bunnyjadwiga (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bunnyjadwiga) wrote2008-01-17 01:13 pm
bunnyjadwiga) wrote2008-01-17 01:13 pm
Personal body tenants
From Clean by Virginia Smith
"'Shifting' linen was not a problem for anyone of high rank: Edward IV's court accounts show regular money given to the 'lavendar-man' (the launderer or washing-man) to obtain 'sweet flowers and roots to make the king's gowns and sheets brethe more wholesomely and delectable.' But shifting his shirt and picking out vermin was a major chore for the poor student Thomas Platter, in Germany in 1499: 'you cannot imagine how the scholars young and old, as well as the common people, crawled with vermin. . . Often, particularly in the summer, I used to go and wash my shirt on the banks of Oder... whilst it dried I cleaned my clothes. I dug a hole, threw in a pile of vermin, filled it in, and planted a cross on top.' Delousing was more normally done by wives, mothers, and intimates in the slow leisure hours-- something that perhaps Platter, like other urban scholars and apprentices, had left behind with his faraway family. A rare description of delousing customs in the French village of Montaillou was fleetingly captured in a fourteenth-century inquisition testimonial:
Delousing was rarely recorded as minutely as that. A single fifteenth-century manuscript shows a well-dressed older woman brushing the downturned head of a young man outside in a garden using a large hand-brush, with the lice flying into a bowl that he is holding. In one medieval romance a nobleman enters the damsel's chamber and removes his shirt so they can scratch him with combs made of wood, bone and ivory 'with two rows of teeth, and brush his hair with their 'small brooms.'
pages 158-159
"'Shifting' linen was not a problem for anyone of high rank: Edward IV's court accounts show regular money given to the 'lavendar-man' (the launderer or washing-man) to obtain 'sweet flowers and roots to make the king's gowns and sheets brethe more wholesomely and delectable.' But shifting his shirt and picking out vermin was a major chore for the poor student Thomas Platter, in Germany in 1499: 'you cannot imagine how the scholars young and old, as well as the common people, crawled with vermin. . . Often, particularly in the summer, I used to go and wash my shirt on the banks of Oder... whilst it dried I cleaned my clothes. I dug a hole, threw in a pile of vermin, filled it in, and planted a cross on top.' Delousing was more normally done by wives, mothers, and intimates in the slow leisure hours-- something that perhaps Platter, like other urban scholars and apprentices, had left behind with his faraway family. A rare description of delousing customs in the French village of Montaillou was fleetingly captured in a fourteenth-century inquisition testimonial:
'Pierre Clergue had himself deloused by his mistresses... the operation might take place in bed, or by the fire, or the window, or on a shoemaker's bench. Raymond Guilhou also deloused the priest's mother, wife of old Pons Clergue, in full view of everybody in the doorway of the 'ostal', retailing the latest gossip as she did so. The Clergues, as leading citizens, had no difficulty finding women to relieve them of their insect life...'(Emmaunuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, p. 141)
Delousing was rarely recorded as minutely as that. A single fifteenth-century manuscript shows a well-dressed older woman brushing the downturned head of a young man outside in a garden using a large hand-brush, with the lice flying into a bowl that he is holding. In one medieval romance a nobleman enters the damsel's chamber and removes his shirt so they can scratch him with combs made of wood, bone and ivory 'with two rows of teeth, and brush his hair with their 'small brooms.'
pages 158-159