| This article is peppered with factual errors. While none of them detract from the core idea, they do lead one to question Dr. Janega's scholarship. Here's a modest sampling: - Soap is given as a medieval invention, but this is stretching to the extreme both the idea of "inventing soap" and the idea of "medieval." In reality it was widely made and used at least as a hair wash by the waning days of the Western Roman empire. - The ingredients list for soap contains a number of equivalent or derived ingredients listed as though totally separate, as if the author weren't aware of the relationships and went copy-pasta crazy from mixed sources. - Aleppo soap is described as if made exclusively from laurel oil (rather than the correct mixture of laurel and olive oils). - The photo shown of a light brown bar of soap with a caption seeming to suggest that it's Castille soap is in all likelihood actually Aleppo soap (cf. the text of the Arabic seal, which is rather humorously shown upside-down). - The description of a deodorant made using "salvia and sage" is rather perplexing, as salvia is the Latin word for sage... and the name of the modern genus of plants containing common sage. A reference to salvia in the colloquial modern sense of Salvia divinorum seems unlikely in the extreme. All told, while this is an interesting read, and does contain some useful information, from a scholarly perspective it seems to be, at best, slipshod. |