In the ­well-­scrubbed modern West, it’s easy to assume that what constitutes personal cleanliness is an objective matter. Upon arriving in India, however, I found that my spotless hotel’s bathroom wasn’t furnished with the familiar toilet and roll of paper but with a “squatter,” a spigot, and a pitcher. As I absorbed the realization that the world is divided between wipers and ­washers—­each group convinced of its method’s ­superiority—­I also saw that in India, as in many places, people have long been concerned not just with cleanliness, which focuses on the body, but with purity, which also involves the soul, or at least one’s religious and cultural status. Thus, an observant Hindu fresh from the shower may be considered ritually impure if he or she previously touched something regarded as ­unclean.

Such variations on the theme of what’s “clean” and what’s “dirty” are important to the history of Homo sapiens in general and of the personal care of the body in particular. Virginia Smith, a British historian and fellow of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 

, her survey of hygiene’s “material empiricism” and purity’s “immaterial imagination,” at the beginning, observing that our grooming rituals are rooted in those of our primate ancestors. Indeed, well into the 17th century, artists de­picted wealthy women apparently proudly de­lousing their children, much as monkeys pick their progeny’s ­nits—­perhaps a skill worth cultivating again in this era of resurgent lice and ­bedbugs.

By the Eurasian Bronze Age (4000 bc), says Smith, our forebears had pro­gressed to ­

—­a Mesopotamian word for a new kind of“beautiful cleanliness,” which in­volved lots of“pampering.” Then as now, the rich indulged themselves with numerous beauty products and ­rituals—­baths, facials, hairdressing, cosmetics, ­mani-­pedis (manicures and pedicures, for the uninitiated). Good grooming was an increasingly important sign of status. Egypt was the first capital of cleanliness deluxe, and its practices of mummifying and making up the dead are with us ­still.

 knows, ancient Greeks and Romans enjoyed being clean and getting that way. 

, Toronto-based journalist Katherine Ashenburg begins her chatty history with ablutions in the 

. The Greeks not only brought us hygiene, which made cleanliness part of healthfulness, but also their sociable public baths. Taking this concept and running with it, the Romans created baths where, says Ashenburg, you could have “sex, a medical treatment, and a haircut” in one convenient ­stop.

With the fall of Rome and the spread of Christianity, bap­tism was in, and ­bathing—­both public and ­private—­was out. Like its founder, the early Christian church prized spiritual purity over physical cleanliness, which facilitated “sins of the flesh.” Thus, a Christian ascetic who crawled with vermin and reeked of body odor was venerated as a paragon of virtue. (For their part, pious pagans and Jews were appalled that Jesus had touched the impure, including lepers, strange women, and even the dead, and that his followers venerated saints’ corpses and graves.) For centuries, Ashenburg says, married Jewish women of menstruating age were among the cleanest people; ritual purity mandated thorough monthly baths.

With the fall of Rome and the spread of Christianity, bap­tism was in. Bathing — both public and ­private — ­was out.

Cleanliness improved during the Middle ­Ages—­particu­larly after the Crusaders imported the Turkish bath. Medieval courtly love encouraged dainty ways, and Saturday baths became common­place. Public bath­houses were popular and well run, Smith says, and expectant mothers even used them for “baby showers,” or festive ­“lying-­in baths,” with their female friends. Paris and London had many of these jolly communal “stews”—a term later applied to houses of ­prostitution.

The real Dark Ages of cleanliness began in the 16th century. Fear of disease helps explain why people just stopped ­bathing—­indeed, doing any meaningful washing. Ashenburg blames the plague, which produced so many corpses that they were layered in mass graves “just as one makes lasagne,” wrote one Florentine. Smith thinks the likelier culprit is syphilis, which by the 16th century was both virulent and prevalent. Clueless doctors declared that bathing was dangerous, because it opened the skin to the malign “vapors” thought to cause much illness. The church chimed in that the baths encouraged concupiscence, and the stews were closed. From the mid-16th century well into the 19th century in much of Europe, a person could go from cradle to grave without a good wash. As Ashenburg says, “Water was the enemy, to be avoided at all costs.”

Most of the deliciously dreadful things you know about how dirty people used to be are drawn from this lengthy Age of the Great Unwashed. Even aristocrats were filthy and ­louse ­ridden beneath their jewels, brocades, and furs. In England, 

Elizabeth I declared that she bathed once a month “whether I need it or not.”

 In Spain during the Inquisition, Ashen­burg says, Jew and Muslim alike could be condemned by the frightful words “was known to bathe.” Nor was sanitation prized in France, where feces left in the halls of Versailles were carted away once a week. Instead of bathing, smelly, grimy people changed into fresh linens, which became a consumer craze among the Dutch. When John Wesley famously remarked, in 1791, that “cleanliness is, indeed, next to godliness,” he wasn’t talking about the body, but about ­clothes.

Rising above the miasma of this long, dirty era, Smith examines the ways in which, as Europe slowly moved toward the Enlightenment, various social movements interpreted cleanliness according to their own lights. In ­17th-­century Britain, for example, the combined influences of reforming Protestant sects and neo­clas­sicism’s interest in Greek hygiene associated the ideas of “coolness, cleanness, and inno­cence.” Cold air, vegetables, and baths were in vogue, and the last became a hallmark of the ­Englishman.

Instead of bathing, grimy people changed into fresh linens, which became a consumer craze. When John Wesley remarked, in 1791, that “cleanliness is, indeed, next to godliness,” he wasn’t talking about the body, but about ­clothes.

By the 19th century, the industrial revolution was spewing its soot and smoke onto the newly crowded cities, which grew filthier than ever. Queen Victoria’s beloved Prince Albert himself died of typhoid, one of the new plagues that accompanied urbanization, and British reformers made sanitation a political issue. Cities were gradually equipped with sewage systems, and their dwellings with indoor plumbing. These amenities often benefited the average citizen before the aristocrat, who preferred to wash in isolation. As late as the 1920s, an English lady, who bathed in her boudoir’s por­table tub, could say, “Bathrooms are only for servants.”

By the late 19th century, the United States was much cleaner than Europe. Towns and cities in the young country were newer and easier to equip with municipal sanitation and water systems. Amer­icans liked innovation, and hotels proudly advertised showers and flush toilets as tourist attractions. As more young women took jobs in offices and factories, the shortage of servants sped the introduction of new cleanliness technol­ogy into the average home. In an age of class upheaval and upward mobility, the 

black educator Booker T. Washington preached the “gospel of the tooth­brush” to his students at the Tuskegee ­Institute

When it comes to modern cleanliness, Ashenburg’s account is more zestful than Smith’s. Between 1900 and 1950, Ashenburg explains, advertising upped the ante by insisting that to be clean you needed not just soap and water but new inventions such as deodorant and mouthwash. “Feminine products,” as modern drugstores still call them, deserve a book of their own. Who knew that the first disposable sanitary pad for women evolved from a material used to bandage soldiers’ wounds during World War I? Long before 

those enigmatic Modess ads that featured the word “Because” and an elegant woman in an evening gown

Kotex brand was promoted with illustrations showing female nurses and male ­soldiers

Although Smith calls modernity the “most grimly fascinating” and best documented era in the history of cleanliness, her heart is clearly back in the good old days of the Egyptians and Puritans. She does make the inter­esting point, however, that even the reader’s notions of cleanliness have probably changed over his or her lifetime. Pollution has become the new filth, for example, and the “green” movement upholds the new ­purity.

Smith and Ashenburg both end on the same note: 

. . . . According to one survey, half of the French still don’t bathe daily, Ashenburg drolly remarks, but they continue to lead Europe in the consumption of perfumes and cosmetics. Despite hundreds of new “antibacterial” products, Smith notes that we’re as worried about cleanliness as our distant, far dirtier ­ancestors—­actually more so. Indeed, Ashenburg says, the only certainty is that a century from now, people will look back on our era “in amusement if not amazement at what passed for normal cleanliness.”

Both histories of cleanliness necessarily offer much of the same information, but their presentations may determine where each is shelved. 

 is the more complete and academic, replete with the subheadings favored by university presses, 80 pages of notes, and Smith’s politically correct disclaimer—“I am unashamedly looking for universal trends, but do not claim to be anything other than a local European (in fact a British) historian.” Ashenburg’s style is livelier, and her text is riddled with gossipy anecdotes about the rich and famous. Whatever you think of Napoleon’s politics, it’s fun to know that he bathed daily for two hours.

A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity 

Virginia Smith, Oxford University Press. 457 pp.

The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History

 by Katherine Ashenburg. North Point Press. 358 pp.

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“Cleanliness is next to godliness” doesn’t mean what you think it does.

What it means to be “clean,” and how that’s changed over time

The home as we understand it—not just a place to eat and sleep but also one that supports and enhances personal life and well-being—is a remarkably recent invention. The clean, comfortable private residence, which first proliferated in 17th-century republican Holland, was a tangible sign of the dawning Age of Reason and its educated middle class, embrace of progress, and recognition of human rights.

Joan DeJean’s claim that the French rather than the Dutch invented the modern home may tweak history. But DeJean, a professor of Romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania and a historian of French culture, makes a strong case that between 1670 and 1765 Paris was the world’s capital for designing the stuff of life, from furniture to clothing. In 

, she traces this outpouring of creativity to a shift in cultural ideals from magnificence and public display to ease and private delight.

To appreciate France’s transition from 

(cleanliness and convenience), one might revisit the splendid misery of aristocratic life as wonderfully depicted in Roberto Rossellini’s film 

 (1970). At court, everything was engineered for the public display of royal power and grandeur. Both sexes were uncomfortably dressed to the nines at all times. Rooms—including those used for sleeping—were large, more-or-less public spaces that opened directly onto each other and were sparsely furnished with hard chairs that enforced bolt-upright perching. Regarding hygiene, ooh la la! The malodorous hallways of Versailles were pocked with piles of human excrement.

Fed up, the Sun King’s descendants set about changing things. Perhaps in gratitude for the new flushing toilets and bathtubs with hot and cold running water at Versailles, Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV’s mistress, gave 

 a bidet. The young aristocrats riddled their stately palaces with secret passages that led them to private lives in newly cozy, intimate rooms. They ordered the first padded armchairs and sofas with slanted backs that encouraged lounging, to say nothing of seduction, as well as the early armoires and chests of drawers that conveniently stored their many new possessions. Ladies shed the rigid, boned 

 in favor of loose, kimono-inspired clothes made from the new lightweight, washable Indian cotton, so that they looked to one older noblewoman “as if they were dressed for bed.”

Nouveau riche financiers and real estate moguls followed the breezy young royals’ lead, and soon tourists flocked to Paris to ogle the chic 

. By the turn of the 18th century, the new “interior decorators”—often upholsterers whose shops were the first furniture stores—were advising clients on cutting-edge “French taste,” which featured innovations such as large windows, white ceilings, and hardwood floors.

In a major architectural change, the upper-class home turned from the display of status and the past’s Classical splendor to an emphasis on the functions of daily life and the pleasures of the present. Smaller rooms meant for specific activities, such as sleeping and bathing, were connected by hallways that allowed privacy. In her boudoir—a feminine version of the male study—even a woman could read, write or gather her thoughts.

 is most engaging when De Jean connects changes in design with shifts in what we’ve come to call “lifestyle.” Writing about the bedroom, for example, she suggests a link between the popularity of private sleeping chambers and hygienic plumbing and the increase in aristocratic couples who married for love and shared the same bed. At times, however, she shifts from this conversational, big-picture, cultural approach to highly technical discussions of “architect-designed seating,” say, or flawed heating systems in a way that can jar the general if not the scholarly reader.

By the 18th century, the French had mastered 

 and in many circles their taste in such matters remains the 

. On a deeper level, DeJean observes, their advances reinforced the idea of social progress and pose a chicken-or-egg question: “Is it possible that sofas and writing desks actually helped pass on a message of philosophical enlightenment?” But she also wonders if the era’s emphasis on private over public life presaged our own modern obsession with the self and its comforts and accoutrements.

Such musings aside, the historical record shows that when Thomas Jefferson, the ambassador of the revolutionary young nation poised to change the world, returned to America from Paris, he brought with him not only new ideas but also furnishings, clothing, and wines. The philosopher Voltaire, showing his compatriot’s characteristic scorn for false modesty, declared the France of the Enlightenment to be the “most civilized nation,” and, like Jefferson, readers of 

House Thinking: A Room by Room Look at How We Live 

"The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual and the Modern Home Began"

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An outpouring of design creativity between 1670 and 1765 made Paris the world's most influential location, beginning a Western cultural shift in ideals from magnificence and public display to ease and private delight. 

Winifred Gallagher