Here is the Late Medieval ideal of the most beautiful woman imaginable, and I want to draw your attention to her hair – specifically where it isn’t. Yes, Bathsheba’s golden locks, seen in this exquisite late 15th-c illumination, trail down her back in full glory, but also check out her pubes, or not – because she HASN’T ANY. And so here I would like to discourse a bit about female pubic hair and its removal in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe.
Honestly, the historical records showing how pubic hair was removed are eye-watering and just sad. The second image, from a gate in Milan called the Porta Tosa dating to about 1185, shows a woman taking a sharp blade to her genital hair. In an age before germ theory, this scraping would have been risky. But that’s nothing compared to recipes of chemical dilapidaries from back in the day. Products like quicklime, alum, and arsenic were made into pastes and smeared all over the genitalia. One Henri de Mondeville advises that girls can prevent the hairs from growing in in the first place by using “bat’s blood.”
And why go through all of this? First, there was historical precedent going back to Antiquity; it was a sign of wealth; it was popularized by practices that had come from the Islamic Middle East during the Crusades. But the sickest rationale had to do with medical and religious ideas about women’s genital hair, which was considered dangerous, corrupt, and sickly. Medieval philosophers thought that it grew from impurities in the body. One 13th-century Medieval writer claimed (falsely citing Avicenna) that “[if you] take the hairs of a menstruating woman and place them under . . . manure during winter, then in the spring or summer when they are heated by the sun a long stout serpent will be generated.”
As with other cosmetic treatments that women performed in these centuries, women’s removal of body hair was frequently condemned by male authors who thought such practices were vain, even as they appraised the polished and smooth _mons pubis_ of Bathsheba..
Sources: “Eyebrows, hairline, and ‘hairs less in sght’v: female depilation in Late Medieval Europe,” John Block Friedman, as chapter four of_Medieval Clothing and Textiles 14_ ed Robin Nethertin ND Gale R Owen-Crocker, Boydell & Brewer: Boydell Press, pp 81-112. “You’re Dead to Me” BBC4, Jill Burke “Renaissance Beauty”
