Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries PDF Download
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Author: Janna Coomans
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108923909
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351
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Book Description
By exploring the uniquely dense urban network of the Low Countries, Janna Coomans debunks the myth of medieval cities as apathetic towards filth and disease. Based on new archival research and adopting a bio-political and spatial-material approach, Coomans traces how cities developed a broad range of practices to protect themselves and fight disease. Urban societies negotiated challenges to their collective health in the face of social, political and environmental change, transforming ideas on civic duties and the common good. Tasks were divided among different groups, including town governments, neighbours and guilds, and affected a wide range of areas, from water, fire and food, to pigs, prostitutes and plague. By studying these efforts in the round, Coomans offers new comparative insights and bolsters our understanding of the importance of population health and the physical world - infrastructures, flora and fauna - in governing medieval cities.
Author: Janna Coomans
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108923909
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351
Get Book Here
Book Description
By exploring the uniquely dense urban network of the Low Countries, Janna Coomans debunks the myth of medieval cities as apathetic towards filth and disease. Based on new archival research and adopting a bio-political and spatial-material approach, Coomans traces how cities developed a broad range of practices to protect themselves and fight disease. Urban societies negotiated challenges to their collective health in the face of social, political and environmental change, transforming ideas on civic duties and the common good. Tasks were divided among different groups, including town governments, neighbours and guilds, and affected a wide range of areas, from water, fire and food, to pigs, prostitutes and plague. By studying these efforts in the round, Coomans offers new comparative insights and bolsters our understanding of the importance of population health and the physical world - infrastructures, flora and fauna - in governing medieval cities.
Author: Lori Jones
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429619294
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
This volume brings together environmental and human perspectives, engages with both historians and scientists, and, being mindful that environments and disease recognize no boundaries, includes studies that touch on Europe, the wider Mediterranean world, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Disease and the Environment in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds explores the intertwined relationships between humans, the natural and manmade environments, and disease. Urgency gives us a sense that we need a longer view of human responses and interactions with the airs, waters, and places in which we live, and a greater understanding of the activities and attitudes that have led us to the present. Through a series of new research studies, two salient questions are explored: What are the deeper patterns in thinking about disease and the environment? What can we know about the environmental and ecological parameters of emergent human diseases over a longer period – aspects of disease that contemporary persons were not able to know or understand in the way that we do today? The broad chronological and geographical approach makes this volume perfect for students and scholars interested in the history of disease, environment, and landscape in the medieval and early modern worlds.
Author: Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192637398
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
People and goods from across the globe filled the vibrant ports of Genoa and Venice during the Renaissance. This book takes us onto the streets, bridges, and waterways of these significant, sensuous cities to reveal the ambitious schemes undertaken to promote the cleanliness and health of their communities. Along the way, we encounter a broad and fascinating cross-section of Renaissance society -- from courtesans to street food sellers and architects to canal diggers -- and, using new archival sources, uncover both the ideals and lived experiences of health and environmental management. During the Renaissance, vital connections were believed to exist between people's natures and those of the places they inhabited. Problems in urban or environmental bodies could have social and moral, as well as physical, effects. Street cleaning or the dredging of canals, therefore, were often justified in societal and religious, as well as natural, terms. These associations shaped government measures to regulate everyday life in ports, alongside communal responses to natural disasters. They informed the management of the environment, including waste disposal, flood defences, dredging, and land reclamation, and endowed such activity with both physical and symbolic purpose. This is not simply a story of elite, official initiatives. Members of communities used public health structures to resolve the challenges of urban life -- social and physical. Occupational groups such as fishermen acted as environmental experts through the organisation of their guilds and provided reports on specific projects and proposals to government magistracies. Finally, the governments of both ports operated important systems of petitions and privileges, which encouraged innovation and the development of new technology by citizens and foreigners to address the central, environmental challenges of the day. Renaissance public health, then, emerges as a collaborate enterprise, as well as a site of tension within cosmopolitan neighbourhoods, and its study unveils more about forms of governance and community in this period. An illuminating and original account of social policies, urban design, and environmental management between 1400 and 1600, Cleaning Up Renaissance Italy provides a new, multi-disciplinary history of Renaissance Italy.
Author: Abigail Agresta
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501764187
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
How did medieval people think about the environments in which they lived? In a world shaped by God, how did they treat environments marked by religious difference? The Keys to Bread and Wine explores the answers to these questions in Valencia in the later Middle Ages. When Christians conquered the city in 1238, it was already one of the richest agricultural areas in the Mediterranean thanks to a network of irrigation canals constructed under Muslim rule. Despite this constructed environment, drought, flooding, plagues, and other natural disasters continued to confront civic leaders in the later medieval period. Abigail Agresta argues that the city's Christian rulers took a technocratic approach to environmental challenges in the fourteenth century but by the mid-fifteenth century relied increasingly on religious ritual, reflecting a dramatic transformation in the city's religious identity. Using the records of Valencia's municipal council, she traces the council's efforts to expand the region's infrastructure in response to natural disasters, while simultaneously rendering the landscape within the city walls more visibly Christian. This having been achieved, Valencia's leaders began by the mid-fifteenth century to privilege rogations and other ritual responses over infrastructure projects. But these appeals to divine aid were less about desperation than confidence in the city's Christianity. Reversing traditional narratives of technological progress, The Keys to Bread and Wine shows how religious concerns shaped the governance of the environment, with far-reaching implications for the environmental and religious history of medieval Iberia.
Author: Els Rose
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031485610
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 500
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Book Description
Author: Neil Murphy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009233807
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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Book Description
This Element examines the emergence of comprehensive plague management systems in early modern France. While the historiography on plague argues that the plague of Provence in the 1720s represented the development of a new and 'modern' form of public health care under the control of the absolutist monarchy, it shows that the key elements in this system were established centuries earlier because of the actions of urban governments. It moves away from taking a medical focus on plague to examine the institutions that managed disease control in early modern France. In doing so, it seeks to provide a wider context of French plague care to better understand the systems used at Provence in the 1720s. It shows that the French developed a polycentric system of plague care which drew on the input of numerous actors combat the disease.
Author: John H. Arnold
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192699792
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 545
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Book Description
What was Christianity like for ordinary people between the turn of the millennium and the coming of the Black Death? What changed and what continued, in their experiences, habits, feelings, hopes, and fears? How did they know themselves to be Christians, and indeed to be good Christians? This book answers those questions through a focus on one specific region — southern France — across a particularly fraught period of history, one beset by the changes wrought by the Gregorian reforms, the spectre of heresy, the violence of crusade, the coming of inquisition, and the pastoral revolution associated with the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Using an array of different historical documents, John H. Arnold explores the material contexts of Christian worship from the eleventh through to the fourteenth centuries, the shifting episcopal expectations of the ordinary laity, the changes wrought through wider socioeconomic developments, and periods of sharp inflection brought by the Albigensian crusade and its aftermath. Throughout, the book explores the complex spectrum of lay piety, finding enthusiasms and doubts, faith and scepticism, agency and negotiation. It explores not just developments in the content of faith for the laity but the very dynamics of belief as a lived experience. We are shown how across these key centuries Christianity developed in its external practices, but also via inculcating a more interiorized and affective mode of belief; and thus, it is argued, it can be said to have become truly a 'religion' — a structured, demanding, and rewarding faith — for the many and not just the few.
Author: Sheilagh Ogilvie
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691267413
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 544
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Book Description
How human institutions—markets, states, communities, religions, guilds and families—have helped both to control and to exacerbate epidemics throughout history. How do societies tackle epidemic disease? In Controlling Contagion, Sheilagh Ogilvie answers this question by exploring seven centuries of pandemics, from the Black Death to Covid-19. For most of history, infectious diseases have killed many more people than famine or war, and in 2019 they still caused one death in four. Today, we deal with epidemics more successfully than our ancestors managed plague, smallpox, cholera or influenza. But we use many of the same approaches. Long before scientific medicine, human societies coordinated and innovated in response to biological shocks—sometimes well, sometimes badly. Ogilvie uses historical epidemics to analyse how human societies deal with “externalities”—situations where my action creates costs or benefits for others beyond those that I myself incur. Social institutions—markets, states, communities, religions, guilds, and families—help us manage the negative externalities of contagion and the positive externalities of social distancing, sanitation, and immunization. Ogilvie shows how each institution enables us to coordinate, innovate and inspire each other to limit contagion. But each institution also has weaknesses that can make things worse. Markets shut down voluntarily during every epidemic in history—but they also brought people together, spreading contagion. States mandated quarantines, sanitation, and immunization—but they also waged war and censored information, exacerbating epidemics. Religions admonished us to avoid infecting our neighbours—but they also preached against science and medical innovations. What decided the outcome, Ogilvie argues, was a temperate state, an adaptable market, and a strong civil society where a diversity of institutions played to their own strengths and checked each other’s flaws.
Author: Leona J. Skelton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317217896
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
Popular belief holds that throwing the contents of a chamber pot into the street was a common occurrence during the early modern period. This book challenges this deeply entrenched stereotypical image as the majority of urban inhabitants and their local governors alike valued clean outdoor public spaces, vesting interest in keeping the areas in which they lived and worked clean. Taking an extensive tour of over thirty towns and cities across early modern Britain, focusing on Edinburgh and York as in-depth case studies, this book sheds light on the complex relationship between how governors organised street cleaning, managed waste disposal and regulated the cleanliness of the outdoor environment, top-down, and how typical urban inhabitants self-regulated their neighbourhoods, bottom-up. The urban-rural manure trade, sanitation infrastructure, waste-disposal technology, plague epidemics, contemporary understandings of malodours and miasmatic disease transmission and urban agriculture are also analysed. This book will enable undergraduates, postgraduates and established academics to deepen their understanding of daily life and sensory experiences in the early modern British town. This innovative work will appeal to social, cultural and legal historians as well as researchers of history of medicine and public health.
Author: Bert De Munck
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351245767
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317
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Book Description
This book presents a new view on the relation between labour and community through a focus on craft guilds. In the Southern Netherlands, occupational guilds were both powerful and governed by manufacturing masters, enabling the latter to imprint their mark upon urban society in an economic, socio-cultural and political way. While the urban community was deeply indebted to a corporative spirit and guild ethic originating in medieval Germanic and Christian traditions, guild-based artisans succeeded in being accepted as genuine political (and, hence, rational) actors – their political identity and agency being based upon their skills and trustworthiness. In the long run, this corporative spirit and power inexorably waned. Yet this book shows that an adequate understanding of the development of European modernity – i.e., proletarianisation and the emergence of a modern economy and modern economic and political thinking – requires taking seriously the ruins upon which it is build. These histories can actually be recounted as purifications of sorts, in which the economic was separated from the political, the individual from the social, and the transcendent from the material. While the religiously inspired corporative nature of the urban body politic waned, the urban artisans lost their credibility as political (and rational) actors.
