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)
PhD Dissertation, University of Virginia, 2008, directed by W. B. Carlson. This study investigates the workings of late medieval sanitation technologies, particularly how solutions to sanitation issues were constructed as a relationship between the city government and urban inhabitants. It argues that medieval sanitation developed through the reciprocal interaction between…
Medium Aevum Quotidianum 53 (2006), 5-16. This article analyzes two types of latrine regulation in far northern Europe during the medieval period: latrine placement and waste disposal. It shows that latrines in the later fourteenth through mid-sixteenth centuries were very much within the public sphere. Public regulation of latrine placement and…
I have discussed medieval environmental history as a discipline and my own work in the field in two podcasts: 2013, Umeå Group for Premodern Studies and 2009, Environmental History Resources (scroll down to podcast #28).
Review of Linda Clark and Carole Rawcliffe, eds. Society in an Age of Plague (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013), Speculum 90, 526–528. Available from journal “Decoupling Water and Sanitation,” a review of Maggie Black and Ben Fawcett, The Last Taboo: Opening the Door on the Global Sanitation Crisis (London: Earthscan, 2008). Available on H-Net…
Interviewed for magazine article “Urban Livestock: A Tender Issue”, New West Magazine, Feb 11, 2008. Read it online. A feature article about my research and its inclusion of Scandinavian archeology appeared in Norwegian in the forskning.no online magazine in June 2007. Read it online.