How Filthy was the Renaissance?

The Renaissance, a period of transformation in art, learning, philosophy and science that brought us Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and Donatello (the artists, not the turtles). This era of the Early Modern period seems to have been tinted with reds and golds, it all sounds very classy ... but how filthy was it? Kate is joined once again by Dr Julia Martins to explore how Early Modern people washed, how they got rid of their waste, and how dangerous some of their methods were. Julia can be found at juliamartins.co.uk https://juliamartins.co.uk This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.

• 1:12Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the podcast that gets very dirty and filthy with history. And because of that, I have to give you the fair dues warning at the top of each episode. And here it is. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects and you being an adult too. I don't know why I keep having to say that. I mean, surely you know that a podcast titled Sex Scandal in Society is gonna get a bit saucy. Oh, well, let's crack on.

• 1:42Kate Lister?

  Imagine Leonardo da Vinci drawing the Vitruvian Man, or Michelangelo up a scaffold painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or Galileo investigating the night sky through a telescope, or Queen Elizabeth I rallying her nation in the face of the Spanish Armada. Oh, they're all so powerful, so talented, so intelligent. But how did they smell? That's the real question, isn't it? That's what we really wanna know. If you got up close and you've given them a good sniffing, what would they smell like? Just how clean were people in the early modern period? Do you wanna find out? I know I do. Right, on with the show.

• 2:39Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. The Renaissance was a time of progress in the arts, progress in the sciences, progress in philosophy, progress is everywhere. But what about in the bathroom? Where and how often did these people bathe? What were they using? Where did they go to the toilet? What was the sewage system like? And so many other questions. Today, I'm joined once again by Dr Julia Martins of Living History on YouTube, and we are gonna find out just how filthy people in the Renaissance were. Are you ready? Well, I know I am. Let's crack on.

• 3:22Kate Lister?

  Well, hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Julia Martins. How are you doing?

• 3:29Speaker 02

  I'm well, thank you, Kate. How are you? I'm so glad to be back here.

• 3:32Kate Lister?

  We had so much fun last time, didn't we?

• 3:34Speaker 02

  We did, yes.

• 3:35Kate Lister?

  That was a good gig. I'm so glad that you're back for this one. This is the next installment in our little mini-series about how mucky were people from the past, basically.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  I love that. Excellent series.

• 3:47Kate Lister?

  It's a good series because that's one of the big miscon- or maybe it's not a misconception, but it's certainly something that everybody thinks about the past, is that they were all filthy and muddy and just, and it was a horrible time to be around, and everybody stank. And you are here to talk to us about the early modern period and about how stinky they were. Do you think that this is a period in history that is associated with being unhygienic and dirty? I mean, the medieval period definitely is. But how do you think your Tudors, your Renaissance, your early moderns are doing?

• 4:18Speaker 02

  I think the way that they're represented in like film and media is not as bad as medieval period, I would say. But it's still, I think, not fair to what people were actually doing. I think people worried a lot about not being filthy, not, you know, smelling bad. And I think we forget that sometimes. So I think it's, so I'm glad to be, you know, here and have the chance to talk about this. Yeah.

• 4:42Kate Lister?

  Right? So let's try and define what kind of time period are we talking about here? Sort of the, sometimes we conflate early modern and Renaissance. I think Renaissance sounds a bit nicer than early modern, but give us a rough...

• 4:54Speaker 02

  So I think roughly, I think we're talking from the period between the early fifteenth century to the mid seventeenth century, when we're talking about the Renaissance. And I think this is not just like a time of rebirth of the rediscovery of classical texts and art, but I think it's also a time when the human body, the way people understood the human body was gradually shifting. I think the body was kind of being remapped in a way, right? So, yeah, so I think some things remain the same as they were in the medieval period. And I think the best example of that is the very long-held belief in the humoral theory. So the idea that there were four humors, four fluids in the body, and that their balance determined health.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  And so that when they were not balanced, you weren't healthy, right? And at the same time, there are things that are changing, going from a kind of more soul-focused body, I guess we could say, in the medieval period, to a more mechanical body, increasingly mechanical body in the Renaissance. So gradually starting to think of the body as a kind of machine, right? And one of the main reasons for that shift was the rise of dissection as a way to learn about the body. And, and I think that's the big change we're seeing in this period. So before then, doctors had mostly relied on ancient authorities, right? People like Galen, who had dissected animals like pigs and monkeys, but not humans.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  But dissection was gradually starting to take over, starting from the fourteen, fifteenth century onwards. So it was starting in unexpected places, I think, to some people, places like convents, where nuns would perform it, or novela. Yeah, yeah, nuns were very big into it. And this is a subject in itself that is so cool. Where was that in Sister Act? Oh, right. Yeah, no, they should include that. No, but seriously, because with some nuns being visionaries or being connected to miracles, there was this curiosity about what was going on inside their bodies after their death. And so Chiara from Monte Falcò, she was the most famous example of that.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  And she, after she died, the nuns opened her body and inside... Her heart, they found reportedly, they found three stones which were connected to the Holy Trinity. So that was a sign of her sainthood. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's, I wasn't there, right? We weren't there, I don't know. That's a lie, isn't it, ladies? I don't know. Well, they. That's what they said happened. Exactly, yeah. But yeah, so in places like that, dissection was increasingly performed, connected to like embalming noble households as well, like autopsies and things like that. So I think when we talk about the history of dissection, we often tend to think of universities, which were very important, but they were not the only places where dissection

• 7:41Speaker 02

  was happening and understanding the body, right? But the big change, I think, came with Andreas Vesalius, because he wrote a book that kind of shifted everything. And he was famous for saying things like, don't trust the book, trust the body, right? So this idea that you had to learn from practice through your senses and what you saw on the table in front of you, rather than what the ancients had written about. And this led to a kind of new culture of dissection. And anatomy became kind of the cutting edge of science. Sorry, that was bad. But you know what I mean? So this was the big change that was going on, I think, in early modern Europe, and especially in places like Italy, right? So it's an exciting time for the history of science and especially the history of

• 8:25Speaker 02

  medicine. There's a lot going on. There are continuities, but there are lots of new and exciting things going on as well. So, yeah.

• 8:33Kate Lister?

  It's amazing how long it took to shake off this idea of like, the ancient medicine is best. Like, there's a bunch of ancient Greek guys who kind of did the best with what they had, but it was mostly mad.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:45Kate Lister?

  And that was just like the greatest hits of medicine. And they rolled it out again and again and again. The idea of like having someone operate you whose most up to date book is four hundred years old, a thousand years old.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  It's a very scary thought, I think. And, and as you said, it lasted so long. I mean, people were still thinking in terms of humors and things like that in the Victorian period, you know, when, when people were being treated for things, all kinds of things with bloodletting and all, all kinds of remedies to do with rebalancing the humors. So it lasted. Such a long time. But yeah, I think it's it's a different paradigm. It's a different way of understanding knowledge. We tend to think knowledge and I think we we tend to think of knowledge, especially medical knowledge, in terms of like how recent it is and we are always learning new things and more research is being done. So there's this idea that new is best.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  And whereas for them, it was the opposite, right? It's the ancients, they held the knowledge, Galen, Hippocrates, you know, Aristotle. And that was kind of degraded through the centuries. So the idea of like going back to the original source, that was like the true knowledge, right? So, yeah, not great.

• 9:51Kate Lister?

  Not great. Like germ theory is way off yet before anyone's gonna come up with that. But how was their medical understanding around like dirt and filth are generally not healthy things to to be around?

• 10:06Speaker 02

  I think that's such a cool question because it's it's an interesting subject because the way they thought about hygiene was so different compared to how we see it, right? I mean, so in terms of like defining keywords, I think we have to go back to the like the word hygiene itself. And the word comes from Hygia, right? The ancient Greek goddess. And she was the daughter of Asclepius, who was the god of medicine in Greek mythology. So she's very closely connected to medicine, to health, to cleanliness. And that means both in an individual level and also a collective way, right? So things like public sanitation. She was usually depicted with a bowl of water. And the idea was that it was all about preventing sickness, right?

• 10:48Speaker 02

  So this gives us a clue, I think, about hygiene and how it was understood later. It wasn't just about being clean, but rather, I think, about a culture of preventing illness and keeping good health through cleanliness. So as you mentioned, how would that work in a world before people knew about germs? So I mentioned the four humors earlier, right? Black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood. And how they had to be balanced for someone to be healthy. But there were other things that determined health. And they were usually called the six non-natural things. So outside things, outside of the humors. So these were exercise, sleep, nourishment, air, emotions, or I guess psychological state,

• 11:31Speaker 02

  and evacuation. And they could be manipulated, these six non-natural things, to treat illness, right? So a physician might suggest a change in a patient's diet or exercise. That sounds quite reasonable, actually, all those things that you've just said there. Don't you think? We still talk about all of those today. Definitely, because it's about lifestyle, right? And you could tweak them to sort of get someone to regain health. But you could also be mindful of them to prevent illness coming and happening in the first place, right? So there were lots of books called regimens of health. They were very popular in the medieval and early modern periods. And they were all about this topic of like, how do you preserve health? How do you maintain health?

• 12:15Speaker 02

  And hygiene was connected to these six non-natural things, especially evacuation. Because, and here again, we kind of need to redefine words because evacuation was much broader than it is now, right? Excrements themselves were a broader concept. It included things like sweat and tears and Right. earwax, for instance. Anything coming out the body? Exactly, including hair. Even hair could be considered a kind of excrement of the head, right? Okay. So going back to cleanliness, Renaissance people would clean the body from external things that made it dirty, just like us, right? Such as, I don't know, muddy hands from working on the soil. But they would also worry about what came from inside the body, these excrements.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  And they were so crucial to the role of evacuation. And evacuation was itself crucial to managing the non-naturals and health in general, right? Yeah. So we can see that the way hygiene was understood was quite different from how we see it today. And if we take the skin as an example, it was all about the pores, right? Right. So there was this Italian physician, Geralamo Mercoriale, and he wrote that the skin was like a sieve. If the pores became blocked by dirt or oils, the vapors created inside the body through digestion, they couldn't escape the body. And if they were trapped inside you, they might affect your brain or your heart and that could be dangerous, right?

• 13:41Speaker 02

  So this was a widespread belief. Going back to Vesalius, he also described the skin as having layers and pores. And he even wrote that if the skin was too dirty, if the pores were clogged, that made someone harder to dissect. So physicians, surgeons, people were really talking about pores and how the people were porous, right? And how the body was constantly leaking impurities. And that's why you have to keep your skin clean, right?

• 14:09Kate Lister?

  Okay, yeah, I see. I'm joining up the dots here. I mean, it's a bit bonkers, but I can see why they're saying what they're saying here.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  Right. But I mean, how do you do that, right? How do you clean the body, I think, is the is the question.

• 14:22Kate Lister?

  That's the big one, isn't it? Is how do you keep clean in the early modern world?

• 14:27Speaker 02

  Exactly, because you have to be mindful of lots of different things. If you used warm water, that would open the pores. And that could be dangerous because it would it would make the body vulnerable to air, right? Potentially miasma, bad air, corrupted air. So in the same way that pores would let out what was inside the body, they were also a gateway for outside things to penetrate the body. So while people did bathe and they did wash their bodies with water, they were mindful of keeping their pores open for too long and how that could be an issue, right?

• 15:02Kate Lister?

  Stay in the hot water for too long. Did they have public bathing, like they did in the medieval period? Sort of right up until, oh, I think it's probably syphilis that came along and clobbered it in this idea of sharing spaces. But what's public bathing looking like in in this time period?

• 15:19Speaker 02

  I think that's that's a good question because we know in the Roman world that public bathing was everywhere, was connected to the social life. The baths were hubs of of people. But then, and that continued, we know, in the medieval period. And I know that Eleanor Yenek is always talking about how people did bathe and, you know, but yeah, so that continued. But then the plague hit, right, in the 14th century. And later, a century later, the syphilis epidemic. And the main problem with these epidemics and public bathing was that people believed, physicians believe that these small spaces, warm spaces with warm water, that they made it easier for disease to spread, right? People were close to each other.

• 16:00Kate Lister?

  I think that's right, actually. It might not have been right for the reasons they thought it was, but...

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I mean, we know in the case of syphilis, we know that public bathing was connected to all sorts of different activities, like sex work and all of that. So, you know, it wouldn't have helped, I would guess, right? So they started sort of becoming less central. At the same time, interestingly enough, in the Renaissance, sort of balneology or medicinal bathing, medical baths, were exploding in popularity, right? So people were bathing, but I think there's a shift, an important shift happening that goes from kind of, how do I say this? It's kind of about the friction. So it's a kind of mechanical cleaning. It's this idea of rubbing the body, scrubbing the body.

• 16:47Kate Lister?

  Oh, like exfoliating.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  Kind of exfoliating, yeah. So there's this idea that you use water from a basin, you know, a jug of water, and you have linen cloths or you have combs for your hair and you just really rub the skin to get the grime, to get everything, to remove the dirt, right? So this is very, very important.

• 17:13Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Julia after this short break.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.

• 17:59Speaker 03

  What started the Civil War? What ended the conflict in Vietnam? Who was Paul Revere? And did the Vikings ever reach America?

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• 18:57Kate Lister?

  How common was bathing? So like the idea of like you go and hang out with your mates in the bath, it's been kind of clamped down on by this point, but there's medicinal bathing. There's this persistent rumor about Elizabeth the First that, I can't remember the exact numbers, but like she had a bath once a year, whether she wanted it or not, or like even then she was considered exceptionally clean. But then I also read she actually had a bathroom with a bath in it. So I don't think that that's true, but like what, what's your take on that? How common was bathing?

• 19:24Speaker 02

  I think my take is that physicians were really, really worried about that. And there were so many different polemics because of the whole situation with making the body fragile through bathing, making it vulnerable. So if you had a cold, if you were pregnant, if you were on your period, immersion in water might not be the best. But that doesn't mean that you wouldn't necessarily use a basin of water to, with water, clean your body, probably starting from the top down, right? So you would do your face. Yeah, yeah. You have like hands and face first, and then you might work your way down. Your feet would be the last thing for sure. But it was something considered important.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  And we know in the Renaissance, there was a very popular book called The Courtier. And it was about how to be, you know, a courtier, how to behave in court. And it was said, it was said that it was beastly. It was something that only animals would do, like to have your hands and your face dirty. So it was very important for people to be clean. And this was something that they would do early in the morning, right? And the same goes for changing. Your clothes. And this is something I wanted to go back to because I think it's so important to how they saw hygiene and keeping the body clean. And it is different to how we see it today, right? We don't think as much about the clothes as they did, I think, right? Because linen in particular was incredibly important as a kind of

• 20:51Speaker 02

  way of keeping the body clean and healthy from what came from the inside, right? Yeah. I mean, white linen underclothes were everywhere in Renaissance Italy and they were kind of dry cleaning system for the body, if we could say that, right? Interesting, okay. What did you mean by that? There was this Italian writer Alessandro Petronio and he wrote a book about how people in Rome lived and how they kept healthy. And he wrote that linen underclothes would draw out the sweat and the impurities from the skin and they would essentially clean the body by doing so, right? And we know, thanks to primary sources like household inventories, that even people who weren't particularly wealthy owned multiple shirts,

• 21:34Speaker 02

  sort of chemises, linen chemises, and they would change them daily. Even if the body itself wasn't immersed in water, they would do that, right? So is the shirt getting dirty, not the outer clothes? Exactly. Because of course, we know that if you were someone wealthy and your outer clothes were made of fine silk or precious fabrics, they are very difficult to clean and very expensive, right? God, they would be, wouldn't they? Yeah. Can't put that in on a boil wash, can you? Definitely not, especially as they used urine, right, to wash. Oh, right. So you wouldn't want your silks in the tub. But yeah, and we know that for super wealthy people, you know, like the Medici family, they would own dozens, over fifty, hundred shirts, linen shirts, and they would change them throughout the day to keep themselves fresh, right?

• 22:19Speaker 02

  Right. And of course, we know, besides that, perfume, like perfumed waters, this kind of thing, they were everywhere for hair and for body. And here, I just wanted to give you an example because this is a recipe that came across. I'm a big fan of Caterina Sforza. She was a famous noblewoman. She was an alchemist. She was known as the Tigress of Forlì. Oh, yes. So you must have heard the story. There was a siege around her city and her enemies had her children hostages and she was like, she lifted her skirts and she flashed everyone and she was like, keep them, I can make more, like I have the means, you know? Yeah, so she's quite, she's quite an interesting character. Yeah, maybe not, but definitely alchemist of the year, I think, because she collected

• 23:02Speaker 02

  recipes for all kinds of things to do with perfumes and cosmetics and medicine. And she had a recipe called celestial water, and that was for cleaning and clearing the face and the body. So it was rosemary flowers and white wine, basically, and you would distill that, and that would remove all of your spots and would make your skin shine like silver. So I like examples like this because they show there's a lot of overlap between hygiene and cosmetics, right? You're removing spots, but you're also cleaning the skin in the process. You're cleaning away all the oil from the pores and then you're keeping them open enough for the vapors to escape the body, right? So, yeah, and you would smell nice, right?

• 23:46Speaker 02

  And I think this is something that people, another myth, I think, because I think lots of people know how important perfumes were throughout history. But there's this idea that you would use perfume to kind of mask the bad smell, and I think that's missing the point, because the way I came to see perfumes, reading about these kind of recipes, is a kind of PPE of sorts, right?

• 24:09Kate Lister?

  PPE, right? Yes, okay.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  It's a silly analogy, right?

• 24:13Kate Lister?

  No, no, go on, explain why perfume is like PPE.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  I think the best way to think about it is that, okay, so if we go back to the pores, we know that bad air and disease could enter the body through the pores, but they could also enter the body through orifices, right? So the nose, the ears, and smells could be used against foul air. And in a way, they would kind of shield the body from this bad air, protecting your body, right? So in Renaissance Italian books, there are lots of recipes for pomanders, for instance, or scented gloves, oils, creams and fragrances, and they would make you smell nice, for sure, but they would also act as a kind of shield when you went to areas that weren't particularly clean, like, you know.

• 25:01Kate Lister?

  Stop the bad smells getting in.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  Exactly. And it's the same with the plague, right? We know with. The iconic image of the plague doctor with the beaked mask. Inside the beak, there would be herbs and scented things of all sorts. And they would kind of act as a filter for the bad air, protecting the doctor in question, right? And yeah, so I think if we see perfume as kind of a PP of salts, I think it makes more sense. We know, as you said, everything, this is all bonkers, obviously. But we know that they didn't know about germs, so how would they?

• 25:35Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  How would they know that this made no sense? But I think that if you kind of accept the premise, if you understand the logic behind it, it sort of does make sense.

• 25:43Kate Lister?

  It does, it does make sense. I can totally see what it is that they think that they're doing there.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:50Kate Lister?

  It would have smelt quite heavily perfumed, I reckon, if you were knocking around at this point.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Definitely.

• 25:55Kate Lister?

  Obviously, in your built up industrial areas, there would have been some pretty nasty niffs going. And you can see that through some of the records, like in York, for example, there's lots of complaints about the areas with the butchers and the tanners. Because it's just lots of animal entrails and like it would have stunk. So there have been areas that were just horrendous. But what about, and this is the question that I've asked in everyone of this series so far, human waste. How are we dealing with this at this particular point? Because wherever you've got civilization, wherever you have a group of people, that you're gonna have to factor this in somewhere.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Yes, I think that's such an important question and, and you're right, I think.

• 26:33Kate Lister?

  Did they really throw it out of a window and go Gardalu, is that true?

• 26:36Speaker 02

  I mean, I guess kind of some people did, but it's not a widespread practice, right?

• 26:41Kate Lister?

  Of course it's not.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  The same way, like you said, there is the myth that people were filthy, like in themselves. But also the myth that cities were dirty and of course there were dirtier areas in, in every city. But I don't think it's that simple. I think a good story to kind of illustrate that is from the Decameron by Boccaccio. I love this story, honestly, it's slightly grotesque, but I love it. And it's about kind of late medieval sanitation, or its shortcomings, to be precise. This is a story of a guy, Andre Ucho, and he goes to Naples to buy horses, as one does. And he's lured into a house. By a woman who claims to be his sister and he's like, sure, I'll go inside the house. Okay. And then once inside the house, he feels a sudden urge to empty his belly, in his words.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  Okay, as, as it happens, it's supposed to be a funny story. So it's all like slightly ridiculous, but okay. So he's inside the house, he needs to empty his belly. And then he steps into a kind of narrow alleyway between two houses. And there's a plank of wood that serves as a latrine. And of course, as he's using it, the plank breaks and he falls into the cesspit below. Okay, so that's the story people, I mean, 14th century Italians loved. Stories slightly gross, I think. I mean, we could say that Chaucer did as well, so it's not just Boccaccio, right?

• 27:59Kate Lister?

  I think so.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  But this is kind of a story that illustrates the shortcomings, I think, of public sanitation. But I don't think that's fair. I think it's supposed to be exaggerated, it's supposed to be grotesque. And this idea that people would just throw their waste out of the window, it's an exaggeration as well, right? Because in places like in Italian cities, there were officers that, there were people who would fine you if you did that, right? There were in places like Florence especially, they were really good in terms of public sanitation. There were people who worked as purgers, who cleaned the streets and made sure that the narrow alleyways between houses weren't blocked by rubbish. There's a historian, I really, really enjoy her work, Sandra Cavalo, and she writes a lot

• 28:40Speaker 02

  about this idea that cleanliness was a civic duty. You wouldn't just throw your, your waste away, right? And as you mentioned, in York with the bad smells. In Italy's case, people were worried about what we would call air pollution as well, right? Bad airs, because again, they are connected to disease. So if you were doing smelly things, like tanning hides in a residential area, you would cause bad air and you could be fined. So again, this all goes back to this problem. It's not just about the fact that when you're tanning hides, it smells bad and so it's unpleasant. It's dangerous if it's connected to disease spreading, right?

• 29:17Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  And there's something that I, I don't know if you've ever seen these, but so Leonardo da Vinci, he designed a kind of ideal city. And he imagined that it would be great if there were different levels for pedestrians and for waste removal. So people were-

• 29:33Kate Lister?

  Oh, he was very clever, wasn't he?

• 29:34Speaker 02

  He was. And he was thinking, what I find so interesting about people like him is that he was thinking about the most mundane things as well as the most sort of transcendent glorious things as well. I think it's, I think that that's why he's such an interesting person still for so many of us, because he was interested in everything. He was curious about everything. And so he was thinking, you know, how can we make cities better for people? So, yeah. And of course, as you mentioned with syphilis and with plague, people, officials, health boards, all, all kinds of people were worried about cities being as clean as possible so that disease would be contained, right? So in Milan, the health board was talking about street cleaning, emptying latrines

• 30:17Speaker 02

  regularly, all these kinds of things to make sure that the plague didn't spread or didn't spread as quickly or as much, right?

• 30:28Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Julia after this short break.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of the best one yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at go.o.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's go.o.gle/workspacewithGemini.

• 31:14Speaker 03

  What started the civil war? What ended the conflict in Vietnam? Who was Paul Revere? And did the Vikings ever reach America?

• 31:25Speaker 03

  I'm Don Wildman and on American History Hit, my expert guests and I are journeying across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made America. We'll visit the battlefields and debate floors where the nation was formed, meet the characters who have altered it with their touch, and count the votes that have changed the direction of our laws and leadership. Find American History Hit twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit.

• 32:12Kate Lister?

  All right, so they're good on plague and syphilis and you keep things clean, as clean as you can do. And you might not be washing your clothes all the time, but your undergarments-

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Your underclothes, yeah.

• 32:23Kate Lister?

  Your underclothes, they're being washed. And I can see the thinking there. Just as a woman, can I ask you, like, what about something like menstruation? Like, because you don't really get a say in that. That's coming. And it's no matter how many undershirts you change, you're still dealing with that one. Do we have, like, evidence at all about, like, how would that be dealt with?

• 32:46Speaker 02

  Varies quite a lot, but we do have sources. Again, the problem, I think, with this, trying to study this kind of thing, is that because there were so many taboos about it, that sometimes you just can't find all the details you want to find. But I think we have sources of people writing about women using rags, tying rags around them, or using more chemises or shifts over each other and then changing those. But again, I think because we're talking about so many layers of clothing, it's very different when you compare to, I don't know, like, being a teenager in the 21st century and kind of bleeding through your trousers at school. It's very different because you have layers upon layers, you know?

• 33:28Speaker 02

  And again, menstruation was considered to be so important for women's health. You- Had to bleed regularly and quite a lot. It was expected that women would have, you know, frequent periods and that there would be quite a lot of them. And there's even a quote that I find slightly disturbing, but in it's a Hippocratic text that says that women should bleed as a sacrificial victim in terms of like the amount of blood that was expected. Of course, that's just, yeah, awful. But anyway, so people were thinking about that and they were dealing with that. They were using rags, they were cleaning them. And I think about the UK specifically, a good source for that, there's an article by Sarah Reid, who's another historian that I really like.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  And she and she wrote about the importance of these cloths or rags that women would use and how there was even a case of it being used as a kind of offence, right? Like you are as dirty as a period rag or something like that. So, yeah, so people were thinking about that and they were they were minding that. And at the same time, we know with sex manuals, which were, again, kind of everywhere as well, that there was advice about avoiding sexual activity with a woman who was on her period because, you know, and I'm sure you came across that multiple times because if you

• 34:45Kate Lister?

  Oh, it's everywhere, that one, isn't it?

• 34:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:47Kate Lister?

  The idea that the menstruating body is dirty. But what about something then like body hair? Because that's interesting how that becomes associated with hygiene at different points throughout history.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, so thinking about body hair and about beards, I found it so interesting when I found out that because there's this idea that the hair is kind of an excrement and you have to be careful with contamination, you have to clean your hair, that meant that men were sometimes advised to have two different combs, one for their hair and one for their beard so that you wouldn't, you know, you wouldn't have the issue of contamination. And that surprised me. But again, with if you look at Renaissance combs, most of them have two sides and one of them is like for untangling and the other is for checking for lice. So there's this idea of like very thorough combing. But then in terms of hair removal, that's also very popular as well. And we know

• 35:40Speaker 02

  that there was in the late medieval period and Renaissance as well, this idea of high foreheads being connected to beauty.

• 35:47Kate Lister?

  Oh, yeah, I've heard that. They love that, don't they?

• 35:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, which, yeah, and we see even in England, I think Elizabeth Woodville, I think, is a good example of that. The medieval queen, because if you if you look at her portrait, she has such a high forehead and Yeah. You know, so women would be plucking those hairs, which must have hurt terribly. But they also used cosmetics to get rid of bodily hair, right? And yeah, so going back to Katharina Sforza, the alchemist that I mentioned earlier, she collected recipes for this as well, right, as did many other women of her day. So she had formulas using quick lime and oil pigment, which is a kind of arsenic. So very dangerous because it could potentially burn the skin. One thing that I find interesting about this kind of formula in the Renaissance, because you find them everywhere.

• 36:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, formulas using ingredients that we know to be dangerous or toxic or, you know, is that you have to be mindful of how long you you leave the product on your skin essentially, right? So women would use prayers as kind of kitchen timers of sorts. So the advice would be like, apply this for the length of a paternoster or something like that and not longer. And that is kind of a timer of sorts, right? But women were also advised to keep an eye on the mirror if you if you had one. Because if the skin starts turning red or itching, then you should remove it at once. So, yeah, so it's tricky because you you want to burn, quote unquote, enough to get rid of the hair, but not too much.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  So, yeah, I'm sure people had all kinds of accidents. And this is something I was going to say, because there's such a good book about this. Jill Berg's book, How to be a Renaissance Woman. She, I mean, she's brilliant because the book is very interesting. But one thing that she does that I find fascinating as a historian is that she tests so many of these recipes. She recreates the conditioners and the dry shampoos and all of that. And, yeah, and I find that really cool. So that's, you know, if people are interested in learning more about that, that's where I would go. But in any case, so facial hair and bodily hair, people were worried about that. And there were formulas coming from places like Muslim Spain. Muslim women were really well known for those formulas. And these recipes were traveling everywhere during the Renaissance and.

• 38:02Speaker 02

  I think that's so cool because we forget sometimes how interconnected all those places were, you know, how women were writing these formulas in their journals, they were sending letters, they were being published in, you know, printed books with the printing press, everything changed. And so these kind of recipe, they were everywhere, right? And I have one here that I want to show you. This is a book that I have. This is a book of medical recipes by the lady Isabella Cortese. And she is a mysterious author, 16th century author. And it's basically a book of recipes for all things to do with alchemy, cosmetics, hygiene. And you can see really well the overlap between cosmetics and hygiene because

• 38:46Speaker 02

  there are so many formulas, like this one, soap to make the hands soft and beautiful. So it's supposed to remove stains and make your hands white because that was, it was very prized in terms of it was a sign of beauty, but also to make them soft. And at the same time, it would clean the hands of, you know, impurities. So there are so many of these formulas that, that women would use and men as well. And books like these, they were not expensive, they were cheap. It can, well, relatively cheap. Most people would be able to afford one or, you know, borrow one and literacy was spreading. So we know that this kind of knowledge was increasingly available to people. And yeah, and we know that people were using these formulas because so many of these books

• 39:31Speaker 02

  are annotated. They have, you know, people writing things like, this works, this doesn't, or I burnt myself, which is something I found with one of these formulas to remove bodily hair. It's like, this hurts. Like, no wonder. You're using arsenic.

• 39:44Kate Lister?

  Oh my god, that's wild, isn't it? But as a final question then, for just how clean were you at this period? Have you ever found any like beauty tips or lotions or potions that actually you think stood the test of time? Because it can't have all been insane arsenic, humoral theory.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  No, no. No, no, and I, and I don't, I don't mean to be unfair to these recipes because many of them are, many of them do make sense. Many of them are for things like untangling hair. These would be formulas using animal fat or olive oil and they would be perfumed with herbs. So they would work. They would, they, I'm sure they would make your hair beautiful. And at the same time, things like soaps, same thing. You would make soap. It would be part of your kind of duties as the lady of the house, the woman of the house. You would know how to make soap. And if you were poor, you would make that yourself. If you had more money, you might have servants who would help you. But you would get the ashes, you would, you know, use lye and herbs.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  And you would make soap for the family. You would make soap to clean the body and the hair. And they would be seasonal as well. So people did know a lot about what to use when in terms of herbs. And many of these things would work. We know, for instance, about women in Venice. It was very in to be blonde. In 16th century Venice was very, it was like the height of beauty. So women would, as a part of their beauty routine, they would wake up, they would change their chemise. They would comb their hair, get rid of all of that. And if it was a sunny day, you would kind of wear this crownless hat. You would go up to the roof and you would have this product on your hair, this formula with things like lemon.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  And it would bleach your hair and you would be, you know, on the rooftop, like going blonde, all of that. And then you would look like a very fashionable lady. So we know that this would work, using chamomile or lemon to bleach your hair, that would have worked. And it wouldn't necessarily have damaged it. So it's not all scary stuff. There are some formulas that do make sense. I think when you verge more towards alchemy territory and Paracelsian formulas and using metals, it starts getting a bit more dangerous. But these herbal recipes, most of them, they would have helped. I mean, why not? And it's something that I want to start like recreating more, sort of following Jill Bikes' example.

• 42:06Kate Lister?

  That'd be fun, wouldn't it?

• 42:08Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure. Yeah. But it is tricky because so many of these recipes and I think.

• 42:13Kate Lister?

  You can't be using arsenic anymore, can you? Or lead or any of the other.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, I wouldn't. I wouldn't. And the same goes, I think, for animal ingredients. I don't know how comfortable I, I would feel with like using birds. Pooh, like, that was something like if you were, but I mean, men would, because there were many formulas for like, if you were losing your hair as a man and you wanted to keep it, formulas would use like dove droppings, which is, yeah, but you know, and I have no idea whether that worked, to be fair. But some of these recipes could be recreated. It's just that there's so much that is expected of the reader. And I think that gives you a good idea of how much Renaissance people were expected to know about hygiene and about cosmetics.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  Because so much was expected of them in terms of what does not need to be said in the recipe, right? I think when you're following a recipe nowadays, most of them, like for a cake, I don't know, a cake recipe, even if you're not a very good baker, you can mostly follow the recipe. Whereas with older recipes, it's expected that you will know so much that it doesn't have to be said. Sometimes like the quantities aren't explicit of ingredients, you know? Or sometimes a plant is mentioned, but you don't know, like, is it fresh or is it dry or I don't know, is it the petals or the leaves? I don't know, you know, so you would have to experiment quite a lot to get to the same level of a kind of random Venetian merchant's wife, you know? And in in terms of what she would know, right?

• 43:41Speaker 02

  So, yeah, that's all, a lot of rambling, but that's just to say that people were worried about hygiene for different reasons than than we are mostly, I think. But they were worried about that and they were thinking about how to keep themselves healthy. And that's the main thing with hygiene for them, right? So they they were using friction, they were using perfumes, they were using all the weapons in their arsenal. They were washing the hair with water over basins. They were then keeping the head like nice and warm, so you wouldn't be putting yourself at risk. They were minding all these different things. And the thing that I found relatable about them, about Renaissance women, thinking about you and I nowadays, is that

• 44:19Speaker 02

  I often feel that we are kind of inundated with different conflicting advice from like influencers and dermatologists and all kind of people. And you have no idea what is healthy and what isn't and what works and what doesn't. And it was the same for them, because you're getting one kind of advice from your doctor and a different. And one from your mother-in-law and then you buy the book that everyone's talking about and it's a different thing altogether. So I think there was a lot of anxiety about hygiene and bathing and all of that. But I think people were doing their best and trying their hardest to be as healthy as possible. And that included being clean, you know.

• 44:54Kate Lister?

  Julia, you have been marvelous to talk to. Thank you so much. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 45:00Speaker 02

  So I have a YouTube channel called Living History by Dr. Julia Martins and I have a blog with the same name. And I write about all these things and many other ramblings as well.

• 45:10Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much. Will you come back and talk to us about more Renaissance madness?

• 45:15Speaker 02

  Anytime, anytime. Thank you so much for having me, Kate.

• 45:18Kate Lister?

  Oh, you've been a blast.

• 45:23Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Julia for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we are finishing Filthy Month with a look at the Victorians, the people who love to tell us that everyone else in history was crap. But listen out next month to hear about the worst breakups in history. And if you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer is Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithgemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithgemini.