Sorry if this has been asked before, but I just finished watching a fascinating documentary by Lucy Worsley, If Walls Could Talk- The History of the Home, all about bathrooms throughout the ages.
In it, she mentions that contrary to popular belief, medieval people bathed quite regularly in public bathhouses.
My question is, if people were indeed keeping themselves quite clean, why do historians say the plague spread because of lack of hygiene. Was it because the bathhouses were public places, because of a lack of hygiene at home, or simply a result of overcrowding?
Looking forward to hearing some answers and I'm sorry if this seems like a silly question. Thank you!
It’s similar to the situation in the Islamic world where public bathing was also common—which I am more familiar with—but the rationale is similar in both cases, which is: people didn’t bathe daily, and, more importantly, they didn’t tend to wash their garments. The last part is actually the key one, because plague is transmitted by fleas. Some of the fleas hang out on the clothing you’re wearing, you go, bathe, get clean, come back ... and put the same clothes back on with the fleas still attached. So your body is clean, but now the fleas are right back where they were.
Clothing was extremely valuable — this is why the dead were buried in inexpensive linen shrouds; their clothes would be kept by the family. If they didn’t fit or, for example, the clothing was for a male and all the surviving relatives were women, they could be sold at secondhand clothing markets — which earned the name “flea market” for a reason!
The other thing is that people were pretty much accustomed to having fleas and lice on their body. It was also really hard to get rid of them (you’d have to shave ... everything ... ), so bathing in and of itself wasn’t enough to actually ensure that eggs and larvae in particular were actually gone off the body.
It’s detailed about a lot of things, but Chapter 1 “A Natural History of Plague,” in Nükhet Varlık’s, Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600 (Cambridge U Press, 2015), covers the current thinking on the animal-flea-human infection cycle and process, including some interesting commentary about clothing, bathhouses, and flea markets!