[vorpalhex]

The romans had soap and were well aware of both lye and unrefined ammonia for cleansing. They actually used ammonia for laundering clothes. Medieval people had soap too, but probably used a different process for making it than romans. (As to who was cleaner, it depends heavily on class, region and specific year.)

That's the problem with preconceived notions, they lead to bad scholarship. It's what made so many victorian era analysis of historic artifacts so poor - they were trying to reconstruct them with Victorian values.

No person can be truly neutral but you do your best to set aside preconceived notions. CRT argues that in some cases we shouldn't do that and reinforces storytelling - a fictional process - as an interpretive lens. That is not aligned with traditional scholarship and part of why Critical Theorists (at large) reject traditional scholarship. CRT is not a fact based tradition. (Crits would say it is a "critical" one)

Revisionism in the marxist dialogue is a distinct phenomenon from revisionism in general, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revisionism_(Marxism) and https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/apr/03.htm

CRT is a Marxist tradition but instead of a class divide it views through the fundamental lens of a racial divide. Just as the class divide is innate in Marxism so it is too in CRT. Re-reading existing texts to "contextualize" them and reframe them in alignment with this racial divide is the usage of Revisionism in the CRT (and likewise for fellow Critical Theories) nomenclature.

You can reject CRT wholesale AND still petition for better racial equality or the correcting of faults in any given country. CRT is not the only solution, nor does a rejection of CRT mean you accept the world as it is currently.

[kennywinker]

So... my point was that we have a cultural bias towards representing the romans as clean and medieval people as dirty - "As to who was cleaner, it depends heavily on class, region and specific year." So you agree with the core of the idea I was presenting, but you then immediately dismiss it as bad scholorship. Apologies, I didn't think I needed to google the details for this conversation - but let's correct the record: romans didn't have soap during the republican era, but they did during the roman empire. At least by 200CE, perhaps as much as a century earlier. Happy?

> That's the problem with preconceived notions, they lead to bad scholarship

I agree. E.g. missing the forest for the trees. As you just did.