How widespread is the occasional or habitual practice of nakedness in the world generally, and how entirely concordant it is with even a most sensitive modesty, has been set forth in “The Evolution of Modesty,” in vol. i of these Studies.

Even during the Christian era the impulse to adopt nudity, often with the feeling that it was an especially sacred practice, has persisted.  The Adamites of the second century, who read and prayed naked, and celebrated the sacrament naked, according to the statement quoted by St. Augustine, seem to have caused little scandal so long as they only practiced nudity in their sacred ceremonies.  The German Brethren of the Free Spirit, in the thirteenth century, combined so much chastity with promiscuous nakedness that orthodox Catholics believed they were assisted by the Devil.  The French Picards, at a much later date, insisted on public nakedness, believing that God had sent their leader into the world as a new Adam to reestablish the law of Nature; they were persecuted and were finally exterminated by the Hussites.

In daily life, however, a considerable degree of nakedness was tolerated during mediaeval times.  This was notably so in the public baths, frequented by men and women together.  Thus Alwin Schultz remarks (in his Hoefische Leben zur Zeit der Minnesaenger), that the women of the aristocratic classes, though not the men, were often naked in these baths except for a hat and a necklace.

It is sometimes stated that in the mediaeval religious plays Adam and Eve were absolutely naked.  Chambers doubts this, and thinks they wore flesh-colored tights, or were, as in a later play of this kind, “apparelled in white leather” (E.K.  Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, vol. i, p. 5).  It may be so, but the public exposure even of the sexual organs was permitted, and that in aristocratic houses, for John of Salisbury (in a passage quoted by Buckle, Commonplace Book, 541) protests against this custom.

The women of the feminist sixteenth century in France, as R. de Maulde la Claviere remarks (Revue de l’Art, Jan., 1898), had no scruple in recompensing their adorers by admitting them to their toilette, or even their bath.  Late in the century they became still less prudish, and many well-known ladies allowed themselves to be painted naked down to the waist, as we see in the portrait of “Gabrielle d’Estrees au Bain” at Chantilly.  Many of these pictures, however, are certainly not real portraits.

Even in the middle of the seventeenth century in England nakedness was not prohibited in public, for Pepys tells us that on July 29, 1667, a Quaker came into Westminster Hall, crying, “Repent!  Repent!” being in a state of nakedness, except that he was “very civilly tied about the privities to avoid scandal.”  (This was doubtless Solomon Eccles, who was accustomed