Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 - Sexual Selection In Man by Havelock Ellis
page 53 of 399 (13%)
page 53 of 399 (13%)
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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 |
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