 the opposite side of the Thames River from London, a person could choose from 18 hot baths. Even smaller towns would have bathhouses, often connected with the local bakery – the baths could make use of the heat coming from their ovens to help heat their water.
In her book Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity Virginia Smith explains,”By the fifteenth-century, bath feasting in many town bathhouses seems to have been as common as going out to a restaurant was to become four centuries later. German bath etchings from the fifteenth century often feature the town bathhouse, with a long row of bathing couples eating a meal naked in bathtubs, often several to a tub, with other couples seen smiling in beds in the mid-distance.”
Public bathhouses were very popular throughout medieval Europe but they also raised controversy as some objected to the fact that men and women could see and be with each other naked, and that this could lead to illicit sex. A thirteenth century church writer made this prohibition: “Hast thou washed thyself in the bath with thy wife and other women and seen them nude, and they thee? If thou hast, thou shouldst fast for three days on bread and water.”
However, it seems that church officials had little influence on bathhouses in the Middle Ages. Medieval people, in fact, seems to have accepted that the bathhouse was not only a place to get clean and healthy, but it could also be a place where sex and prostitution could occur. The bathhouses in Southwark were called the Stews, and were largely seen to be just fronts for brothels. These practices were usually overlooked by local authorities, who believed that it was best to allow some level of sexual outlets for its young men, otherwise risk more serious problems.
The prominence of the public bathhouse went into rapid decline in the sixteenth-century. Several suggestions have been made to as why – were more puritanical religious people able to impose their moral values on the community, or were the diseases that struck Europe since the Black Death convincing people from to avoid them. The disease of syphilis, which broke out in Europe the late fifteenth-century, would have also motivated people to stop their sexual promiscuity, thus reducing the other reasons for having a bathhouse.
The Dutch philosopher Erasmus, writing in 1526, notes the fall of the public bathhouse. “Twenty-five years ago, nothing was more fashionable in Brabant than the public baths,” he remarked. “Today there are none, the new plague has taught us to avoid them.”
This is the web address for this article, http://www.medievalists.net/2013/04/13/did-people-in-the-middle-ages-take-baths/
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Caskey, Jill, “Steam and “Sanitas” in the Domestic Realm: Baths and Bathing in Southern Italy in the Middle Ages,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 58, No. 2 (1999)
Harvey, Barbara, Living and Dying in England, 1100-1540: The Monastic Experience (Clarendon Press, 1993)
Holmes, Urban Tigner, Daily Life in the Twelfth-Century (University of Wisconsin Press, 1952)
Lucas, A.T., “Washing and Bathing in Ancient Ireland,” The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, Vol. 95, No. 1/2 (1965)
Newman, Paul B., Daily Life in the Middle Ages (McFarland and Co., 2001)
Smith, Virginia, Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity (Oxford University Press, 2007)
van Dam, Fabiola I., “Permeable Boundaries: Bodies, Bathing and FLuxes, 1135-1333,” Medicine and Space: Body, Surroundings and Borders in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. Patricia Baker (Brill, 2012)
van Winter, Johanna Maria, “Medieval Opinions about Food and Drinking in Connection with Bathing,” Spices and Comfits: Collected Papers on Medieval Food (Prospect Books, 2007)
2014 has arrived and it is once again time to begin the planning of the Alabama Renaissance Faire. This year the Faire is going to take place on Oct