Policing the Urban Environment in Premodern Europe
Title
Policing the Urban Environment in Premodern Europe
Price
€ 141,00 excl. VAT
ISBN
9789462985193
Format
Hardback
Number of pages
318
Language
English
Publication date
Dimensions
15.6 x 23.4 cm
Also available as
eBook PDF - € 140,99
Table of Contents
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Introduction Carole Rawcliffe and Claire Weeda 1 Cleanliness, Civility, and the City in Medieval Ideals and Scripts Claire Weeda 2 The View from the Street: The Records of Hundred and Leet Courts as a Source for Sanitary Policing in Late Medieval English Towns Carole Rawcliffe 3 Urban Viarii and the Prosecution of Public Health Offenders in Late Medieval Italy G. Geltner 4 Food Offenders: Public Health and the Marketplace in the Late Medieval Low Countries Janna Coomans 5 Policing the Environment of Late Medieval Dordrecht Patrick Naaktgeboren 6 Muddy Waters in Medieval Montpellier Catherine Dubé and Geneviève Dumas 7 Regulating Water Sources in the Towns and Cities of Late Medieval Normandy Elma Brenner 8 Policing the Environment in Premodern Imperial Cities and Towns: A Preliminary Approach Annemarie Kinzelbach 9 Official Objectives of the Visitatio Leprosorum: Ambiguity, Ambivalence, and Variance Luke Demaitre Index

Reviews and Features

"This excellent collection of essays addresses the enforcement of urban public health measures and sanitary regulations in premodern Europe. [...] In scope, the chapters cover much of Latin Christendom--Italy, France, the Low Countries, England, and the Holy Roman Empire--and focus primarily on the period from the twelfth through sixteenth centuries. This breadth of coverage serves to illuminate the many commonalities in sanitary measures, while individual case studies showcase local or regional particularities. The essays themselves are in English, but the bibliographies provide a valuable guide to primary sources and urban environmental scholarship across a variety of languages."
- Roberta Magnusson, The Medieval Review, 21.05.11 (2021)

"This interesting collection considers how urban polities across Europe in the premodern era managed concerns with urban hygiene, public health, and environmental protections. As the title suggests, legislative measures that were encoded in statute legislation in some cities from as early as the twelfth century showed significant concern for maintenance of the built environment, enforced through the appointment of officials whose remit became more specialized over time. A close relationship is revealed between statute rules that appear to have a primary function in the beautification or improvement of the urban fabric but do so through measures that improved sanitation and sought to reduce the transmission of disease."
- Fabrizio Nevola, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. LXXIV, No. 4 (2021)

"This collection of essays not only provides new insights but also provokes important questions. In addition, the rich bibliographies following each chapter and the useful index will undoubtedly help to advance our knowledge of this much-neglected but, not surprisingly, very 'live' topic of research."
- Marc Boone, Speculum, Vol. 97, No. 3 (2022)

Carole Rawcliffe, Claire Weeda (eds)

Policing the Urban Environment in Premodern Europe

Tapping into a combination of court documents, urban statutes, material artefacts, health guides and treatises, Policing the Urban Environment in Premodern Europe offers a unique perspective on how premodern public authorities tried to create a clean, healthy environment. Overturning many preconceptions about medieval dirt and squalor, it presents the most outstanding recent scholarship on how public health norms were enforced in the judicial, religious and socio-cultural sphere before the advent of modern medicine and the nation-state, crossing geographical and linguistic boundaries and engaging with factors such as spiritual purity, civic pride and good neighbourliness.
Editors

Carole Rawcliffe

Carole Rawcliffe is Professor Emerita of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia, and is the author of many books and articles on health, medicine and disease in the Middle Ages, especially in an urban context.

Claire Weeda

Claire Weeda works as an assistant professor at the History Department of Leiden University. She is specialized in ethnic identity, medicine, and community formation in the period 1100-1500.