Our knowledge of the bathing arrangements of Roman days is chiefly derived from Pompeii.  Three public baths (two for both men and women, who were also probably allowed to use the third occasionally) have so far been excavated in this small town, as well as at least three private bathing establishments (at least one of them for women), while about a dozen houses contain complete baths for private use.  Even in a little farm house at Boscoreale (two miles out of Pompeii) there was an elaborate series of bathing rooms.  It may be added that Pompeii was well supplied with water.  All houses but the poorest had flowing jets, and some houses had as many as ten jets. (See Man’s Pompeii, Chapters XXVI-XXVIII.)

The Church succeeded to the domination of imperial Rome, and adopted many of the methods of its predecessor.  But there could be no greater contrast than is presented by the attitude of Paganism and of Christianity toward the bath.

As regards the tendencies of the public baths in imperial Rome, some of the evidence is brought together in the section on this subject in Rosenbaum’s Geschichte der Lustseuche im Alterthume.  As regards the attitude of the earliest Christian ascetics in this matter I may refer the reader to an interesting passage in Lecky’s History of European Morals (vol. ii, pp. 107-112), in which are brought together a number of highly instructive examples of the manner in which many of the most eminent of the early saints deliberately cultivated personal filth.

In the middle ages, when the extreme excesses of the early ascetics had died out, and monasticiam became regulated, monks generally took two baths a year when in health; in illness they could be taken as often as necessary.  The rules of Cluny only allowed three towels to the community:  one for the novices, one for the professed, and one for the lay brothers.  At the end of the seventeenth century Madame de Mazarin, having retired to a convent of Visitandines, one day desired to wash her feet, but the whole establishment was set in an uproar at such an idea, and she received a direct refusal.  In 1760 the Dominican Richard wrote that in itself the bath is permissible, but it must be taken solely for necessity, not for pleasure.  The Church taught, and this lesson is still inculcated in convent schools, that it is wrong to expose the body even to one’s own gaze, and it is not surprising that many holy persons boasted that they had never even washed their hands. (Most of these facts have been taken from A. Franklin, Les Soins de Toilette, one of the Vie Privee d’Autrefois series, in which further details may be found.)

In sixteenth-century Italy, a land of supreme elegance and fashion, superior even to France, the conditions were the same, and how little water found favor even with aristocratic ladies we may gather from the contemporary books on the