The latest CA, An Introduction to the Tudor and Elizabethan House by Susan Stallman, is now at the printer...
Onward and upward!

From
Alessio: The Secretes. London, 1558 (Theatrum Orbis, 1975)
The English Experience, no. 707, ISBN: 90-221-0707-8

A very exquisyte sope, made of divers thinges

Take Aluminis catini thre onces, quicke lyme one part stronge lye that will beare an egge of swimming betwene two waters, thre pottels, a pot of commun oyle; mengle all well together ( Read more... )

Got email last night from Tonwen saying Volume II of the Compleat Anachronist on Medieval Hygiene has GONE TO THE PRINTER! So we should look for it about 2 weeks after the first one... say maybe mid-July...

Lookit what I found ( Read more... )

"’And that reminds me. Miss Lydgate’s History of Prosody was marked PRESS with her own hand this morning. I fled with it and seized on a student to take it down to the printers. I’m almost positive I heard a faint voice crying from the window about a footnote on page 97-but I pretended not to hear’" (Sayers, 1995 Harper paperback Gaudy Night, Ch 22 ( Read more... )

In the preceding pages, I have detailed examples of many personal hygiene practices used before 1601. Personal hygiene, clearly, was not completely unknown to our medieval and Renaissance forbears. Teeth and mouths were cleaned, bad breath combated, hands and faces washed, good manners in eating expected, and hair combed and dressed, at least some ( Read more... )

Recipe from The Secretes of Alexis of Piemont... Fol. 76
To make heare [hair] as yelow as golde ( Read more... )

Research and Re-creating herbalism in the Society for Creative Anachronism has its satisfactions. But it has some big, big frustrations, too ( Read more... )

8. Katherine Ashenburg. The Dirt on Clean: an Unsanitized History (New York: North Point Press, 2007)

This popular history of cleanliness and its pursuit is high on my lists of books I must buy soon. I raced through it at a breakneck speed while preparing my CA, and it nearly broke my spirit. The section on medieval hygiene was so good that I ( Read more... )

The Dirt on Clean Katherine Ashenburg, p. 100-101 ( Read more... )