At the same time, the filthiness of medieval people should not be exaggerated. Much evidence shows that personal hygiene mattered to medieval people, that they made an effort to keep clean. Popular advice books recommended washing the hands, face and teeth on rising, plus further handwashing throughout the day. Other body parts were washed less frequently: daily washing of the genitals, for example, was believed to be a Jewish custom, and thus viewed with suspicion by the non-Jewish population. Nevertheless, many households owned freestanding wooden tubs for bathing, and late-medieval cities usually had public bathhouses. Medical compendia gave recipes for washing hair, whitening teeth and improving skin. Medieval clergymen complained about the vanity of people who spent too much time fussing over their appearance. [...]
These variations in terminology reflect a shift in the understanding of microbiology, including parasites. Today, we know that parasites are something you catch – from another person, from food or in other ways. Until the 17th century, people thought that they were produced by spontaneous generation – that is, not by hatching from eggs, but by forming from existing (usually unpleasant) matter. The 13th-century physician Gilbert the Englishman described how ‘worms of various shapes are engendered in a man’s guts, both because of the diversity of guts [ie, whether they originate in the small or large intestines], and because of the diversity of matter [various types of phlegm] that they are made from.’ His near-contemporary Albertus Magnus described the louse as ‘a vermin which is generated from the putrescence at the edge of a person’s pores or which is amassed from it as it is warmed by the person’s heat in the folds of his clothing’. [...]
Medieval people also faced a wider range of parasites than we do: because they were apparently generated by the body, it was believed that they could occur in virtually any part of it. Despite being nonexistent, ‘earworms’ and ‘toothworms’ were particularly common, and no one was immune. Arnau of Villanova treated Pope Clement V when ‘one of his teeth had a cavity and there a worm tossed to and fro. When the worm stirred within the tooth … [the Pope] suffered greatly, so that he could not drink or sleep.’ Worms and lice around the eyes also seem to have been a frequent problem. These were probably linked to the contemporary belief in the importance of removing nocturnal residues and excretions from around the eyes on waking. [...]
According to The Good Wife’s Guide, it was the woman’s duty to make sure that there were no fleas in the marital bedroom, and especially in the bed itself. The author (purportedly a 14th-century husband instructing his much younger wife) includes tips on how to deal with fleas, including scattering alder leaves around the room, using white bedding on which pests are easily visible, and placing a slice of bread covered in glue with a candle in the middle as a trap. By the end of the middle ages, parasites (especially lice) were increasingly seen as evidence of poor hygiene, and associated with ‘wild people’. The link between poverty and parasites was reflected in the early 16th-century regulations for the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, which stated that: ‘Because many of the poor arrive teeming with lice, we separate out their clothes and store them … in a different place.’
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