by Albrecht Classen
It is one of the favorite strategies by many people to reflect generally and superficially on the past for comparative purposes and then to cast it in mostly negative terms. Thereby they can aggrandize and idealize their own culture as if all that technological progress in the modern world really represented progress for humanity in ethical, moral, or spiritual, and then also material terms. The Middle Ages and also the following centuries were, so the story goes, mostly dark, cold, barbaric, and ignorant, entirely subservient to the Catholic Church, and only with the rise of the Renaissance, later the age of the Enlightenment, did notable progress develop. Numerous medievalists have rallied against this myth, but myths tend to be stronger than historical facts, at least in popular opinions. In particular, the concept of physical hygiene proves to be most insightful in this regard especially because we have much more evidence available confirming a relatively higher level of hygiene in the pre-modern world than most commentators today want to believe. After a critical review of the common process of myth making today and the notion of dirt, this article will examine the statements by the rather obscure and yet important poet Der König vom Odenwald who had much to say about this and other related topics in cultural-historical terms. His comments and those by numerous contemporaries easily confirm that we must put to rest this foolish myth of the dirty Middle Ages and the early modern period. Most scholars are fully aware of this need, but we often lack the concrete evidence to make this claim.
History of hygiene; medieval bathing culture; modern myth-making; Der König
vom Odenwald; modern fake concepts of the past; misconceptions
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