The Roman Church embrace personel hygien in the dark ages

What would the effect be on europe when the Roman church embrace, personel hygiene. Some influencial monastry order (lets say the Dominicans) have the dogma that the human body is made by the excample of the Lord and there for need to be cleaned and washed regulary. Also it is an insult to God to enter a church without beiing washed.
The bath houses of the monastries are next to the church the most important building of the manastry complex.
This bath houses are coppied in emerging cities and by wealthy nobels.
In OTl the Roman church disproved the bathing of humans, a verry common habbit in the middle ages but due to the church propaganda complete out of use/fashion by the late 15th century. Later even regarded as dangerous for the body.
 
What would the effect be on europe when the Roman church embrace, personel hygiene. Some influencial monastry order (lets say the Dominicans) have the dogma that the human body is made by the excample of the Lord and there for need to be cleaned and washed regulary. Also it is an insult to God to enter a church without beiing washed.
The bath houses of the monastries are next to the church the most important building of the manastry complex.
This bath houses are coppied in emerging cities and by wealthy nobels.
In OTl the Roman church disproved the bathing of humans, a verry common habbit in the middle ages but due to the church propaganda complete out of use/fashion by the late 15th century. Later even regarded as dangerous for the body.

We'd get a more water-intensive Europe.
 
Possible POD - somehow make it that the various aqueducts and bath complexes in and near Rome or the Papal territories remain in much better repair during the invasions and that they maintain such for a longer period. This may allow it to become a tradition of the papal organisation and thus the Church
 
Er, I don't know about the church, but people in middle ages were surprisingly clean. Most cities had public baths, and bathing was seen as both a necessity and a recreational activity. Of course, they probably didn't bathe as often as we did (once a week, usually, and maybe less during the winter), but this whole myth about the unwashed masses in nonsense.

Ironically enough, it wasn't until the renaissance and the reformation that bathing fell out of favor, since it was seen as a decadent and potentially sinful behavior.
 
Dominicans were/are preachers and teachers, so it is the appropriate order to spread the new gospel of Saturday night baths. (Perhaps a "cleanliness is next to Godliness" strategy.) Question is: Why? There has to be a reason for the new emphasis on bathing, and not one associated with the decadent Roman Empire. Everyone is used to the smell, after all.

So let's say some bright Dominican friar makes the connection between dirt and infection. He notices that wounds cleaned with clean, boiled water (or with that Cistercian-made brandy he favors) don't get infected as much as other wounds. He uses a rudimentary form of the scientific method to determine that using boiled water and cleaning the dirt from a wound helps it heal. Thus bodily cleanliness helps the soul to heal. The idea translates into domestic cleanliness as well.

This could give the Dominicans a new calling as healers and early scientists as well as promoters of bathing. So when the Black Plague comes calling in the mid-1300s, it's another Dominican who notices the connection between flea bites and plague victims ...
 
Possible biblical argument for this that could be used by the Church: Jesus was baptized in the river Jordan and at times talked of washing feet. This could be interpreted as a sign that people need to wash themselves in order to show that they are members of the Universal Church.

Sure it is a flimsy argument but so is the Doctrine of Original Sin.
 
You need a very early POD for that. The church inherited the Neoplatonic idea that the body and its associated sensations are inferior to the mind, and they turned that into the dualism of being 'of the flesh' and 'of the spirit'. That is why, though its entire history, the church discouraged taking exaggerated care of the body, and that is what the 'scent of holiness' originally was - ascetics smelling like poor people. If you can't get rid of this at the origin, you have to counteract nearly a millennium of tradition that says holy people don't live physically enjoyable lives (and throughout the Middle Ages, washing was formly associated with enjoyment and wellbeing, not necessity or protection from disease).

A simple, though extremely far-reaching POD would be to pre-empt the rise ofmonasticism. Most secular clergy in the SAncient world lived the way their flock did, incöluding regular washing, and were expected to act like respectable citizens. Monks, on the other hand, often refused to wash ever, to mortify the flesh. If their influence istaken out of the church, we'll see a very different attitude to cleanliness (but also a very different world, of course).
 
I was under the impression that it was part of the monastic routine to bathe at least once a week

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
I know that middle agers used a bath more frequent than than later in early 16th century and less and less in the comming centuries. Also Roman build bath housses in the UK and Germany were in use far into the middle ages.
I also am aware of beiing not so clean can be a sign of ''scent of holyness''.
But what if, some monk, like Sant Dominic or Sant Fransiscus or who ever, spiritual man who get a considerable amount of followers, state that it is a duty to wash your self every time before you enter the house of God, the church.
That, entering a church, never washed since you were born and so covered with dirt and smelling like '' hell'' is an insult to God?
Of course the church will have their crusade against bath houses ( most of them brothels) and bading together of men and women.
 
I'd agree that middle-agers were cleaner than usually assumed.

One difference though: swimming skills were pretty rare, AFAIK. If the church advocates bathing, this may lead to the ability of swimming being more widespread, which could safe many human lives throughout the centuries.
 
One of your problems is that wood gets very scarce about the time of Elizabeth in England. Heating water for bathing was expensive. That was less of a problem in the actual middle ages.

The other thing was the Spanish. Regular bathing meant someone might think you were a secret Jew or Moslem and report you to the inquisition. Or so I understand. While there was some little of that in the rest of Europe, I think it's not that big a deal most places.
 
I was under the impression that it was part of the monastic routine to bathe at least once a week

Among the more genteel orders, it was. That was the routine most cityfolk followed, too: bathe weekly, other days just wash. But the monastic orders had to justify this kind of thing because the original regulations usually allowed bathing'as health requires', i.e. not for pleasure.
 
The Rule of Saint Benedict...

...Is the basis of Western European monasticism. If Saint Bernard had incorporated a chapter on bodily cleanliness, life could have been different. Unfortunately, Monte Cassino is a hill and wine would have been more available than water.:)
 
...Is the basis of Western European monasticism. If Saint Bernard had incorporated a chapter on bodily cleanliness, life could have been different. Unfortunately, Monte Cassino is a hill and wine would have been more available than water.:)

Benedict was a very moderate man, and Monte Cassino included baths as a matter of course (as did Lerins but IIRC not Tours). The problem is that he didn't really see the need to regulate it. His monks did not create a washing culture, they followed the one they found themselves in, any in the roman worldview, they couldn't help connect bathing and pleasure (and thus consider it, like food and drink, something to be done in moderation). It's a lot like the monastic attitude to food - the Benedictine rule mandates adequate and pleasing rations, but later orders sometimes entered into competition who would serve less palatable things. The inner logic of opposing spiritual and corporeal makes it sort of unavoidable.

Incide4ntally, thev idea that you should come to Church only washed and preoperly groomed goes counter to important tenets of Christianity (it took the Protestants to change that attitude), but a similar injunction can be reconstructed for pagan Scandinavia from Icelandic sources. And an Anglo-Saxon source laments that the Danes were too cleanly.
 
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