Concepts of Cleanliness Changing Attitudes in France since the Middle Ages

This lucid and imaginative study uses the French experience to examine one fundamental aspect of the 'civilizing process': the way in which, over the past millennium, attitudes to and perceptions of human cleanliness, health and hygiene have changed, as have the moral properties attributed to the human body. Such changes are clearly manifest in the history of bathing, and Professor Vigarello demonstrates that the use of water for cleanliness has been by no means constant since the Middle Ages: the medieval ideal of visible purity (effectively meaning face and hands only) was replaced by modern notions of hygiene, which in turn reflected the growing concern for personal privacy. Clothes, in particular linen, assumed major importance in the creation of a new physical space for cleanliness; and scientific, bourgeois concepts of 'vigour' and bodily health, related to personal hygiene, gradually transformed the superficial aristocratic purity of earlier generations.