Books: The Dirt on Clean
Oct. 20th, 2009 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vcmwThe Dirt on Clean: an Unsanitized History by Katherine Ashenburg. Well, this is one of those delightful single-topic books of social history that have been trendy for several years now. I love 'em, and I'm not tired of 'em at all. This was a particularly well written, nicely paced sample of the genre. It moved along at a good clip, the transitions between sections didn't feel too jarring to me, and the layout really added something (a lot of little inset quotes from various sources, and some interestingly placed illustrations that broke up the text here and there). I think this would be a good book for fantasy writers to pick up (at least, those writing fantasy set in countries similar to Europe/post-colonial North America), particularly for its lovely list of works cited. Some are quite standard and others seem (to me at least) reasonably obscure and academic.
I shouldn't have been surprised that so much of the discussion about cleaning our bodies ends up being a discussion about sex, but I was. Not in a bad way. I felt that, in that regard, this book would be a nice lighter follow-up to Hanne Blank's Virgin: the Untouched History. I'd learned a bit about the bathhouses in Germany when reading the Burgermeister's Daughter, but I liked hearing more about them here. (Side note: how awesome is it that typing "history book woman germany lawsuit medieval" into a search engine actually pulled me up the forgotten title of this book? I love the modern era!).
Particularly pleasing notes:
The section on modern bathing habits includes mention of recent research on asthma, allergies, and the possible negative effects of living in a sterile environment; male vs. female bathing habits within one country and time period are often compared; issues of class are mentioned in regards both access to and opinions about cleanliness.
We get at least a bit on particularly Jewish and Muslim bathing habits as they interface with developing European and Christian culture. But I found this quote both fascinating and unspeakably sad:
"Because the Moor was clean, the Spanish decided that Christians should be dirty. Many of the Moorish baths were destroyed by orders of Ferdinand and Isabella after the conquest of Granada in 1492, but enough remained that Philip II definitively banned them in 1576. Moors who converted to Christianity were not allowed to take baths, and a damning piece of evidence at the Inquisition, levelled against both Moors and Jews, was that the accused "was known to bathe." "
[Side note: I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the way all history texts talk about Muslim people in al-Andalus and Spain during the middle ages. Why oh why is it always "Moorish Spain"? It's as if 700 years of a country's history don't count at all. And then there's the whole thing where not all the Muslims in the peninsula were Moors, but that's another irritation I suppose - I know it comes from quoting the source material that was written in a certain way, but isn't there some kind of new consensus on this we could come to?]
I shouldn't have been surprised that so much of the discussion about cleaning our bodies ends up being a discussion about sex, but I was. Not in a bad way. I felt that, in that regard, this book would be a nice lighter follow-up to Hanne Blank's Virgin: the Untouched History. I'd learned a bit about the bathhouses in Germany when reading the Burgermeister's Daughter, but I liked hearing more about them here. (Side note: how awesome is it that typing "history book woman germany lawsuit medieval" into a search engine actually pulled me up the forgotten title of this book? I love the modern era!).
Particularly pleasing notes:
The section on modern bathing habits includes mention of recent research on asthma, allergies, and the possible negative effects of living in a sterile environment; male vs. female bathing habits within one country and time period are often compared; issues of class are mentioned in regards both access to and opinions about cleanliness.
We get at least a bit on particularly Jewish and Muslim bathing habits as they interface with developing European and Christian culture. But I found this quote both fascinating and unspeakably sad:
"Because the Moor was clean, the Spanish decided that Christians should be dirty. Many of the Moorish baths were destroyed by orders of Ferdinand and Isabella after the conquest of Granada in 1492, but enough remained that Philip II definitively banned them in 1576. Moors who converted to Christianity were not allowed to take baths, and a damning piece of evidence at the Inquisition, levelled against both Moors and Jews, was that the accused "was known to bathe." "
[Side note: I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the way all history texts talk about Muslim people in al-Andalus and Spain during the middle ages. Why oh why is it always "Moorish Spain"? It's as if 700 years of a country's history don't count at all. And then there's the whole thing where not all the Muslims in the peninsula were Moors, but that's another irritation I suppose - I know it comes from quoting the source material that was written in a certain way, but isn't there some kind of new consensus on this we could come to?]
