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.
Author Bio
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 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.
