Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Figures and Charts
- Introduction
- 1 Cleanliness, Civility, and the City in Medieval Ideals and Scripts
- 2 The View from the Streets: The Records of Hundred and Leet Courts as a Source for Sanitary Policing in Late Medieval English Towns
- 3 Urban Viarii and the Prosecution of Public Health Offenders in Late Medieval Italy
- 4 Food Offenders: Public Health and the Marketplace in the Late Medieval Low Countries
- 5 Policing the Environment of Late Medieval Dordrecht
- 6 Muddy Waters in Medieval Montpellier
- 7 Regulating Water Sources in the Towns and Cities of Late Medieval Normandy
- 8 Policing the Environment in Premodern Imperial Cities and Towns: A Preliminary Approach
- 9 Official Objectives of theVisitatio Leprosorum: Ambiguity, Ambivalence, and Variance
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Figures and Charts
- Introduction
- 1 Cleanliness, Civility, and the City in Medieval Ideals and Scripts
- 2 The View from the Streets: The Records of Hundred and Leet Courts as a Source for Sanitary Policing in Late Medieval English Towns
- 3 Urban Viarii and the Prosecution of Public Health Offenders in Late Medieval Italy
- 4 Food Offenders: Public Health and the Marketplace in the Late Medieval Low Countries
- 5 Policing the Environment of Late Medieval Dordrecht
- 6 Muddy Waters in Medieval Montpellier
- 7 Regulating Water Sources in the Towns and Cities of Late Medieval Normandy
- 8 Policing the Environment in Premodern Imperial Cities and Towns: A Preliminary Approach
- 9 Official Objectives of theVisitatio Leprosorum: Ambiguity, Ambivalence, and Variance
- Index
Summary
As urban communities in Western Europe mushroomed from the twelfth century onward, authorities promptly responded with a plethora of regulations to facilitate, at least in theory, the orderly cohabitation of dwellers within the city walls. Many of these rules concerned public health matters, such as the disposal of waste, the protection of water supplies, and the sale of wholesome foodstuffs. In some cases, sanitary regulations drew from Ancient Greek and especially Galenic medical theory, which stressed the importance of a hygienic environment in safeguarding the urban body from disease. The effective execution of such measures relied in part on the active engagement and compliance of the population. Shared assumptions regarding physical and spiritual well-being, social cohesion, neighbourliness, and economic prosperity, as well as the pursuit of ideals of urbanity, fed into communal efforts to police the environment, the behaviour of others, and the conduct of the self. Nonetheless, conflicting interests and contradictory impulses abounded, and official bodies might wield the disciplinary stick when their efforts met with apathy, confusion, resistance, or evasion. This volume explores attempts to enforce rules and recommendations for the improvement of public health and sanitation in premodern Western Europe, while also seeking to establish how urban populations may have reacted to them. To this end, it draws upon a wide range of source material, including bylaws, court rulings, and official injunctions, together with the evidence of judicial inquiries, administrative records, urban chronicles, panegyrics, and medical texts. And in so doing it comprehensively challenges a lingering tendency on the part of historians writing for the academic as well as the popular market to employ the word ‘medieval’ as a synonym for ignorance, superstition, and indifference to squalor.
Policing the environment and the politics of health
As a form of ‘social disciplining’, policing involves the regulation of behaviour in social and physical spaces. Primarily, it is a political act, for it concerns the intervention by authorities in the lives and conduct of individuals and groups with the stated objective of promoting order and security. The word ‘police’ derives from the Latin politia, which in turn comes from the Greek politeia, meaning variously the state, public administration, politics, or public life.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Policing the Urban Environment in Premodern Europe , pp. 11 - 38Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019