Contrary to popular misconceptions, Europeans in the Middle Ages took pains to keep themselves clean. While the stereotype about the Middle Ages is that it was an era of darkness and filth, medieval art and literature suggest the opposite—it was a colorful epoch, even bright—during which people delighted in bathing and appreciated its medicinal value.
That bathing is critical to maintaining good health has been known since antiquity. Throughout history, both medical treatises and poems have been dedicated to the subject of good hygiene. Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum , a Latin poem made up of more than rhymes was likely first written in the eleventh century by someone familiar with the education provided by the medical school in Salerno.
Later translated into various vernaculars, the popular poem offered common sense advice on how to keep well by, for example, washing hands and face in cold water in the morning, and taking care to keep warm after a bath.
Indeed, an early German print of this poem featured a woodcut of a queen bathing. He also wrote some fifty recipes for bath solutions, customized to individual needs. Peter of Eboli described thirty-five ancient baths around the Bay of Naples, home to thermo-mineral springs.
Medieval manuscripts of this poem feature illustrations of bathers in indoor pools as well as in caves, enjoying steam baths, relaxing, drinking mineral water, and taking it away in small barrels. Ancient Romans associated the town called Baiae a spa resort also in the Bay of Naples with Venus, the goddess of love, while medieval astronomical manuscripts depicted people born under the influence of the planet Venus as bathing in the Fountain of Youth. A Eurasiatic myth about a miraculous fountain whose waters reverse the aging process mirrored this idea, and the development of vernacular literature during the Crusades spread this myth.
