Medieval sanitation
I am interested in how medieval Europeans dealt with sanitation problems in the growing urban areas. My primary focus has been waste handling and disposal choices and their effects on streets, empty plots, and waterbodies in the cities and towns.
Medieval cities –
Not as dirty as we think.
Muck and filth cleaned up.
(my dissertation haiku posted on Dissertation Haiku)
In In Pursuit of Healthy Environments, ed. Esa Ruuskanen and Heini Hakosalo, 13-26. Routledge, 2020. Through a study of English town government sources, this chapter argues that local authorities in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries regulated craft businesses with an eye on their outputs to the environment that could have…
Continue reading
Blood on the butcher’s knife, In Blood Matters: Blood in European Literature and Thought, 1400-1700, ed. Bonnie Lander Johnson and Eleanor Decamp, 224-37 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). The late medieval period has complex and contradictory developments in the thinking about animal blood from butchery. It is both a…
Continue reading
Nature + Culture 9 (2014): 225-237 This article challenges the common presentation of the medieval street as a mud- and muck-filled cesspit. Using the television episode “Medieval London” of the Filthy Cities series aired by BBC Two in 2011 as a spring board, I discuss the realities of medieval waste management…
Continue reading
In Les cinq sens de la ville du Moyen Âge à nos jours, ed. Ulrike Krampl, Robert Beck and Emmanuelle Retaillaud-Bajac (Tours: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, 2013), 301-313. Although linking smell and sanitation has been previously discussed by scholars as an early modern development, this article argues that controlling smells from human…
Continue reading
Arcadia: Online Explorations in European Environmental History, 2012. Access the article online in Arcadia (free)
Continue reading
Early English Studies, 2010, online. This article examines Sir John Harington’s A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called The Metamorphosis of Ajax through the lens of urban environmental history, examining the everyday context of Harington’s discourse. It argues that although Harington may have used the work for the political and social…
Continue reading
in Living cities: An anthology in urban environmental history, ed. Matthias Legnér and Sven Lilja (Stockholm: Forskningsrådet Formas, 2010), 34–55. Living in an urban setting comes with a price. Waste disposal in these crowded settings often becomes a problem. In the late medieval towns of York and Coventry, the town councils…
Continue reading
Water History 2.1 (2010), 35-52. This article examines the local responses to medieval urban river pollution in three leading English towns—Coventry, Norwich, and York—during the late fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. The case studies reveal the extent to which local governments became involved in river upkeep. Interventions by the town governments were…
Continue reading
Journal of Urban History 36.3 (2010), 300-315. This article examines how providing one basic city service—sanitation—influenced civic governmental structures from 1400 to 1600 in two of England’s largest provincial cities, Norwich and Coventry, and how those changes meshed with concepts of good rule. Although sanitation services were neither the most…
Continue reading
Technology and Culture 49.3 (2008), 547-567. This article investigates the workings of sanitation technologies in late medieval English and Scandinavian cities through both written and archeological evidence. It defines the roles of city corporations and individuals in the areas of street maintenance and waste management between the years 1350 and 1550.…
Continue reading