The Dirt on Clean Paperback by Katherine Ashenburg

Product Details

• Publisher: Vintage Canada (2008-10-28)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 384 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780676976649
• Item Weight: 481.95 grams
• Dimensions: 9.01 x 5.51 x 0.81 cm

For the first-century Roman, being clean meant a public two-hour soak in baths of various temperatures, a scraping of the body with a miniature rake, and a final application of oil. For the seventeenth-century aristocratic Frenchman, it meant changing his shirt once a day, using perfume to obliterate both his own aroma and everyone else’ s, but never immersing himself in – horrors! – water. By the early 1900s, an extraordinary idea took hold in North America – that frequent bathing, perhaps even a daily bath, was advisable. Not since the Roman Empire had people been so clean, and standards became even more extreme as the millennium approached. Now we live in a deodorized world where germophobes shake hands with their elbows and where sales of hand sanitizers, wipes and sprays are skyrocketing.

The apparently routine task of taking up soap and water (or not) is Katherine Ashenburg’s starting point for a unique exploration of Western culture, which yields surprising insights into our notions of privacy, health, individuality, religion and sexuality.

Ashenburg searches for clean and dirty in plague-ridden streets, medieval steam baths, castles and tenements, and in bathrooms of every description, revealing the bizarre rescriptions of history. Filled with amusing anecdotes and quotations from the great bathers of history, The Dirt on Clean takes us on a journey that is by turns intriguing, humorous, startling and not always for the squeamish.

About the Author

KATHERINE ASHENBURG is the author of several books and many magazine and newspaper articles. She has written for The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, and Toronto Life, among other publications. Her nonfiction books include The Mourner's Dance: What We Do When People Die and The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History, which was published in twelve countries and six languages. In former incarnations, she was a producer at CBC Radio and was The Globe and Mail's Arts and Books editor. In 2012, she won a Gold Medal at the National Magazine Awards for her article on old age. In 2018, she published her acclaimed debut novel, Sofie and Cecilia; and in 2020 she followed that work with the delightfully tart novel Her Turn.