Author: Katherine Ashenburg File Type: epub The question of cleanliness is one every age and culture has answered with confidence. For the first-century Roman, being clean meant a two-hour soak in baths of various temperatures, scraping the body with a miniature rake, and a final application of oil. For the aristocratic Frenchman in the seventeenth century, it meant changing your shirt once a day and perhaps going so far as to dip your hands in some water. Did Napoleon know something we didnt when he wrote Josephine I will return in five days. Stop washing? And why is the German term Warmduscher--a man who washes in warm or hot water--invariably a slightagainst his masculinity? Katherine Ashenburg takes on such fascinating questions as these in Clean, her charming tour of attitudes to hygiene through time. 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. An engrossing fusion of erudition and anecdote, Clean considers the bizarre prescriptions of historysdoctors, the hygienic peccadilloes of great authors, and the historic twists and turns that have brought us to a place Ashenburg considers hedonistic yet oversanitized.From Publishers WeeklyAccording to Ashenburg (The Mourners Dance), the Western notion of cleanliness is a complex cultural creation that is constantly evolving, from Homers well-washed Odysseus, who bathes before and after each of his colorful journeys, to Shaws Eliza Doolittle, who screams in terror during her first hot bath. The ancient Romans considered cleanliness a social virtue, and Jews practiced ritual purity laws involving immersion in water. Abandoning Jewish practice, early Christians viewed bathing as a form of hedonism they embraced saints like Godric, who, to mortify the flesh, walked from England to Jerusalem without washing or changing his clothes. Yet the Crusaders imported communal Turkish baths to medieval Europe. From the 14th to 18th centuries, kings and peasants shunned water because they thought it spread bubonic plague, and Louis XIV cleaned up by donning a fresh linen shirt. Americans, writes Ashenburg, were as filthy as their European cousins before the Civil War, but the Unions success in controlling disease through hygiene convinced its citizens that cleanliness was progressive and patriotic. Brimming with lively anecdotes, this well-researched, smartly paced and endearing history of Western cleanliness holds a welcome mirror up to our intimate selves, revealing deep-seated desires and fears spanning 2000-plus years. 82 b&w illus. (Nov. 15) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. From School Library JournalAdultHigh SchoolThis is a fascinating examination of the changing notions of what it means to be clean, and how those concepts fit into the worldview of different societies. The book is especially valuable for exploring the daily lives of people in past societies, but also for providing perspective on our attitudes toward ourselves, our bodies, and our world. It begins with the communal baths of the Greeks and Romans and explores the religious and ritual aspects of bathing, including Christian baptism. The public bath returned with the Crusaders, who brought the custom back to Europe in the form of the Turkish bath. With the plague and fears of communicable diseases, people avoided water-which they feared made the body vulnerable-in favor of linen cloth, which could be changed regularly, in lieu of bathing. Fear of immersing the body in water continued into the 20th century. Ashenburg, who uses interesting quotes from contemporaries to illustrate her history, speculates that in the future, when water shortages dictate new concepts of cleanliness, our own day may be seen as an age of excessive bathing and deodorizing.Tom Holmes, King Middle School, Berkeley, CA Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

Author: Margaret C. Jacob File Type: pdf Margaret Jacob and Larry Stewart examine the profound transformation that began in 1687. From the year when Newton published his Principia to the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, science gradually became central to Western thought and economic development. The book aims at a general audience and examines how, despite powerful opposition on the Continent, a Newtonian understanding gained acceptance and practical application. By the mid-eighteenth century the new science had achieved ascendancy, and the race was on to apply Newtonian mechanics to industry and manufacturing. They end the story with the temple to scientific and technological progress that was the Crystal Palace exhibition. Choosing their examples carefully, Jacob and Stewart show that there was nothing preordained or inevitable about the centrality awarded to science. It is easy to forget that science might have been stillborn, or remained the esoteric knowledge of court elites. Instead, for better and for worse, science became a centerpiece of Western culture. ReviewPractical Matter presents a popular argument for strong continuities between the Scientific Revolution and the industrial transformation whose machines and symbols populated the Crystal Palace in 1851.--David Philip Miller (Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences )[Practical Matter] is a highly ambitious and provocative survey of the cultural history of science and industry...While Jacob and Stewart embrace a comparative perspective and offer occasional forays to describe the developing relation between science and industry on the Continent and in the colonies, these additional studies serve mainly to underscore the pioneering precedent set by British natural philosophers and manufacturers in forging the requisite cultural matrix and technical knowledge for industrialization. Practical Matter resolutely avoids many of the commonplaces of the scholarship on the Industrial Revolution.--Fredrik Albritton Jonsson (Journal of Modern History 20070201)This ambitious little book reviews how Newtons disciples promoted themselves and their inventions throughout Europe . . . By concentrating on utility, Jacob and Stewart have refreshingly revived some voices of the periods practical reformers . . . Writing small books on big subjects is extremely hard, but there is a great demand amongst teachers and readers for short, accessible stories about the history of science.--Patricia Fara (Minerva 20051201) About the AuthorMargaret C. Jacob is Distinguished Professor of History, University of California, Los Angeles.Larry Stewart is Professor of History, University of Saskatchewan, Canada.