Hey friend and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network and the original Tudor History history podcast telling stories of Tudor England since 2009.

This is episode 260. We are talking about tutor hygiene, how the tutors kept clean, how the tutors took care of themselves, hygienically, all of that kind of

good stuff. So there is a really great book and TV series. If you have been around Tudor

history for a while, you've heard of Ruth Goodman and the Tudor Monastery Farm and TV show and

all of that. If you are newer to

tutor history, you might not have discovered those books in Ruth Goodman yet. She writes a lot on

daily life of the Tudors and just kind of how normal people had lived. And one of the things that

comes up often in her books is hygiene. There is this idea

that personal hygiene at the time didn't matter, that people were stinky, unaware of basic hygiene,

and that is not the case. So far from being indifferent to cleanliness, medieval and tutor people were actually

very concerned about how they smelled and presented themselves. As we uncover their daily rituals,

we will see how people of this period went to great lengths to stay fresh, even without modern

conveniences. I have to say that I wanted to do this episode. Not only,

it's been on my list for a while to do, but I just got done reading a biography of Ben Franklin.

I've read a couple of biographies of Ben Franklin before. He's a personal hero of mine.

He's a personal hero of a lot of people. But one thing I read about him was that he did something called

air baths, which was basically hanging out in the buff for like 20 minutes in the morning.

He would have his windows open, so I'm not sure if the neighbors got a show or what. And he

believed it cleaned out his pores.

He was a really big fan of the air bath. And it got me thinking about how, you know, ideas change of what is considered hygienic, how people keep clean, everything like that.

So I decided to dig this topic up and do an episode. So here we are. You can thank Ben Franklin for this

episode, as Ben Franklin could be thanked for so very much in our lives, I say, as I'm reading

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