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feedmegin posted:A hemisphere the Vikings did in fact get to, though! If anyone from Europe was going to have a word for potato pre-Columbus, it was them. I’ve really started to wonder how far the Vikings got in North America and how much they hosed up tribes they meet with diseases the Native population couldn’t cope with. We will honestly never know.
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Apr 23, 2018 06:28
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would they? really? unless they were sick or asymptomatic with a particularly nasty pathogen, there's nothing they can really transmit. the boat trip would be a quarantine period, most people would have lost viral load by the time they got across. just cause you're filthy doesnt mean you're carrying smallpox it took a while for the spanish expeditions to finally make sufficient contact where the dice came up bad, and someone infectious managed to successfully transmit into the local indigenous populations. and they started off with a large scale colony right in the carribean, where they could make repeated contact with the mainland meanwhile, the vinland settlement never really got off the ground, and most contact seemed to involve warriors killing one another in skirmishes
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Apr 23, 2018 14:05
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sbaldrick posted:I’ve really started to wonder how far the Vikings got in North America and how much they hosed up tribes they meet with diseases the Native population couldn’t cope with. We would know if they'd brought a ton of disease to the area, there'd be a lot of evidence of suddenly abandoned habitation, remains, etc. Also the people around the area would know about it.
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Apr 23, 2018 14:38
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sbaldrick posted:I’ve really started to wonder how far the Vikings got in North America and how much they hosed up tribes they meet with diseases the Native population couldn’t cope with. I could be wrong, but I think the Viking contacts with North America pre-date the medieval European urbanization and spread of trade that supposedly led to the increased prevalence of diseases, plagues, etc. On the other hand they post-date Roman urbanization etc. So I'm not sure how well that thesis really holds up.
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Apr 23, 2018 14:46
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I could be wrong, but I think the Viking contacts with North America pre-date the medieval European urbanization and spread of trade that supposedly led to the increased prevalence of diseases, plagues, etc. Also, the region the Vikings visited was lightly populated and fairly isolated, and travel was slow. It's not good circumstances to spread diseases. They undoubtedly brought some, but the impact was probably fairly minor. We can't really know for sure, though.
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Apr 23, 2018 15:05
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Yeah getting a tribe in the far northeast sick is much different that spreading disease to the main empires on the continent.
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Apr 23, 2018 16:13
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Perhaps it would have been better if they did bring more illness. The population could have rebounded before the Spaniards.
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Apr 23, 2018 16:14
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Didn’t 1491 have some ideas about unknown European expeditions around 1492 being responsible for the spread of disease into the heavily populated north east and plains regions ?
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Apr 23, 2018 16:15
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euphronius posted:Didn’t 1491 have some ideas about unknown European expeditions around 1492 being responsible for the spread of disease into the heavily populated north east and plains regions ? Theres some research and evidence suggesting that early long range and intense fishing might have led to early contacts.
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Apr 23, 2018 16:20
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Phobophilia posted:just cause you're filthy doesnt mean you're carrying smallpox John of Wallingford posted:[...] for they were wont, after the fashion of their country, to comb their hair every day, to bathe every Saturday, to change their garments often, and set off their persons by many frivolous devices. In this matter they laid siege to the virtue of the married woman, and persuaded the daughters even of the noble to be their concubines.
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Apr 23, 2018 16:56
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That may be the grossest thing about history I've ever learned.
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Apr 23, 2018 17:32
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euphronius posted:Didn’t 1491 have some ideas about unknown European expeditions around 1492 being responsible for the spread of disease into the heavily populated north east and plains regions ? I seem to remember there was something in there about early Spanish expeditions bringing pigs along as a mobile food source, thus spreading disease even faster.
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Apr 23, 2018 17:32
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Plus most of the (few) Norse who actually went to Vinland were Icelanders. Sparsely populated rural middle-of-nowhere Iceland wasn't a great place for virulent diseases to thrive, so they were statistically pretty unlikely to be carrying any.
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Apr 23, 2018 17:37
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Zopotantor posted:Also the Vikings probably were not that filthy to begin with; some Anglo-Saxon chronicles complain about women favoring the Danes because they smelled better. Weekends in Britain were rough. The Saxons knew to attack the Vikings on bath day, and the Norse knew to attack the Saxons when they were all sitting around in church the next day.
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Apr 23, 2018 17:41
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Monocled Falcon posted:That may be the grossest thing about history I've ever learned. Was it Cyrano4747 who used to have an avatar quoting his post here where he discusses the logistics of Suetonius's claims about Tiberius's sex life?
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Apr 23, 2018 17:52
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Jamwad Hilder posted:Weekends in Britain were rough. The Saxons knew to attack the Vikings on bath day, and the Norse knew to attack the Saxons when they were all sitting around in church the next day. Vikings had no respect for the tea break, either.
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Apr 23, 2018 18:10
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That is funny as hell because it suggests that they could tell that bathing did something useful but still didn't do it. "Should I do something about these three decades worth of dingleberries? Ehhhhhhh."
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Apr 23, 2018 18:53
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That’s funny and gross, but I always roll my eyes whenever a scribe dude rants that the pure women of of the nation are sullying their virtue with foreigners, whether it’s 1218 or 2018.
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Apr 23, 2018 19:04
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Maybe they just thought smelling good and being appealing to ladies was effeminate.
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Apr 23, 2018 19:14
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Can anyone recommend a book on the Olympian/cthonic divide in Ancient Greek worship? I’m most interested in the development of Heracles myths and what we know about their Neolithic origins and how they spread across the Mediterranean.
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Apr 23, 2018 21:00
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Zopotantor posted:Also the Vikings probably were not that filthy to begin with; some Anglo-Saxon chronicles complain about women favoring the Danes because they smelled better. This not being a possible event in CK2 is the most damning thing about it.
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Apr 24, 2018 01:23
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Grevling posted:Maybe they just thought smelling good and being appealing to ladies was effeminate. It's basically like when dudes got really up in arms about"metrosexuals" around the turn of the century. Except in this case the metrosexuals were going around cleaving people in twain and, allegedly*, impaling infants on spears and competing at how far they could throw them. *Very allegedly. There is like one mention in Landnáma that just says one guy was nicknamed "Child lover" because he didn't engage in this pastime. And I suspect that is just a case of "our pagan ancestor were a bunch of savages thank God we have found Christianity"
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Apr 24, 2018 01:26
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aphid_licker posted:That is funny as hell because it suggests that they could tell that bathing did something useful but still didn't do it. "Should I do something about these three decades worth of dingleberries? Ehhhhhhh." People did bath regularly throughout the 1000 years we call Middle Ages in Europe. For every saint who bathed twice a year and reports of the fine-smelling Vikings we have dozens of bathing manuals and bathing advices. Just "bath" means mostly a cold dip in the river or hauling a lot of water home in rural areas (which was most of Europe by then). Early on the Catholic Church still even built bath houses (separated by sex of course), but since they were a hot bed of prostitution and other "immoral" things, they started to clamp down as time moved on, although it is not clear how effective they were in doing so. But even so, public bathhouses only declined and basically disappeared by the 17th century. Only with the onset of the plague bathing was more and more frowned upon, since it was seen as a possible way of infection and washing all the body parts presented in public was the way to go (which of course means the most stinky parts stay unwashed). The decline in bathing was a 15-17th century thing. And I don't think I need to mention the tremendous bathing culture of the Eastern Roman Empire, the Muslim world, who copied it from them or of Japan and China. Bathing feels great, there have to be big hurdles for people not to do it.
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Apr 24, 2018 05:53
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Lol at the idea that bathing was transmitted thousands of miles. You just get in some water and it's nice.
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Apr 24, 2018 06:00
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Decius posted:People did bath regularly throughout the 1000 years we call Middle Ages in Europe. For every saint who bathed twice a year and reports of the fine-smelling Vikings we have dozens of bathing manuals and bathing advices. Just "bath" means mostly a cold dip in the river or hauling a lot of water home in rural areas (which was most of Europe by then). Early on the Catholic Church still even built bath houses (separated by sex of course), but since they were a hot bed of prostitution and other "immoral" things, they started to clamp down as time moved on, although it is not clear how effective they were in doing so. But even so, public bathhouses only declined and basically disappeared by the 17th century. Only with the onset of the plague bathing was more and more frowned upon, since it was seen as a possible way of infection and washing all the body parts presented in public was the way to go (which of course means the most stinky parts stay unwashed). The decline in bathing was a 15-17th century thing. When you realize the Founding Fathers of the USA probably smelled worse than random medieval peasants.
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Apr 24, 2018 07:34
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It was like dipping a turd into fish sauce, believe me.
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Apr 24, 2018 07:40
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Decius posted:People did bath regularly throughout the 1000 years we call Middle Ages in Europe. For every saint who bathed twice a year and reports of the fine-smelling Vikings we have dozens of bathing manuals and bathing advices. Just "bath" means mostly a cold dip in the river or hauling a lot of water home in rural areas (which was most of Europe by then). Early on the Catholic Church still even built bath houses (separated by sex of course), but since they were a hot bed of prostitution and other "immoral" things, they started to clamp down as time moved on, although it is not clear how effective they were in doing so. But even so, public bathhouses only declined and basically disappeared by the 17th century. Only with the onset of the plague bathing was more and more frowned upon, since it was seen as a possible way of infection and washing all the body parts presented in public was the way to go (which of course means the most stinky parts stay unwashed). The decline in bathing was a 15-17th century thing. This dude tried out Tudor-era hygiene and it worked surprisingly well, i.e. no one noticed he was doing anything strange. https://newrepublic.com/article/129828/getting-clean-tudor-way
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Apr 24, 2018 09:08
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Kemper Boyd posted:This dude tried out Tudor-era hygiene and it worked surprisingly well, i.e. no one noticed he was doing anything strange. The dude is actually a woman - Ruth Goodman, known from entertaining and recommended historic re-enactment edutainment series like The Tudor Monastery Farm, The Victorian Farm or Secrets of the Castle.
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Apr 24, 2018 09:56
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I've never heard this explicitly linked to bathing, but firewood prices (along with lumber) soared in late medieval and early modern England. It was a big driver for the development of the coal industry. The cost of heating up a bath full of water would have been much higher in, say 1650 than it was in 1250. That might also be why traditional bathing and sauna cultures survived in Russia and Scandinavia, while bathhouses died out in England.
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Apr 24, 2018 11:17
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Decius posted:who copied it from them or of Japan and China. how common was bathing in China? there's an account of a Song envoy to Goryeo where he mentions the Koreans smugly look down on the Chinese for being dirty, and bathing and washing is one of the few things he relents that the Chinese don't do as well. Also there've been baths in Mesopotamia and India since ancient times haven't there? Not sure it's an idea that needs transmitting.
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Apr 24, 2018 11:33
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im pretty sure ive seen film depictions of public bathhouses in 1930s shanghai, they were big multistorey places where you can get murdered and thrown out of windows but other than that, i dont think china has the same extent of bathing culture as say japan, which is filled with natural hot springs Zopotantor posted:Also the Vikings probably were not that filthy to begin with; some Anglo-Saxon chronicles complain about women favoring the Danes because they smelled better. im pretty sure a viking dude fresh off the boat is going smell absolutely rank
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Apr 24, 2018 12:08
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Decius posted:And I don't think I need to mention the tremendous bathing culture of the Eastern Roman Empire, the Muslim world, who copied it from them or of Japan and China. Bathing feels great, there have to be big hurdles for people not to do it. I think people are reading a bit much into this, getting bent out of shape about some supposed implication that world-wide bathing culture was invented in the Eastern Roman Empire and then transmitted outward, rather than that among the various noteworthy bathing cultures of the world, a reasonably familiar example is the bathing culture of the Eastern Roman Empire, from which the bathing traditions of the Muslim world likely draw significant influence.
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Apr 24, 2018 12:10
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The ones fresh off the boat probably had some kind of business like raiding or trading in mind, while I imagine the ones who were going around getting all the Angle ladies were the ones who'd already settled down and were living in the Danelaw.
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Apr 24, 2018 12:10
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hailthefish posted:I think people are reading a bit much into this, getting bent out of shape about some supposed implication that world-wide bathing culture was invented in the Eastern Roman Empire and then transmitted outward, rather than that among the various noteworthy bathing cultures of the world, a reasonably familiar example is the bathing culture of the Eastern Roman Empire, from which the bathing traditions of the Muslim world likely draw significant influence. I forgot a comma, I didn't mean that Japan or China copied it or that the Muslim world took it from them. It should read as "...Eastern Roman Empire, the Muslim world, who copied/took it over from them. And Japan and China having a tremendous bathing culture at this time too." As said, that people like to bath in warm water isn't exactly something that takes a lot of inventive spirit, it's a pretty basic thing that makes people generally feel great. Not bathing is rather the odd thing if you have the means to do it. @Koramei: the Yangzhou bathhouses have a pretty long tradition, so I would count them in the whole bathing culture thing.
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Apr 24, 2018 13:11
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Huh I wonder why the envoy was so specific about that then. I imagine it varied throughout China but then the area around Yangzhou woulda been a major cultural hub of the Southern Song anyway so it’s not like he wouldn’t have been aware of that. Maybe in China it was limited more to elites? In Korea (and Japan?) it wasn’t
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Apr 24, 2018 13:17
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I live in China right now and wouldn't say there's much of a bathing culture even today.
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Apr 24, 2018 14:35
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Japan's bathing culture remains extremely on point.
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Apr 24, 2018 14:41
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Grand Fromage posted:I live in China right now and wouldn't say there's much of a bathing culture even today. There's a lot of influence from TCM and grandparents who grew up on the communal farm screaming at you for washing your hands in "cold" water.
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Apr 24, 2018 14:59
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Yeah but psuedoscientific traditional Chinese medicine is an invention of the mid 20th century. More than a hundred years ago old people would probably scream at you about demons or something.
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Apr 24, 2018 15:03
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Roman bathing culture was heavily influence by Japanese bathing culture as shown in this documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOmFSflNiQU
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Apr 24, 2018 15:49
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