Clean and decent

Who would have supposed that the Romans had lagged hot-water pipes? that Queen Elizabeth I had a valve water-closet? that Louis XIV had cushions in his bath? that sponges have sex? This book, says the author, "is meant to entertain, even if scholarship does keep breaking through". This book offers an excursion into the household's most private room. Informative and hilarious, it suggests that more may be learnt about the past from bathrooms than battlefields, and that patterns of social history may be mirrored in the bathwater or found locked in the water-closet.