Medieval Morals

Abstract

Abstract From now on we move northwards into western and central Europe to investigate patterns of personal health and hygiene from the medieval period onwards through to what later Europeans triumphantly called the early modern and modern world—finally putting the economic and demographic disasters of the fall of Rome well behind them. The ‘civilizing process’ that seeped through cash-strapped Europe in these medieval and early modern centuries was in effect the slow escalation of domestic luxuries, spread thinly over more ancient ways of subsistence life—hut life—that endured well into the twentieth century.