Susan North. Sweet and Clean? Bodies and Clothes in Early Modern England.

Susan North’s Sweet and Clean? Bodies and Clothes in Early Modern England offers a trove of information about clothing in early modern England: how it was made, washed, worn, recycled, repaired, and more. There is also a significant long-overdue discussion of underwear. What are the differences between flax and hemp? A man’s smock versus a woman’s shift? Sweet and Clean is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the practical household work of making, sewing, and washing clothes, as well as the history of bodies, health, and hygiene.

The book is framed around a clear key finding: early modern men and women bathed. This argument may seem commonplace, but in actuality it is a significant historiographical revision. The prevailing belief, until now, has been that Europeans did not wash themselves frequently. They cleaned only their visible outer layers of clothing, which came to represent propriety, leaving their bodies and innermost layers of linen untouched. North revises this long-held misconception by showing that Englishmen and women did indeed wash their bodies and their clothes, and she provides a multitude of details demonstrating how and why they did so.

The first half of the book attends to prescription and the second half to practice. There is a logic to this structure, and North surely uses it to organize a vast amount of archival material. There is much to be gained, too, from addressing prescription and practice together. Prescriptive texts point to the fundamental importance of cleanliness, since maintaining health, rearing children, and preventing contagion all depended on keeping skin and clothing clean. Changing linen frequently, for example, could cool the body and open up clogged up pores, while not changing linen could heat the body and trap poisons within it. Linen, in short, could be manipulated to expel or absorb corrupt matter, which was crucial to health.

North cross-checks ideas like these found in medical and conduct literature with evidence of practice in objects like pitchers and washbasins, as well as written sources, such as probate inventories, household accounts, hospital correspondence, and proceedings from London’s criminal court, the Old Bailey. A final chapter uses household recipe books to get at bathing practices. Recipes can be tricky sources for accessing practice, since they tend to be instructional—guides for what to do—rather than evidence of what people actually did. Most unique is the author’s analysis of garments themselves, which are listed in a lengthy descriptive appendix. North has worked with linens in museum collections, and this expertise is evident throughout the book. We learn, for example, how seamstresses counted the threads of cloth to determine where to place stitches, which explains why fine linen required more stitches per inch and therefore higher remuneration.

This book is noteworthy for bridging the history of medicine and the history of textiles. Historians of hygiene and health do not tend to focus on the materiality of clothes, nor the technology of cleaning them, and fashion historians often overlook relationships between clothing and health. North marries these two subfields by attending to both theoretical and prescriptive texts, as well as the social history of washing and sewing. Readers learn what dirt and hygiene meant to early modern individuals, as well as the practical reality of how to sew a shirt.

Perhaps the most significant takeaway of this book is that women devoted substantial effort, resources, and time to keeping bodies and clothing “sweet and clean.” North is creative and adept at showing readers the details of that work, which was so central to everyday life in the period. In doing so, the book does a huge service by exposing the otherwise invisible and undervalued labor of early modern women.