On the Genealogy of a Bad Sauna - Part II
The Medieval & Pre-Modern Period in Western Europe
The Fountain of Youth, Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1546
This is the second part of a five-part exploration of sauna pods, optimization culture, and the joys of bathing.
The medieval period in Europe was a time of bathhouses. Some were holdovers from the ancient Roman practice of building public bathhouses wherever they settled. Others, such as in eastern and northern Europe, derived inspiration from yet more ancient practices: the Lithuanian pirtis, the Russian banya, and the Finnish sauna. In Iberia, the Balkans, and anywhere under the aegis of either the Umayyids or the Ottomans, there was the hammam (often referred to as “Turkish baths”), and knights from western and central Europe brought this concept home upon returning from crusades.
“The Baths of Pozzuoli”, Naples c. 1370, from Pietro da Eboli, "De Balneis Puteolanis", Codex Bodmer
Balneology, German Bath House, 1405
“Women’s Bath”, Albrecht Dürer, 1496
Virgilius Solis. Copperplate engraving of the interior of a bathhouse with men and women, circa 1550.
In all these forms, Europeans of the Middle Ages liked to bathe: in pools of water and in steam, and often did so in public settings, surrounded by friends, neighbors, and complete strangers. Late medieval Cracow was home to 12 public bathhouses, while in Paris in 1292 there were at least 26. In 14th-century England, you could catch a steam bath at one of the city’s many “stews” (there were at least 18 in Southwark alone), or even at bakeries. The abundant steam created in the bread-making process was sometimes used for steam bathing, which caused a perennial conflict between the bakers guild and the Barbers Company (which represented the ‘stovers’, or keepers of the stews).
Medieval bathhouses served a variety of purposes beyond simple hygiene: patrons could receive a massage, a haircut, or shave, as well as medical procedures including cupping, bloodletting, and bathing in herbs especially prescribed for certain ailments. (The various medical guilds also had their conflicts with the Barbers.) You could also get a meal, enjoy live entertainment, or practice with your singing group, as did the Meistersingers in 15th-century Nuremberg. Bathhouses were places to relax and enjoy the company of others. And in many cases, they were places to commune with spirits and Gods, such as in the ninth century Aquae Granni, “Waters of Grannus”, at Charlemagne’s palace in Aachen.
A sainted cleaning with oak branches. Thomas Murner, Badenfahrt, 1514.
“Whoever cleans himself in this bath
Unites with God
And cleanses in one bath
His Body and soul, as he should”
—Thomas Murner, Badenfahrt, 1514
“The Bathhouse”, Albrecht Dürer, 1496
The use of public bathhouses in Europe began to decline precipitously in the 16th century, in part due to puritanical religious beliefs, the Reformation, the Counter Reformation, and the catastrophic carnage these movements wrought on early modern European society. There was also a vague sense, still 400 years before Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch would develop germ theory, that hanging out in public baths was spreading plague. As the Dutch philosopher Erasmus noted in 1526: “Twenty-five years ago, nothing was more fashionable in Brabant than the public baths. Today there are none, the new plague has taught us to avoid them.”
However, while communal bathing experiences were on the decline, certain forms of individual sweat bathing persisted, albeit with a narrower focus on medicinal benefits. The personal sweat bathing cubicle, which had existed within the rich milieu of bathing culture for centuries, persisted as many of those other forms faded from popular culture. Not only were you less likely to contract plague in a personal sweat box, the boxes’ implicit modesty allowed one to evade the Elizabethan period’s assault on bodily freedom, which saw “the development of shame with respect to nakedness, the advent of “manners” that attempted to regulate how one laughed, walked, sneezed, how one should behave at the table, and to what extent one could sing, joke, play.” Moreover, the backing of the medical community would have lent an air of respectability to a practice that may have otherwise been considered too frivolous to escape censure.
Thus, in many ways, the personal sweat cubicle is a good metaphor for a changing society by virtue of its implied modesty, adherence to changing norms of respectability, and an avoidance of public spaces motivated by a fear of plague. And underlying all these changes was a shifting attitude toward the body.
German woodcuts of steam and fumigation devices, 1547
Sweat box, 1688
A German broadside satirizing medical practices. The engraving depicting two treatments against “foolishness”: in the foreground the doctor's assistant pushing one patient on a stretcher into an oven, and in the background the doctor pouring liquid into another patient's mouth. Circa 1610.
In her noted work Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici examines how the transition from feudalism to capitalism entailed a change in the way the body is perceived, arguing that understanding the body as a “work-machine” is fundamental to the functioning of a capitalist society. This mechanistic view of the body, Federici writes, was not natural to the people of late medieval Europe, whose animist worldview did not perceive any separation between matter and spirit, imagining the cosmos as a living organism, populated by occult forces.
The shift to a mechanical worldview was achieved first by land reforms that pushed serfs off the land and into the wage market; and second, by the state’s use of overwhelming force to discipline workers, thus acculturating them to the new expectations around work. With the imposition of a totalizing regime of wage labor, workers were now encouraged to view their work as a commodity, something separate from themselves, which could be measured in time and bought and sold on the market. Increasingly, the body came to be perceived as merely an implement in service of that commodity.
“Instruments of human sustenance”, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 16th century
This changing relationship with the body was both perceived and influenced by early modern philosophers and statesmen, whose ideas affected state policy, public opinion, and eventually, the founders of the United States. As what would later be called the Scientific Revolution spread across Europe and the American colonies, it introduced a mechanistic world view, which reimagined the body and led to what social theorist Max Weber referred to as the “disenchantment of the world.”
The French philosopher René Descartes’ made among the most notable contributions to this process in his seminal work, Treatise of Man (1664). Here he sought to establish an ontological divide between a purely physical world and a purely mental one, one in which he repeatedly refers to the human body as “this machine”. Importantly, the division of mind and matter was not one of equivalency but of hierarchy: one in which the mind was privileged as the “master” of the body. (It was an idea that mirrored religious rhetoric of the day, in which conscience or will sought to master the “passions of the flesh.”) Another French philosopher, Julien Offray de la Mettrie, took this idea even further in his 1747 work, Man A Machine, in which he claimed that humans were nothing more than machines. In his conception, the mind and the soul were merely “illusions.”
Finally, one cannot overstate the influence that the discovery of the Americans and the subsequent enslavement of indigenous and African peoples had in forming pre-modern European notions of the body. Throughout this period successive colonial powers sought spiritual, legal, and intellectual justification for chattel slavery in the New World, which centered around the ability to treat entire groups of human beings as property. This rhetorical gymnastics, which allowed for the commodification of human bodies overseas, was bound to affect the way the European intelligentsia viewed humanity more broadly.
The concept of property was an especially potent vector for this transference, as demonstrated by the English philosopher John Locke. A looming figure of the Enlightenment and an inspiration to many of the founders of the United States, Locke was also a major investor in the English slave trade and co-author of the Fundamental Constitution of Carolina (1669). The Constitution states: “Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves.”
In his later, more influential work, Second Treatise on Government (1689), Locke writes that “every Man has a Property in his own Person and is the absolute Lord of his own Person and Possessions.”
What I find most interesting about this comparison is not the slavery-sized hole in Locke’s moral argumentation, but rather his abiding commitment to the concept of a person as property, regardless of who is master. Imagining oneself as “Lord” of one’s “own Person” is like an internalization of the master-slave relationship, a connection that would not have been lost on someone as intimately involved with slavery as Locke. It’s also an effective means of democratizing the notion of self-ownership (and self-objectification).
This concept of self-ownership, and by consequence, self-development, would play a pivotal role in the formation of the modern subject, grounding its autonomy and responsibility in a framework of individual rights and moral agency. Alongside a mechanical, Cartesian worldview this type of self-perception would be key to the emergence and functioning of an industrial society, making possible workers who were “temperate, prudent, responsible, proud to possess a watch.”
This is the second part in a five-part exploration of sauna pods, optimization culture, and the joys of sweat bathing. Tune in next week for Part III.
