White and radiant is the bride with her bouquet of flowers... fragrant. The evil tongues of history, those that present the Middle Ages as an era of smelly brutes, place the origin of the tradition of the wedding bouquet in the stench that the bride and groom of those times would distill:
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the fragrance of roses and others would help mitigate the plague on such an important day. So important that the custom of celebrating the nuptials in spring would also come to us from then, because the annual bath took place in May and thus the bride and groom would arrive at the altar still fragrant...
Isabella the Catholic may have actually only taken two baths in her life, the day of her birth and the day of her betrothal to Ferdinand the Catholic, something that her own majesty boasted about, but the spring betrothal thing is an invention: In the Middle Ages, weddings took place at any time of the year, in summer coinciding with festivals or autumn and winter, when work in the fields slowed down, so a bath would be of little use so many months ago. Of course, what if it turns out that that wasn't the only day they washed? Were Europeans as unhygienic in the Middle Ages as they have traditionally been portrayed?
University of London historian Katherine Harvey does not agree at all with this stinking vision of the Middle Ages and explains in an article for the BBC that, to begin with, Isabella the Catholic's own daughter, Juana la Loca, felt such love for bathing and washing her hair that her husband, Philip the Fair, feared would make her sick. The royal spouse's concern responded to the deep-rooted belief at the time that too many baths weakened her body.
The legend attributes to the Leonese Alfonso VI the destruction of all the baths in his kingdom in the 11th century after several defeats against the Muslims, because his soldiers would have been weakened by drinking the waters, a myth that is even collected in the Estoria of Spain. , which is considered the first history book of Spain not translated from Latin, compiled at the initiative of Alfonso X the Wise in the 13th century.