Urban Bodies

Urban Bodies PDF

Author: Carole Rawcliffe

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 1843838362

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"This first full-length study of public health in pre-Reformation England challenges a number of entrenched assumptions about the insanitary nature of urban life during "the golden age of bacteria". Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that draws on material remains as well as archives, it examines the medical, cultural and religious contexts in which ideas about the welfare of the communal body developed. Far from demonstrating indifference, ignorance or mute acceptance in the face of repeated onslaughts of epidemic disease, the rulers and residents of English towns devised sophisticated and coherent strategies for the creation of a more salubrious environment; among the plethora of initiatives whose origins often predated the Black Death can also be found measures for the improvement of the water supply, for better food standards and for the care of the sick, both rich and poor."--Provided by publisher.

Health and the City

Health and the City PDF

Author: Isla Fay

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1903153603

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An exploration of the health, sanitation, and cleanliness of one of England's most important medieval and early modern cities.

The Oxford Handbook of Later Medieval Archaeology in Britain

The Oxford Handbook of Later Medieval Archaeology in Britain PDF

Author: Christopher Gerrard

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-01-11

Total Pages: 968

ISBN-13: 0191062111

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The Middle Ages are all around us in Britain. The Tower of London and the castles of Scotland and Wales are mainstays of cultural tourism and an inspiring cross-section of later medieval finds can now be seen on display in museums across England, Scotland, and Wales. Medieval institutions from Parliament and monarchy to universities are familiar to us and we come into contact with the later Middle Ages every day when we drive through a village or town, look up at the castle on the hill, visit a local church or wonder about the earthworks in the fields we see from the window of a train. The Oxford Handbook of Later Medieval Archaeology in Britain provides an overview of the archaeology of the later Middle Ages in Britain between AD 1066 and 1550. 61 entries, divided into 10 thematic sections, cover topics ranging from later medieval objects, human remains, archaeological science, standing buildings, and sites such as castles and monasteries, to the well-preserved relict landscapes which still survive. This is a rich and exciting period of the past and most of what we have learnt about the material culture of our medieval past has been discovered in the past two generations. This volume provides comprehensive coverage of the latest research and describes the major projects and concepts that are changing our understanding of our medieval heritage.

A Companion to Late Medieval and Early Modern Siena

A Companion to Late Medieval and Early Modern Siena PDF

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-01-11

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 9004444823

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A Companion to Late Medieval and Early Modern Siena introduces the once-powerful commune to a wider audience. Edited by Santa Casciani and Heather Richardson Hayton, this collection explores how Siena built a distinctive civic identity and institutions that endured for centuries.

Christ the Physician in Late-Medieval Religious Controversy

Christ the Physician in Late-Medieval Religious Controversy PDF

Author: Patrick Outhwaite

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2024-05-28

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1914049268

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A consideration of the allegory of Christ the Divine Physician in medical and religious writings. Discourses of physical and spiritual health were intricately entwined in the Middle Ages, shaping intellectual concepts as well as actual treatment. The allegory of Christ as Divine Physician is an example of this intersection: it appears frequently in both medical and religious writings as a powerful figure of healing and salvation, and was invoked by dissidents and reformists in religious controversies. Drawing on previously unexplored manuscript material, this book examines the use of the Christus Medicus tradition during a period of religious turbulence. Via an interdisciplinary analysis of literature, sermons, and medical texts, it shows that Wycliffites in England and Hussites in Bohemia used concepts developed in hospital settings to press for increased lay access to Scripture and the sacraments against the strictures of the Church hierarchy. Tracing a story of reform and controversy from localised institutional contexts to two of the most important pan-European councils of the fifteenth century, Constance and Basel, it argues that at a point when the body of the Church was strained by multiple popes, heretics and schismatics, the allegory came into increasing use to restore health and order.

Law in Common

Law in Common PDF

Author: Tom Johnson

Publisher:

Published: 2019-12

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 0198785615

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There were tens of thousands of different local law-courts in late-medieval England, providing the most common forums for the working out of disputes and the making of decisions about local governance. While historians have long studied these institutions, there have been very few attempts tounderstand this complex institutional form of "legal pluralism".Law in Common provides a way of understanding this complexity by drawing out broader patterns of legal engagement. Tom Johnson first explores four "local legal cultures" - in the countryside, in forests, in towns and cities, and in the maritime world - that grew up around legal institutions,landscapes, and forms of socio-economic practice in these places, and produced distinctive senses of law.Johnson then turns to examine "common legalities", widespread forms of social practice that emerge across these different localities, through which people aimed to invoke the power of law. Through studies of the physical landscape, the production of legitimate knowledge, the emergence of English asa legal vernacular, and the proliferation of legal documents, the volume offers a new way to understand how common people engaged with law in the course of their everyday lives.Drawing on a huge body of archival research from the plenitude of different local institutions, Law in Common offers a new social history of law that aims to explain how common people negotiated the transformational changes of the long fifteenth century with, and through legality.

Sanitation in Urban Britain, 1560–1700

Sanitation in Urban Britain, 1560–1700 PDF

Author: Leona J. Skelton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-12-22

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 131721790X

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Popular belief holds that throwing the contents of a chamber pot into the street was a common occurrence during the early modern period. This book challenges this deeply entrenched stereotypical image as the majority of urban inhabitants and their local governors alike valued clean outdoor public spaces, vesting interest in keeping the areas in which they lived and worked clean. Taking an extensive tour of over thirty towns and cities across early modern Britain, focusing on Edinburgh and York as in-depth case studies, this book sheds light on the complex relationship between how governors organised street cleaning, managed waste disposal and regulated the cleanliness of the outdoor environment, top-down, and how typical urban inhabitants self-regulated their neighbourhoods, bottom-up. The urban-rural manure trade, sanitation infrastructure, waste-disposal technology, plague epidemics, contemporary understandings of malodours and miasmatic disease transmission and urban agriculture are also analysed. This book will enable undergraduates, postgraduates and established academics to deepen their understanding of daily life and sensory experiences in the early modern British town. This innovative work will appeal to social, cultural and legal historians as well as researchers of history of medicine and public health.

Contesting the City

Contesting the City PDF

Author: Christian Drummond Liddy

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0198705204

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The political narrative of late medieval English towns is often reduced to the story of the gradual intensification of oligarchy, in which power was exercised and projected by an ever smaller ruling group over an increasingly subservient urban population. Contesting the City takes its inspiration not from English historiography, but from a more dynamic continental scholarship on towns in the southern Low Countries, Germany, and France. Its premise is that scholarly debate about urban oligarchy has obscured contemporary debate about urban citizenship. It identifies from the records of English towns a tradition of urban citizenship, which did not draw upon the intellectual legacy of classical models of the 'citizen'. This was a vernacular citizenship, which was not peculiar to England, but which was present elsewhere in late medieval Europe. It was a citizenship that was defined and created through action. There were multiple, and divergent, ideas about citizenship, which encouraged townspeople to make demands, to assert rights, and to resist authority. This volume exploits the rich archival sources of the five major towns in England - Bristol, Coventry, London, Norwich, and York - in order to present a new picture of town government and urban politics over three centuries. The power of urban governors was much more precarious than historians have imagined. Urban oligarchy could never prevail - whether ideologically or in practice - when there was never a single, fixed meaning of the citizen.