wants to read a romance about two smelly, hairy people with bad teeth who have to sleep in a cold, stinking room with their servants and livestock?

Not to mention, there was NO CHOCOLATE in the Middle Ages. 

(Spam word - “Efforts 32”  The heroine died at the ripe old age of 32, despite the best efforts of the local barber).

Lita

One accounting I read, years ago when working on a Master’s degree in Medieval and Early Modern Social History, was of knights who were permanently stained with rust marks from their armor.

There was a book in the last couple of years that talked about the physical toll that the Knight’s Templar’s lifestyle and clothing took on their bodies and how they would have been easy to spot, even in “disguise” by the knights who were hunting them down . . . I wish I could remember the name of the book. It’s not my era, so I sort of let it drift away. It was fascinating though.

Modern tests have verified that this was indeed possible. A 700-800 grain arrow can pierce 9 cm of oak at close range, and 2.5 cm at 200 yards. No armor up to plate was proof against an arrow at less than 200 yards, and even plate could be penetrated at less than 100 yards.

From Wikipedia (with footnotes for verification):

In a modern test, a direct hit from a steel bodkin point penetrated Damascus chain armour.[19] (Bodkin points have been described as “armour-piercing”, but the latest research is that they were not made of hardened steel and were not designed for this purpose.)[20]

Even very heavy draw longbows have trouble penetrating well made, tough steel plate armour, which was used increasingly after 1350. Armour of the Medieval eras was not proof against arrows until the specialized armour of the Italian city state mercenary companies.[21] Archery was ineffective against plate armour in the Battle of Neville’s Cross (1346), the siege of Bergerac (1345), and the Battle of Poitiers (1356); such armour became available to European knights of fairly modest means by the late 1300s, though never to all soldiers in any army. Strickland and Hardy suggest that “even at a range of 240 yards heavy war arrows shot from bows of poundages in the mid- to upper range possessed by the Mary Rose bows would have been capable of killing or severely wounding men equipped with armour of wrought iron. Higher-quality armour of steel would have given considerably greater protection, which accords well with the experience of Oxford’s men against the elite French vanguard at Poitiers in 1356, and des Ursin’s statement that the French knights of the first ranks at Agincourt, which included some of the most important (and thus best-equipped) nobles, remained comparatively unhurt by the English arrows.”[22]

19 Hunting with the Bow and Arrow, by Saxton Pope.
20 Royal Armouries: 6. Armour-piercing arrowheads
21 “Medieval Military Surgery”, Medieval History Magazine, Vol 1 issue 4, December 2003
22 Strickland M, Hardy R. The Great Warbow. Sutton Publishing 2005. Pages 272-278

This tallies with what I’ve always understood about the effectiveness of the longbow and its gradual decline in effectiveness and use.

On Lita’s comment about the spices and ‘rotting meat’—this is the information given in William Edward Mead’s _The English Medieval Feast_, originally published in 1931—including the ‘gameyness’ thing. Later research and more information in inventories and household rules have come up with a more complex idea, involving the distribution of different cuts of meat to different servants and inhabitants and the size of the catering; there’s also a certain amount of information out there about preservation techniques in the middle ages and before 1900. Check out books by Peter Brears and Ken Albala on this subject. Most scholarly texts no longer support the rotted meat theory.

Also, the fact that lords only gave their servants (of all classes) one or two suits of clothing a year doesn’t prove that they only bathed once a year—you seem to be assuming that each outfit only lasted the 6 months and then was discarded. Which seems… unlikely. (17th century noblewomen were sometimes sewn into their clothes for the evening as well as pinned into them; and today’s fashion models are also sometimes basted into their outfits for a shoot. Again, not proof that the clothing was never taken off.)

Books to check out on cleanliness include Douglas Biow’s The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy… there’s also, somewhere, an article about how bathing humor features in German medieval romances.

Re: Hair removal

I will happily sign the petition for letting leg hair grow (true story: from the ages 11-14 I wore leggings under my school uniform skirt every single day because I didn’t want to shave - and this was in Houston 95-degrees-and-99%-humidity, Texas. Woo! And don’t get me started on the Epilady.

Re: Historical (snigger) periods

What about biblical allusions? Oh yes, when Rachel steals her father’s idols, she hides them under her cushion, and she doesn’t rise because all assume she’s sitting on her menstrual cushion. Something like that (oh, some previous bible teacher of mine is undoubtedly weeping at how wrong I’m getting this). I dimly remember us asking in class about what women did then, and we were told they kinda sat on a sheep.

Pause.

Maybe they meant a sheepskin?

Here’s a problem re the stuffed rag idea: if virginity was such a hot commodity, wouldn’t women stay away from a tampon-like set up; assuming that it would break the hyman (even though it doesn’t) and render the woman as a useless commodity?

God. I soooo want to know! aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhhhh!

Ok, I’ll step up to this one since I have done a ton of research and I get asked this question every time I give a workshop on the history of underclothes: THERE IS ZERO DOCUMENTATION ABOUT WHAT WOMEN DID BEFORE THE VICTORIAN ERA.

Zero.

As in Nada.

None.

Whenever the topic gets brought up there is a ton of speculation, ranging from “nothing, they bled on their shifts” to “rags” to “Pessiaries” but the plain, simple truth is that there is not one shred of documentation before the 1850s.*

As it’s never been germane to any story I’ve written, I just leave it behind the veil (along with the toothbrushes). 

*If you have something, I’d LOVE to see it.

Some years ago I read a great YA novel called Journey To Matacumbe (sic?) by Robert Lewis Taylor, set in the years following the American Civil War.  At one point in the story a female character gets her period and can’t do anything about it, since everyone is camping out in the wild, on the run from the KKK.  One of the men in the party hands her a plug of chewing tobacco, and she stalks off into the woods and does something mysterious with it (since the narrator is an adolescent boy, he’s clueless about what’s going on, and we don’t get anything like a detailed description.)  I’ve often wondered what she did with that chewing tobacco—did she use it as a tampon?  Or did eating it somehow dry up her menses?  And what was the author’s source for this?

Anony Miss~
  ROFLOL. Bible School Teachers Gone Wild: telling little kids women used to SIT ON SHEEP to deal with menstrual flow.  Bahahahahahaha.

Also, the fact that lords only gave their servants (of all classes) one or two suits of clothing a year doesn’t prove that they only bathed once a year—you seem to be assuming that each outfit only lasted the 6 months and then was discarded . . . Books to check out on cleanliness include Douglas Biow’s The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy… there’s also, somewhere, an article about how bathing humor features in German medieval romances.

I agree that the “two suits of clothing a year” doesn’t support or prove that people only bathed twice a year (esp as this was somewhat standard well up into the 19th century).

It is interesting to see the differences between countries and cultures (and because of these differences we can’t construe anything about one people based on the habits of another). I’m really not that familiar with the bathing habits of Medieval/Renaissance Englishmen. I know that the Germans and the Italians bathed frequently though.