Actually, Europe had a strong bathing culture, the issue was the decline that occurred. The Vikings are well known for taking load public baths in England; where those warrior savages loudly congregated near rivers and showed off their bodies to anyone, how scandalous! You can find laws and ordinances everywhere prior to Victorian times that show that bathing was generally enforced. Soap might have been a harder find.
Thank you, this shit drives me crazy sometimes. Soap was literally a medieval invention (before soap some europeans used oil and a scraper to clean themselves, it's not as good as soap but it was still effective). If I remember right the first known soap makers guild in europe was from the seventh century (It's been awhile so don't quote me on this). Medieval people also regularly washed both their hands and faces both before and after meals when in between baths because they knew that dirt and grime could be hazardous to their health if ingested.
If any of the waste products of third digestion are left under the skin that were not resolved by exercise and massage, these will be resolved by the bath. -Magninus Mediolanensis
puritanical thoughts of how bathhouses could end up acting as brothels tweaked the nose of those more than the smell did.
In fairness to the puritans a lot of bathhouses were basically brothels.
Combine that with cities having otherwise poor cleanliness due to throwing literal buckets of shit onto the streets and rivers being the dumping place of all refuse, and it wouldn't matter how clean you got in the bath.
People throwing shit out of their windows and into the streets was largely a myth, it did happen but it was pretty rare. The ones that did do it didn't get to do it for long because of either heavy fines or their neighbors kicking their shit in for making a mess on the road or because they hit someone, we have reports of both.
But it is a very frequently described myth that medieval Europe was a pigsty of personal cleanliness, where people didn't take baths at all. It was the enlightenment period that stunk up the place. But the common belief that every succeeding culture only improved on the previous in every way; backed up by misquoted, misattributed, and straight made-up sources for the lack of cleanliness has caused the myth to be everywhere.
God, I fucking hate Voltaire and his clique. So many of our modern misconceptions about medieval Europe come from these assholes with a grudge just making shit up.
Much of medieval Europe were afraid of bathing because it would make them sick! True it was mostly do to poorly insulated living spaces, but doesnt make it any less true.
Europeans weren't afraid of bathing, they knew that poor hygiene could make them ill and that it would be worse than being wet and cold for a bit. There were people that didn't like the bathhouses but it didn't have anything to do with thinking it would make you sick (not counting VD).
Just imagine walking into a Victorian era party and be sent reeling from the stench of unwashed body odor and the strong perfumes ment to cover it up. It was even worse for their peasants, though they did lack the perfume.
The medieval era was from the 5th century to the late 15th century, the Victorian era was from 1837 to 1901. So, that's not really relevant, there's no overlap. The issues the Victorians had with hygiene were pretty unique to that period. The cities and industry growing and out pacing developments in plumbing. The medieval era being mostly a rural agrarian society just had completely different problems.
