Passionate Encounters, Public Healing

Abstract

This article focuses on the resurgence of urban bathhouses (called estuves in French after the stoves that heated them) between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries in Paris and other northern French-speaking cities. Popular and widespread institutions, bathhouses contributed to both individual well-being and civic health in cities across the kingdom. Using medical treatises, trial records, literary sources, and archival documentation, the article argues that bathhouses encouraged sociability, brought disparate groups together, and were in fact essential to the circulation and well-being of people in medieval cities as places of emotional community.