The dynamics of healthscaping: mapping communal hygiene in Bologna, 1287–1383

Zaneri, Taylor; Geltner, Guy

doi:10.1017/s0963926820000541

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…For example, in the topographical place of the main market, likely a global phenomenon, physical-spatial features such as stalls, halls, water points and waste pits may have been excavated and can thus brought into dialogue with texts reflecting on zoning, food availability and events impacting it such as war, as well as data on diets from cesspits and skeletal remains. Mapping health-related nodal points may also uncover previously unnoticed or at least untested spatial and material correlations, for instance between social geography, polluting industrial activities and increased mortality rates, or else between hygienic interventions such as sinking a drainage system and the recalibration of environmental enforcement policies (Zaneri and Geltner 2022). Mapping therefore is a powerful tool for reconstructing the cultural, social and class biases of community healthscaping.…”

Section: Digital Tools and Mapsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Healthscaping Approach: Towards a Global History of Early Public Health

Geltner¹,

Coomans²

2022

Preprint

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This article presents a modular, multidisciplinary methodology for tracing how different communities in the deeper past adapted their behaviors and shaped their environments to address the health risks they faced, a process also known as “healthscaping.” Historians have made major strides in reconstructing preventative health programs across the pre- or non-industrial world, thereby challenging a common view of public health as a product of Euro-American modernity and biomedicine. However, these studies’ general focus on cities and their reliance on archival and other documents that are more readily available in Euro-American contexts, limit the intervention’s potential for rethinking the earlier history of public health comparatively, transregionally and on a global scale. A broader definition of health, additional sources and alternative methodologies allow us to expand research in and especially beyond urban Europe, promoting a global turn in health historiography that operates outside the seductive teleology of modernization, colonialism and imperialism.

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Section: Digital Tools and Mapsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Healthscaping Approach: Towards a Global History of Early Public Health

Geltner¹,

Coomans²

2022

Preprint

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“…At an even more local level, they identified three clusters of threats to residents’ health which, unlike climate and stellar movement, they could ostensibly control: decaying matter, such as stagnant pools of blood and tainted water, carcasses, dung and various forms of artisanal waste; immoral behavior such as gambling, blasphemy, prostitution and selling corrupt produce; and the mistreatment or neglect of infrastructures, whose malfunction hampered commercial traffic, hydraulic energy input and waste removal, and risked causing injury to human and non-human animals. Balancing between the fixity of infrastructures and the flow of matter through them thus acted as a Galenic linchpin between individual and community health on the one hand, and the more expansive influence of region, climate and the cosmos, on the other (Zaneri and Geltner 2021 ). Decades of scholarship by urban historians and archaeologists have unearthed abundant evidence for interventions designed in this very light and traced their enforcement and impact.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Kinetic health: ecologies and mobilities of prevention in Europe,c. 1100-1600

Geltner

2021

Mobilities

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This article coins and deploys the term kinetic health as part of a broader attempt to historicize the mobilities paradigm from the standpoint of past community prophylactics. It uses the example of Galenic or humoral medicine, which for millennia organized individual and group health as a dynamic systems balance among several spheres of intersecting fixities and flows. The radical situatedness it fostered emerges clearly from tracing preventative health interventions among different communities in 'preindustrial' Europe, including urban dwellers, miners and armies, whose different motilities both bound people to and released them from their immediate environment. Beyond reframing past practices, kinetic health benefits mobilities studies scholars by interrogating stagist narratives of civilization and modernization in two ways. First, as an analytic, because although humoralism and other medical systems continue to inform present-day approaches to health and disease around the globe, they are often obscured by layers of colonialism and biomedicine. And secondly, as a perch for viewing the long-term ebb, flow and mingling of ideas about ill/health as an assemblage of (social) bodies and their natural and social environments.

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“…Other contributions examined internal urban geographies. Zaneri and Geltner use a GIS dataset to examine municipal public health policies in Bologna between 1287 and 1383. Analysing 3,540 nuisance offences recorded in the registers of fango officials, who were responsible for maintaining public amenities, they demonstrate that authorities were engaged in ‘healthscaping’ according to Galenic medical principles.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Review of periodical literature for 2022: (ii) 1100–1500

Gibbs

2024

The Economic History Review

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The year 2022 again saw a significant number of publications in late medieval economic and social history, including a bumper six articles in this journal which at least partly covered this period. Political structures and their economic impacts were a particularly popular topic. Angelucci, Meraglia and Voigtländer examine the development of self-governing merchant towns in England using a dataset of 555 boroughs which existed before the Black Death. They demonstrate that a combination of involvement in trade and being in royal hands caused specific towns to seek 'Farm Grants' (conferring rights to self-governance including in tax collection and law enforcement) from the crown. They argue this process was triggered by the Commercial Revolution of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in which towns sought more flexible institutional arrangements to handle commerce. They further show that towns with Farm Grants were more likely to be represented directly in parliament, creating a virtuous re-enforcing relationship by which urban autonomy led to a stronger nationally representative body. This leads to their wider argument that this relationship helped create stronger constraints on rulers in early modern England than elsewhere in Europe. Lantschner examines city states across the Mediterranean world, comparing Christian and Islamic regions. He challenges previous assessments that have seen Italian city-republics as a stage in the development of western-European democracy and as imperfect versions of modern states. Instead, he argues that city states thrived in areas of political fragmentation and are best seen as 'brittle regimes' in which actors including political organisations and city-based lords, often in alliance with external agents outside the city, vied for control.Two articles focused specifically on Tuscan city leagues. Caferro calls for a deeper understanding of these leagues beyond their military function in marshalling collective armies. He highlights their significant economic role, through creating tariff-free zones among participants and cancelling reprisals between members (where a whole city would be held responsible for the This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

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The dynamics of healthscaping: mapping communal hygiene in Bologna, 1287–1383

Cited by 6 publications

References 25 publications

The Healthscaping Approach: Towards a Global History of Early Public Health

The Healthscaping Approach: Towards a Global History of Early Public Health

Kinetic health: ecologies and mobilities of prevention in Europe,c. 1100-1600

Review of periodical literature for 2022: (ii) 1100–1500

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