early part of the seventeenth century, found that in Lombardy many of the women and children wore only smocks, or shirts, in the hot weather.  At Venice and Padua, he found that wives, widows, and maids, walk with naked breasts, many with backs also naked, almost to the middle. (Coryat, Crudities, 1611.  The fashion of decollete garments, it may be remarked, only began in the fourteenth century; previously, the women of Europe generally covered themselves up to the neck.)

In Northern Italy, some years ago, a fire occurred at night in a house in which two girls were sleeping, naked, according to the custom.  One threw herself out and was saved, the other returned for a garment, and was burnt to death.  The narrator of the incident [a man] expressed strong approval of the more modest girl’s action. (Private communication.) It may be added that the custom of sleeping naked is still preserved, also (according to Lippert and Stratz), in Jutland, in Iceland, in some parts of Norway, and sometimes even in Berlin.

Lady Mary Wortley Montague writes in 1717, of the Turkish ladies at the baths at Sophia:  “The first sofas were covered with cushions and rich carpets, on which sat the ladies, and on the second, their slaves behind them, but without any distinction of rank in their dress, all being in a state of Nature; that is, in plain English, stark naked, without any beauty or defect concealed.  Yet there was not the least wanton smile or immodest gesture among them.  They walked and moved with the same majestic grace which Milton describes of our general mother.  I am here convinced of the truth of a reflection I had often made, that if it was the fashion to go naked, the face would be hardly observed.” (Letters and Works, 1866, vol. i, p. 285.)

At St. Petersburg, in 1774, Sir Nicholas Wraxall observed “the promiscuous bathing of not less than two hundred persons, of both sexes.  There are several of these public bagnios,” he adds, “in Petersburg, and every one pays a few copecks for admittance.  There are, indeed, separate spaces for the men and women, but they seem quite regardless of this distinction, and sit or bathe in a state of absolute nudity among each other.” (Sir N. Wraxall, A Tour Through Some of the Northern Parts of Europe, 3d ed., 1776, p. 248.) It is still usual for women in the country parts of Russia to bathe naked in the streams.

In 1790, Wedgwood wrote to Flaxman:  “The nude is so general in the work of the ancients, that it will be very difficult to avoid the introduction of naked figures.  On the other hand, it is absolutely necessary to do so, or to keep the pieces for our own use; for none, either male or female, of the present generation will take or apply them as furniture if the figures are naked.”  (Meteyard, Life of Wedgwood, vol. ii, p. 589.)

Mary Wollstonecraft quotes (for reprobation