bunnyjadwiga

• One with scenes from Bocaccio's Comedia delle Ninfe Fiorentine showing hunters conversing with nymphs in a garden/sylvan setting
  
• A 1428 Florentine tray with a birthscene on one side and on the other, a naked child with coral amulet,pinwheel and hobbyhorse, urinating silver and gold, in a forest setting along with 2 inset coats of arms and the motto, being translated, "May God grant health to every woman who gives birth and to their father... may [the child] be born without fatigue or peril. I am an infant who lives on a [rock?] and I make urine of silver and gold."
  
• a Medici birth tray with a triumph, to commemorate the birth of Lorenzo il Magnifico in 1449.
  

...mixed bathing was forbidden, though this was not immediately clear to everyone. Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, scolded a devout Christian woman who patronized a mixed bath, which was apparently an unremarkable practice in third-century Carthatge. The woman, who had taken a vow of chastity, responded stoutly that she was not responsible for the motives of people who might look upon her nudity: "As for me," she wrote, "my only concern is to refresh and bathe my poor little body."

In the fourth century, St. Melania, the abbess of a women's monastery on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, successfully petitioned for a bath in the nunnery. Until then, her nuns had been walking down into the city and washing in the public bathhouses.

Most church authorities did allow Christians to patronize single-sex baths for the proper motives. Clement of Alexandria was a second-century teacher and writer whose views on most subjects were balanced and moderate for his time. In his guide to Christian thought and behavior, the Paedagogus (Instructor), he writes that there are four reasons for visiting the baths-- cleanliness, warmth, health, and pleasure. Christians may not bathe for pleasure, nor (although this is a less serious objection) for warmth. Women may bathe for cleanliness and health, and men only for health-- probably because men could wash in the river, which would be immodest for women. Clement prized the democratic nature of the baths, chiding ostentatious customers who arrived with a parade of servants, "because the bath [has] to be common and the same for everybody." For the same reasons, bathers should wash their own bodies, not relying on the care of an attendant.

Even the austere St. John Chrysostom (ca. 344-407) classed bathing, like eating, with the necessities of life... when the emperor Theodosius punished Antioch by closing its bathhouses in 387, Chrysostom protested that giving up bathing was too great a hardship and that he worried about the old, the sick, children and nursing mothers who relied on the bathhouse to safeguard health.

... fine white cloth, tablecloths, napkins, and other linen made... she will have very fine linen-- delicate, generously embroidered and well made... will keep it white and sweet-smelling; neatly folded into a chest.

The trouble with most people is, they bow to what is called authority; they have a certain reverence for the old because it is old. They think a man is better for being dead, especially if he has been dead a long time. They think the fathers of their nation were the greatest and best of all mankind. All these things they implicitly believe because it is popular and patriotic, and because they were told so when they were very small, and remember distinctly of hearing mother read it out of a book. It is hard to over-estimate the influence of early training in the direction of superstition.

A story from the collection of tales known as the Heptameron (c. 1558), and usually attributed to the authorship of Marguerite, Queen of Navarre . . . A certain lady, on a visit to a Franciscan monastery, wished to go to the privy. 'For company she asked a girl called La Mothe to go with her, but for the sake of privacy and modesty she left her in a room nearby, and went on her own to the privy' (Navarre, 1984:156)
... The story goes on to relate that the lady gets covered in excrement due to the privy being covered in the stuff. Her shame at being discovered in such a besmirched state is related partly as being a function of being covered in that particular material, and partly because male members of her party discover her thus . . .