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  3. Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries
  • Cited by 8
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
August 2021
Print publication year:
2021
Online ISBN:
9781108924344
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108924344
Subjects:
Environmental History, British History 1066-1450, Area Studies, European History 1000-1450, History, European Studies
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Fourth Series (119)
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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.

Reviews

‘It is thoughtfully and inventively theorized, with an original interpretation solidly grounded in primary sources … Coomans provides a useful demonstration of how public health initiatives and principles could be implemented in places with different sociopolitical realities. The book is a regional case study rooted in a range of primary source genres but should be valuable to urban historians of other regions and periods as well. Coomans explicitly avoids facile comparisons with the failures and successes of contemporary public health strategies. She engages thoughtfully, however, with the conspicuously relevant questions of how multifaceted and decentralized public health strategies can be effective and the implications of conceptualizing public health as a common good.’

Lucy C. Barnhouse Source: H-Sci-Med-Tech

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