← Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society
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- [00:00]
Sleep Number Advertiser
Why choose a Sleep Number Smart bed?
- [00:02]
Dr. Julia Martins
Can I make my site softer?
- [00:03]
Sleep Number Advertiser
Can I make my site firmer? Can we sleep cooler? Sleep Number does that cools up to eight times faster and lets you choose your ideal comfort on either side. Your sleep number setting J.D. power ranks sleep number number one in customer satisfaction with mattresses purchased in store and online. And now the more you buy, the more you save on beds, faces and more limited time. For J.D. power 2025 award information, visit jdpower.com awards check it out at the Sleep Number Store or sleepnumber.com today, the new year brings new health goals and wealth goals. Protecting your identity is an important step. Your info is in endless places that could expose you to identity theft leading to lost funds. LifeLock monitors millions of data points per second. If your identity is stolen, our restoration specialists will fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Resolve to make identity, health and wealth part of your New year's goals. With LifeLock, save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock.com Special offer terms apply.
- [01:02]
Kate 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 subjects. And you should be 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 going to get a bit saucy. Oh, well, let's crack on. 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 the First 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 want to know. If you got up close and you giving them a good sniffing, what would they smell like? Just how clean were people in the early modern period? Do you want to find out? I know I do. Right, on with the show. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of Sex, Scandal and Society with me, Kate Lister. The Renaissance was a time of progress in the arts. Progress in the sciences, progresses 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 going to find out just how filthy people in the Renaissance were. Are you ready? Well, I know I am. Let's crack on. Well, hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Julia Martins. How are you doing?
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Dr. Julia Martins
I'm well, thank you, Kate. How are you? I'm so glad to be back here.
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Kate Lister
We had so much fun last time, didn't we? That was. That was a good giggle. I'm so glad that you're back for this one. This is the next installment in our little mini miniseries about how mucky were people from the past, basically.
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Dr. Julia Martins
I love that excellent series.
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Kate Lister
It's a good scene because that's one of the big misconceptions, 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?
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Dr. Julia Martins
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.
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Kate 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.
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Dr. Julia Martins
Rough time period, roughly. I think we're talking from the period between the early 15th century to the mid 17th 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. 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 so 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 I think that's the big change we're seeing in this period. So before then, doctors had mostly relied on ancient, ancient authorities, Right. People like Galen, who had dissected animals like pigs and monkeys, but not humans. But dissection was gradually starting to take over, starting from the 14th, 15th century onwards. So it was starting in unexpected places, I think to some people, places like convents where nuns would perform it, or noble. Yeah, yeah. Nuns were very big into it. And this is a subject in itself that is so cool.
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Kate Lister
Where was that in Sister Act.
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Dr. Julia Martins
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 Montefalco, she was the most famous example of that. And 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. I mean, I wasn't there, Right. We weren't.
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Kate Lister
That ladies. Well, they. That's what they said happened.
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Dr. Julia Martins
Exactly. Yeah. But, yeah, so in places like that, dissection was increasingly performed, connected to, like in all main 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 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 ancient 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 medicine. There's a lot going on. There are continuities, but there are lots of new and exciting things going on as well.
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Kate Lister
So, yeah, 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.
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Dr. Julia Martins
Yeah.
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Kate 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 400 years old, a thousand years old.
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Dr. Julia Martins
It's a very scary thought, I think. 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 people were being treated for things, all kinds of things with bloodletting and all kinds of remedies to do with rebalancing the humors. So it lasted such a long time. But yeah, I think it's a different, different paradigm. It's a different way of understanding knowledge. We tend to think knowledge and I think 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 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.
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Kate Lister
Not great. Like germ theory is a way off yet before anyone's going to come up with that. But how was their medical understanding around? Like, dirt and filth are generally not healthy things to be around.
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Dr. Julia Martins
I think that's such a cool question because 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 Hygiea, 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. So this gives us a clue, I think, about hygiene and how it was underst 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 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.
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Kate Lister
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?
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Dr. Julia Martins
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? 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 earwax, for instance, anything coming out the body. Exactly. Including hair. Even hair could be considered a kind of excrement of the head. Right. 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. 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. 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. So. Right. So there was this Italian physician, Girolamo Mercuriale, 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. 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.
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Kate Lister
Right, 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.
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Dr. Julia Martins
Right. But I mean, how do you do that? Right. How do you clean the body, I think is the question.
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Kate Lister
That's the big one, isn't it? How do you keep clean in the early modern world?
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Dr. Julia Martins
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 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.
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Kate Lister
Right. They 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, I think it's probably syphilis that came along and clobbered it and this idea of sharing spaces. But what's public bathing looking like in this time period?
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Dr. Julia Martins
I think that's a good question, because we know in the Roman world that public bathing was everywhere. It was connected to the social life. Baths were. Were hubs of people. But then. And that continued, we know, in the medieval period, and I know that Eleanor Yenig is Always talking about how people did bathe and, you know. 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 believed 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.
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Kate Lister
Actually, it might not have been right for the reasons they thought it was, but.
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Dr. Julia Martins
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.
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Kate Lister
Right.
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Dr. Julia Martins
So they started sort of becoming less central at the same time. Interestingly enough, in the Renaissance, sort of boneology of 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. Oh, exfoliating the dirt 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 com 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.
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Kate Lister
I'll be back with Julia after this short break.
- [17:14]
Dr. Julia Martins
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- [17:44]
Sleep Number Advertiser
Why choose a sleep number Smart bed.
- [17:46]
Dr. Julia Martins
Can I make my site softer?
- [17:48]
Sleep Number Advertiser
Can I make my site firmer? Can we sleep cooler? Sleep number does that cools up to eight times faster and lets you choose your ideal comfort on either side. Your sleep number setting. J.D. power ranks sleep number number one in customer satisfaction with mattresses purchased in store and online. And now, the more you buy, the more you save on beds, faces and more limited time for J.D. power 2025 award information. Visit J.D. power.com awards check it out at the Sleep Number Store or SleepNumber.com Today, the new year brings new health goals and wealth goals. Protecting your identity is an important step. Your info is in endless places that could expose you to identity theft leading to lost funds. LifeLock monitors millions of data points per second. If your identity is stolen, our restoration specialists will fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Resolve to make identity, health and wealth part of your New year's goals with LifeLock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock.com SpecialOffer Terms Apply are you.
- [18:46]
Dr. Julia Martins
Looking for the perfect podcast to hunker.
- [18:49]
Kate Lister
Down with during the longer, colder, darker nights? Well, look no further than the award.
- [18:55]
Dr. Julia Martins
Winning After Dark Myths, Misdeeds and the.
- [18:57]
Kate Lister
Paranormal with me, Maddy Pelling and me, Anthony Delaney. We are historians and love all things gloomy and macabre, from Tudor executioners and.
- [19:06]
Dr. Julia Martins
Ancient Egyptian death rituals to witch trials and folklore. Feel transported back in time on After Dark out every Monday and Thursday wherever you get your podcasts.
- [19:16]
Kate Lister
And guess what?
- [19:17]
Dr. Julia Martins
We're also now on YouTube.
- [19:18]
Kate Lister
YouTube After Dark, a podcast from history hit. How common was bathing? So like the idea of like you go and hang out with your mates in the bath is 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 where the 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?
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Dr. Julia Martins
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. 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 go 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. 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 to have your hands and your face dirty. So it was very important for people to be clean. And this would be 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 way of keeping the body clean and healthy from what came from the inside. Right. 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.
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Kate Lister
Okay, what do you mean by that?
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Dr. Julia Martins
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, 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.
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Kate Lister
So is the shirt getting dirty, not the outer clothes?
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Dr. Julia Martins
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. They would be, wouldn't they? So, yeah, definitely not. Especially as they used urine. Right.
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Kate Lister
To wash. Oh, right.
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Dr. Julia Martins
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 free, fresh. Right, 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 Forli.
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Kate Lister
Oh, yes.
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Dr. Julia Martins
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, keep them. I can make more. Like, I have the means you do, you know. Yeah. So she's quite. She's quite unusual. Yeah. Maybe not, but definitely Alchemist of the year, I think, because she collected 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. 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. 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?
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Kate Lister
Ppe, right, yes.
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Dr. Julia Martins
It's a silly analogy word.
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Kate Lister
No, no, I go on, explain why perfume is like ppe.
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Dr. Julia Martins
I think the best way to think about it is that. Okay, so if we 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 were also act as a kind of shield when you went to areas that weren't particularly clean, like, you know, the bad smells getting in. 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 PPE of sorts. 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 gems, so how would they, 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.
- [26:20]
Kate Lister
It does, it does make sense. I can totally see what it is that they think that they're doing there. So it would have smelt quite heavily perfumed, I reckon, if you were knocking around, around at this point, obviously in your built up industrial areas, there would have been some pretty nasty nifs 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 stuck. So there have been areas that were just horrendous. But what about this is the question that I've asked in everyone of this series so far, Human waste. How are we dealing with the this at this particular point? Because wherever you've got civilization, wherever you have a group of people, that you're going to have to factor this in somewhere.
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Dr. Julia Martins
Yes, I think that's such an important question. And you're right.
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Kate Lister
Did they really throw it out of a window and go gardaloo? Is that true?
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Dr. Julia Martins
I mean, I guess kind of. Some people did, but it's not a widespread practice. Right. Of course it's not the same way. Like you said, there is the myth that people were filthy healthy, like in themselves, but also the myth that cities were dirty and of course there were dirtier areas 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, Andrei Ucco, 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 woods. Okay. 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 little 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? I think so. 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 Cavallo, and she writes a lot about this idea that cleanliness was a civic duty. You wouldn't just throw 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, yeah. 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.
- [30:10]
Kate Lister
Oh, he was very clever, wasn't he?
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Dr. Julia Martins
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 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 kinds of people were worried about cities being as clean as possible so that disease would be contained. So in Milan, the health board was talking about street cleaning, emptying latrines 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.
- [31:05]
Kate Lister
I'll be back with Julia after this short break.
- [31:16]
Sleep Number Advertiser
Why choose a Sleep Number Smart bed.
- [31:18]
Dr. Julia Martins
Can I make my site softer?
- [31:19]
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- [31:46]
Dr. Julia Martins
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- [32:29]
Kate Lister
All right, so they're good on plague and syphilis and keep things clean, as clean as you can do. And you might not be washing your clothes all the time, but you're under garments. You're under clothes, 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? 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?
- [33:03]
Dr. Julia Martins
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 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? 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 Reed, who's another historian that I really like, 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 offense. Right. Like you are as dirty as period rag or something like that. So, yeah, so people were thinking about that and 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.
- [35:01]
Kate Lister
Did have everywhere, that one isn't it?
- [35:03]
Dr. Julia Martins
Yeah.
- [35:03]
Kate 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.
- [35:13]
Dr. Julia Martins
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, 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, very thorough combing. But then in terms of hair removal, that's also very popular as well. And we know that there was, in the late medieval period and Renaissance as well, this idea of high foreheads being connected.
- [36:03]
Kate Lister
Oh, yeah, I've heard that they love that, don't they?
- [36:06]
Dr. Julia Martins
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 look at her portrait, she has such a high forehead. And, you know, so women would be plucking those hairs, which must have hurt terribly. But they also use cosmetics to get rid of bodily hair. Right. And, yeah, so going back to Katarina 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 quicklime and orpiment, 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. 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 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 paternoster or something like that, and not longer. And that is kind of a time of sorts. Right. But women were also advised to keep an eye on the mirror if you had one, because if the skin started turning red or itching, then you should remove it at once. So, yeah, so it's tricky because you want to burn enough to get rid of the hair, but not too much. 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 Burke's book, How to Be a Renaissance Woman. 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 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 this 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 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 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 a. 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. You 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 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.
- [40:02]
Kate Lister
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 has stood the test of time? Because it can't have all been insane. Arsenic, humoral theory.
- [40:19]
Dr. Julia Martins
No, no, no. And I, and I don't. I don't mean to be un. To these recipes, because many of them are. Many of them do make sense. Many of them 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. 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 tubs 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, 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 and it would bleach your hair and you would be, you know, on the rooftop 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 Baeck's example.
- [42:23]
Kate Lister
But fun, wouldn't it?
- [42:25]
Dr. Julia Martins
Oh, for sure, yeah. But it is tricky because so many of these recipes, and I think you.
- [42:30]
Kate Lister
Can'T be using arsenic anymore, can you? Or lead or any of the other.
- [42:33]
Dr. Julia Martins
I mean, yeah, stuff that's in this, I wouldn't. And the same goes, I think, for animal ingredients. I don't know how comfortable I would feel with like using bird poo. 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, because so much was expected of them in terms of what does not need to, 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 all the 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 petals or the leaves? I don't know, you know. So you would have to experiment quite, quite a lot to get to the same level of a kind of random Venetian merchant's wife in terms of what she would know. Right. So, yeah, that's a lot of rambling. But that's just to say that people were worried about hygiene for different reasons 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 were using friction, they were using perfumes, they were using. They were using all the weapons in their arsenal. They were washing the hair with water over basins, they were then keeping the head 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 I often feel that we are kind of inundated with different conflicting advice from influencers and dermatologists and all kinds 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 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.
- [45:10]
Kate Lister
You know, 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?
- [45:17]
Dr. Julia Martins
So I have a YouTube channel called Living History by Dr. Julia Martins. And I have blog with the same name and I write about all these things and many other ramblings as well.
- [45:27]
Kate Lister
Thank you so much. Will you come back and talk to us about more Renaissance Madness?
- [45:31]
Dr. Julia Martins
Anytime, anytime. Thank you so much for having me. Kate.
- [45:35]
Kate Lister
Oh, you've been a blast. 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 wherever it is you get your podcasts Coming up. We are 50 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, if you wanted to say hello, then you can email us@betwixtistoryhit.com this podcast was edited by Tim Arstel and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer is Freddie Chick. Join me again betwixt the Sheets the History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
- [46:21]
Dr. Julia Martins
This is Paige desorbo from Giggly Squad. Boost Mobile gives you the same network coverage, speed and service you're used to, just at a more affordable price. Why pay more if you don't have to? Offering reliable nationwide coverage backed by a 30 day money back guarantee. Love your service or get your money back, no questions asked? Visit your nearest Boost Mobile store or head to boostmobile.com to learn more. After 30 gigabytes, customers may experience slower speeds. Customers who cancel within 30 days of activation will have Boost service fees refunded, activation fees if applicable, and phone payments will not be refunded.
- [47:00]
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- [47:01]
Dr. Julia Martins
Smart Bed Can I make my site softer?
- [47:03]
Sleep Number Advertiser
Can I make my site firmer? Can we sleep cooler? Sleep Number does that cools up to 8 times faster faster and lets you choose your ideal comfort on either side. Your sleep number setting J.D. power ranks sleep number number one in customer satisfaction with mattresses purchased in store and online. And now the more you buy, the more you save on beds, faces and more limited time. For J.D. power 2025 award information, visit J.D. power.com awards. Check it out at the Sleep Number Store or SleepNumber.com today.