The Bath & The Mirror: Religious Power Play?

This Paris exhibit, "The Bath and The Mirror" sounds fascinating! Interesting, though, that this exhibit seems to offer physical refutation to an article about the history of bathing published in The Smithsonian magazine as recently as 1991:

In response to the debauchery of Roman baths, the early Christian church frequently discouraged cleanliness. “To those that are well, and especially to the young,” Saint Benedict in the sixth century commanded, “bathing shall seldom be permitted.”

Living unwashed were saints, the masses, and monarchs alike. Saint Francis of Assisi considered an unwashed body a stinking badge of piety.

“The fathers of the early church equated bodily cleanliness with the luxuries, materialism, paganism and what’s been called ‘the monstrous sensualities’ of Rome,” explains Professor Greene [V. W. Greene, a professor of epidemiology at the Ben Gurion Medical School in Beersheva, Israel].

Within a few centuries, the public and private sanitation practices of Greece and Rome were forgotten; or, as Greene adds, were “deliberately repressed.”

Europe during the Middle Ages, it’s often been said, went a thousand years without a bath.

The article does go on to mention that monasteries, however, as guardians of knowledge, "preserved some of Rome’s hydrological technology and cleanliness habits pointing out that Christchurch Monastery at Canterbury had elaborate plumbing laid in 1150 CE. -

—“Cleanliness has only recently become a virtue” by Jay Stuller, February, 1991, issue of Smithsonian, pages 126-135. Abstracted in web post, "Ablutions and Bathing: Historical Perspectives" , Wordinfo.info.

As we see by the beautiful toilette articles displayed in this new exhibit, however, bathing, like other social "perks", continued to be enjoyed by the wealthy elite, despite its vilification for the masses.

I think the early church was simply trying to control the social gatherings of the general population by its prohibition on bathing. The morality issues were just an excuse. The bathing ritual as practiced in ancient Rome and elsewhere was considered more a social activity than personal hygiene. It was often said that more business was conducted in the baths than in the streets. In my opinion, the embrace of Christianity by Constantine and others was simply a political strategy to control the Roman mob in the first place and subsequent repression of activities whereby the common man could improve their circumstance like education and "networking" in the bath house were simply repressed to ensure the continuance of the existing power structure.

The despotic emperors of the 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries had, for all practical purposes, already demasculated the Senate to the point that many magistracies were filled from the equestrian ranks or even lower. This meant that the emperors had to control an increasing number of subordinate administrators (and their kinsmen) rather than the select few of the earlier oligarchic senate. So, with the emperor as head of the church - the pontifex maximus - it is hardly surprising that he turned to the church to assist him in this regard.

The exhibit at the National Medieval Museum (Musée de Cluny) and the National Renaissance Museum at the Chateau d'Ecouen explores daily rituals around bathing and grooming from the Greco-Roman era through the Renaissance... an impeccably curated and fascinating glimpse into Roman Empire hairstyles and bathing rituals, formulas pre-modern Europeans used to make balms, unguents, rouges and other early beauty regimes, and artistic representations of beauty and grooming through the Renaissance period. It also debunks the myth that no one so much as approached a bath or wore makeup during the "dark ages", showing how social bathing and grooming rituals simply went underground in the medieval period, as the powerful Christian church regarded such rituals as potentially sinful.

Part of the exhibit at the Musée de Cluny is held at the newly reopened Gallo-Roman frigidarium, which once housed a public bath during the period when Paris was Lutetia, part of the Roman empire. - More: About.com

The exhibit also includes information about 144 powders, unguents, and other cosmetic materials that have been excavated from various sites, many reconstituted and displayed in recovered glass or ceramic containers.

Although the grooming rituals were no longer public, I wouldn't exactly say the wealthy went out of their way to hide this activity, as evidenced by the rise in popularity of the nude portrait in the 16th century.

[Image - Lady at her toilette. Ecole de Fontainebleau. 1560 CE]

How to read Cicero's gobbets and the problem of context when studying the ancient sources

I found this extensive review of Andrew Lintott’s new book, Cicero As Evidence: A historian’s companion, very interesting from the perspective of someone who tries to understand the historical context of works written by ancient sources:

An abstract:

"Andrew Lintott’s new book, Cicero As Evidence: A historian’s companion, treats the multi-volume writings of Cicero, from the private letters to the philosophical treatises, as if they were one big gobbet..."

"...He wants, on the one hand, to warn the novice against a naive, gullible approach to this material. You must not imagine, as he explains very clearly, that what have come down to us as "Cicero’s speeches" were in most cases anything like what were actually delivered in courtroom, Senate House or Forum. This is not just a question of Cicero improving what he had said on the day, when it came to circulating the “published” version. Some were outright confections, never delivered at all. This is well known to be the case with, for example, the later speeches in the series "Against Verres"; for Verres had seen the writing on the wall and scarpered when the trial was only part way through. But the idea that his famous fourth speech against Catiline is almost as much a retrospective invention is not so widely acknowledged. More than this, however, Lintott hammers home the obvious, but often neglected, point that the speeches as we read them make no sense in terms of the courtroom procedure of Roman law. If they reflect anything of what was said at the trial, it is only because Cicero has stitched together elements of various separate phases of the proceedings (including witness interrogation) to make something that would be handed to posterity as a single, coherent "speech"..."

"...He is impressively at home with the whole body of Cicero’s writing and has a sharp eye for some interesting and evocative passages. He is particularly good at unravelling the niceties of senatorial debate, as they are hinted at by Cicero in his letters. And he has an elegant few pages on the strange work known as the Commentariolum Petitionis (Handbook on Electioneering) written by Cicero’s brother Quintus to advise him on how to get elected to the consulship. Many have suspected this to be a first-century ad forgery, one of those imaginary historical exercises that Roman rhetoricians so loved. Lintott is not, for once, on the suspicious side, and uses the Commentariolum to capture the atmosphere of a Roman election, the handshaking, the canvassing and the streetwise PR campaign. Cicero, as we know, was to prove extremely successful at this. Not so the effete aristocrat Scipio Nasica in his own attempt at a charm offensive in an earlier election campaign. Surprised to find that the peasant’s hand he was shaking was so horny, he asked the poor man if he used his hands to walk on. Scipio lost that election..."

"...But there is also a “wood and trees” problem with the idea of history as gobbet. The finely honed analysis of individual passages is all well and good. But ancient writers did not write in three-line chunks, nor (despite the modern vogue for “sourcebooks”) did they write to be “sources”; nor, of course, did they write to be “Evidence”. By keeping his nose so close to the micro-problems, Lintott can miss out the bigger picture of the world in which Cicero operated, of what he thought he was doing and why that has been of such interest ever after.

So, for example, a carefully crafted section of Lintott’s book dissects Cicero’s philosophical writing and its relationship to his political life more generally. But there is nothing on just how extraordinary it was for a Roman politician to be analysing the world in Greek philosophical terms in the first place, or on the revolution in Roman thought (of which Cicero was part driver, part beneficiary) that made this possible. Another few pages offer a sensible analysis of the politics behind one of Cicero’s, now little read, religious speeches. This is Cicero’s own response to an enigmatic priestly interpretation of a strange rumbling sound that had been heard outside Rome and was assumed to be a message from the gods. But Lintott offers little to help us understand what difference this made, or how important the gods were in a world that might otherwise seem to be governed by hard-headed realpolitik and philosophical scepticism."