Books › The Dirt on Clean
The Dirt on Clean
An Unsanitized History
First published 2007 · 384 pages
A fascinating, unsanitized tour through the surprising history of human hygiene and the shifting cultural anxieties hidden behind a bar of soap.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like taking a brisk, eye-opening tour through the most intimate spaces of human history. It strips away the mundane nature of soap and water to reveal a fascinating tapestry of shifting cultural anxieties, spiritual beliefs, and bodily fears. The narrative moves steadily across centuries, contrasting the two-hour soaks of ancient Romans with the perfume-drenched, water-averse aristocrats of seventeenth-century France, before landing in our modern, hyper-deodorized world. The prose is observant and engaging, balancing broad historical events like plagues and the Civil War with vivid, sometimes unsettling, details of daily life. It is a perfect read for lovers of micro-histories who delight in seeing their everyday routines completely recontextualized by the strange and messy realities of the past.
- Mood
- eye-opening
- reflective
- fascinating
- gritty
- Tone
- curious
- observant
- informative
- wry
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- evolution of hygiene · changing social norms · bodily fears and desires · spirituality and the physical body
- The writing
- Engaging and historically grounded, weaving broad societal shifts with vivid, intimate details of daily life.
- The arc
- Moves from a familiar modern baseline into a surprising, sometimes unsettling exploration of the past, ultimately arriving at a new understanding of our own intimate habits.
- Who it's for
- Readers who love micro-histories that recontextualize everyday habits and reveal the strange origins of modern norms.
Content notes
- plagues
- discussion of bodily odors
About the book
What could be more routine than taking up soap and water and washing yourself? And yet cleanliness, or the lack of it, is intimately connected to ideas as large as spirituality and sexuality, and historical events that include plagues, the Civil War, and the discovery of germs. For the first-century Roman, being clean meant a two-hour soak in baths of various temperatures, scraping the body, and a final application of oil. For the aristocratic Frenchman in the seventeenth century, it meant changing your shirt once a day and using perfume to cover your own aroma as well as others', but never immersing yourself in water. Now we live in a deodorized world where sales of hand sanitizers and wipes are skyrocketing. Ashenburg's tour of history's baths and bathrooms reveals much about our changing and most intimate selves--what we desire, what we ignore, and what we fear.--From publisher description.
Description from Open Library.
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