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Comment by philwelch

"Regularly", but not as frequently as we do now, and to whatever extent this was true, it certainly didn't extend to conquistadors in the early modern period because American Indians all considered white people intolerably dirty by their standards.

The Internet seems to have amplified a certain contrarian tendency that goes too far. While it's true that the people of medieval Europe were not just a bunch of ignorant, filthy peasants, they were still more ignorant and probably more dirty than you and I are at the moment. While the early middle ages in western Europe were not "dark ages" completely bereft of human accomplishment, they were by many measures crappier than either the heyday of the Roman empire or the early modern era that would follow (or indeed even the late Middle Ages).

parent philwelch 7 years ago

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