Soap in Europe has nothing to do with Arabs or Islam. The earliest hard evidence for it is ~8th century CE, but it is likely older. Contact with the Arabic world brought *hard soap* to Europe, a different tech than the soft, squishy soap native to Europe. It took off like wildfire because bar soap stores better, is transportable, and generally is an aesthetically more elegant texture. Also it signals a greater wealth as bar soap was first imported, than a more involved, expensive process to make. But by the 12th-13th century, hard soap was being made in Europe on near-industrial levels. There were soap guilds and soap factories and towns known for their soap and soap everywhere. Soap soap soap.
Water bathing was brought to/written about in Europe by the Romans, but you have to take their accounts as heavily influenced by the mindset that everything Roman was better and everything not-Roman was Uncivilized. It could be that water bathing in Europe is a lot older; we just don’t have written accounts or really obvious “this is a Bath Thing”. But the Romans didn’t used soap so any native soap use could have been stomped out.
Then there’s a gap in my hygiene/soap history knowledge because not many people tend to research that kind of nitty gritty detail between the fall of the Roman Empire and Medieval Europe. Not a lot of primary sources or extant goods.
Medieval Europe, people bathed. They bathed communally, with hot water and with soap.
Then water bathing fell out of style. It becomes medically shunned, for reasons whose foundations are erroneous, but make very clear, understandable sense. That’s a different topic and post, but the ideas aren’t out of nowhere. In a twist, Western people in the 21st century still believe some of them. 😀
But this doesn’t mean people were filthy, stank, or didn’t care about personal hygiene. They care a lot. I mean, duh, people generally dislike stinking and lack of hygiene has a really obvious connection to disease, social outcasting, and poverty. It’s just they had slightly different standards and often radically different practices.
You don’t need to water bathe or use soap to be clean. Really. Honest.
You can use the old technique of dry scrubbing with linen cloths, regular (linen) undergarment changing, and hair combing and be clean, smell-free, and no one in modern society will be able to tell. You might even see an improvement in body skin health as soap is kinda not-good for skin. You can dry scrub and wash your clothes and look clean, neat, and be unsmelly. You can shower and soap and not change/wash your clothes regularly and look filthy and utterly stink. Have done both, can attest. Also know a reenactor who did linen scrubbing for months and bish, no one could tell she hadn’t showered in half a year.
I mean, yeah, you’re not going to smell like nothing or flowers, but you’re not going to be rank con-goer stanky. You’re going to be person-smelling. Like, whatever your skin/body naturally smells of without stripping it away with detergents. Past people generally smelt slightly of woodsmoke anyway, so it’s not like it was that obvious.
Early-mid 19th century, water bathing comes back into (Western) style and that’s when things get funky. Soap use takes on moralistic and class connotations. This is where “the great unwashed masses” comes from. Those poor people living in industrial areas who couldn’t afford regular soap bathing. The new carbolic soap doesn’t do its soap thing in cold water. It just…becomes slime. You have to heat water on a stove (expensive), using coal (expensive), to make the soap (expensive) do its thing. But carbolic soap also has a distinctive smell so you can tell if someone has washed using it because they have this lingering aroma of it around them. So even if a poor person was dry scrubbing, you could tell they weren’t soap bathing, with all the moral, class, conscious Othering that went with it.
So the Arabic world may have brought certain hygiene tech, but the exchange went both ways (French soap quickly surpassed their original and they exported it back to the Levant) and it’s not that they were filthy before or after. We’re primates. We like grooming ourselves. We quickly make the really obvious connection between hygiene and disease. No person needed the Islamic world to teach them how to be clean. Soap and water bathing has just gone in and out of fashion through the centuries.
Pre-modern European cities were filthy, but not out of choice or because they didn’t know better. They grew and population exploded faster than first the idea of public works and then faster than any civic projects could keep up with. You can read 13th and 14th century London petitions to the king to “please increase waste disposal systems because this is gross and unhealthy and we don’t like it.” They knew that dumping it in the Thames would come back to haunt them, but the options were “dump in the river” or “let the shit sit in the road under the sun”. These were people who believed that disease came from bad-smelling air; they really wanted clean towns. They just didn’t have a civic system to make the projects and societies and governments that prioritized money for war over money for sewers.
Also even if you didn’t have solid soap you could make a pretty decent liquid soap with soapwort. And the Vikings were known to be very into bathing and cleanliness, especially hair care. Shockingly, even people in the past liked being clean. Wow!
So about that soap thing *chinhands*
Published
A Middleground 