Bathing, Beauty and Christianity in the Middle Ages

By Elizabeth Archibald

Insights, Vol.5 (2012)

Abstract: Most of my work focuses on the later Middle Ages, the time of the development of the written vernaculars of western Europe and the rise of romance as a literary genre. But in thinking about my research project on baths and bathing in medieval literature and society in relation to the Durham research theme ‘The Recovery of Beauty,’ I realized that I needed to know much more about the attitude of the early Church to bathing, and how this evolved in the later Middle Ages. It turns out to be considerably more complex than one might suppose. The early Christians, living in the Roman empire with its culture of bathing, did not all condemn it out of hand. The growth of the ascetic movement and monasticism produced some extremely negative reactions to bathing, but some churches and monasteries built and maintained baths for the poor and sick, and many senior clerics also created splendid bath suites for themselves. In the later Middle Ages, preachers inveighed against luxurious bathing, but both male and female religious continued to enjoy public and private baths, which were increasingly popular across western Europe, and bathing imagery was sometimes used by ecclesiastical writers for didactic purposes. This ambivalent attitude is reflected in the imaginative literature of the period.

Introduction: It might be expected that for medieval Christians suspicion of tempting female beauty and disapproval of concern for external appearance would lead to a negative view of bathing. Virginia Smith claims that ‘Early Christians evidently had a rooted aversion to baths and nakedness; but in this they were strangely alone, compared to their neighbours [Islam] […]’. She echoes an argument voiced long ago by Gibbon, who ‘saw the monks as defying all we understand by civilisation and culture. Every sensation offensive to man was thought acceptable to God; pleasure and guilt are synonymous’. But in fact the attitudes of the early Church were much more complicated, and that complexity continued throughout the Middle Ages. It is ironic that it was the Church that maintained some of the old Roman public baths in the early medieval period (and later); in some cases this was an act of charity to serve pilgrims and the poor and sick, but in others the Church made money from the entry fees. While early ascetics were condemning bathing, high-status clerics were also installing and renovating private bath suites. Monastic rules prescribed bathing only once or twice a year for monks unless they were ill and needed medicinal baths (recommended in many medical treatises); but this rule was not strictly observed, and in the later Middle Ages some ecclesiastics were contractually permitted to go to spas.


Click here to read this article from the University of Durham

See also Did people in the Middle Ages take baths?

Amazon.com Widgets Amazon.com Widgets