Tag Archives: personal hygiene

The Daily Communiqué – 21 April, 2019 – Recap Week 3

Lookee here!  Three weeks of posting daily.  Writing ahead and scheduling hasn’t been working out so I race home after work and write.  And for some reason, the scheduling feature on WordPress has stopped working.  Neither of the plugins I downloaded work either.  So no regularly scheduled posts at 1700 each day.  Daily posts when I get to a computer and can push the button.

On Monday, Notre Dame caught fire.

Tuesday, I went pink.

Exploring different ways of chasing the demons away, spurred by a story about a small town in Spain which throws turnips at a monster was the topic on Wednesday.

I discovered a new artist on Thursday.  Artemisia Gentileschi by name, and her work is feminist and takes on the patriarchy.  Not bad for a 16th century painter.

Friday was fantasize about travel day.

I closed the week by exploring hygiene as a seduction technique.

The Daily Communiqué – 20 April, 2019 – Viking Hygiene

Over on Twitter, there was a discussion about personal hygiene as a seduction tool.  Apparently, because the Viking invaders into what’s now England brushed their hair and cleaned their teeth every day, washed their clothes, and took a bath once a week, the women were leaving their husbands in droves.

“It must be recognized that the Christians of the time avoided bathing specifically because they considered too much cleanliness to be a sign of vanity, which was sin. Thus the infamous smelliness of the medieval period began.” (C. J. Arden, Were the Vikings Dirty? 03/20/2015)

To put this in context, the Viking age was ~793–1066 AD.  But what I got to wondering about was, when did we go from cleanliness as a vanity and a sin to cleanliness is next to Godliness?

My brief search led me to John Wesley who,  in a sermon in 1778, stated that cleanliness was indeed next to Godliness.  (There’s a lot of media and books available by and about him here at the Internet Archive, a cool place in itself.)

But even in 1778 personal hygiene was more difficult than we have today.  It’s a good reminder we should never expect our norms to fit history.  Things evolve and change.  I’m grateful every day for indoor plumbing and hot and cold running water.