Research project
Challenging the paradigm of filthy and unhealthy medieval towns
Mapping sanitary infrastructure in large urban societies in the Low Countries, 1200–1900
- Duration
- 2016 - 2019
- Contact
- Roos van Oosten
- Funding
-
NWO-Veni
- Partners
Heritage Leiden and Region, Team Archeologie Haarlem, Intergemeentelijke samenwerkingsverband Brughes and De Zwarte Doos Ghent
Background
Earlier research by Van Oosten has demonstrated that in early modern urban societies medieval cesspits were replaced by sewers. Human excrement now drained directly into the canals and resulted in an unbearable ‘Great Stink’. This pattern is seen in Leiden and occurred a little later in other canal rich towns. This material shift suggests that the medieval concept of common good was abandoned and the needs of the few were given consideration over the needs of the many. These results challenge the long-held assumption that public health was an 18th- and 19th-century invention and that medieval towns were unorganized places of dirt, squalor and disease. These findings are in line with a revisionist school of thought in the history of public health that emphasizes that medieval town councils genuinely cared for the wellbeing of their town’s residents and wanted to ensure the common good or the body urban.
Research questions
The very first archaeological case studies of medieval sanitary infrastructure carried out in Leiden and Haarlem suggest that sanitation management deteriorated in postmedieval towns. In other words, medieval residents were better off in terms of public hygiene than postmedieval citizens. Whether this was the case in big medieval towns as well will be tested in two of the largest 14th-century boomtowns of northwestern Europe: Bruges, with 45,000 residents, and Ghent, with 64,000. How the trends in waste facilities and water supply facilities were interrelated will also be scrutinized further.
Dataset
This project focuses on sanitary infrastructure (cesspits, sewers, wells, cisterns, water pipes) because the decisive factors in the health and wellbeing of residents of towns were access to clean water and the way in which fecal matter, the foremost pathogenic waste, was processed.
Four large, complex, urban societies have been selected for this Veni-funded project: Bruges, Ghent, Haarlem and Leiden. Data of exceptional quality resulting from archaeological excavations and from historical GIS-map application projects (Bruges-Map&House, and two pilot projects, Haarlem–DANS-KleineDataSubsidie2014 and Leiden–NWO-AlfaMeerwaarde2015) provide excellent groundwork for a systematic interdisciplinary (archaeological/historical/cartographic) and longitudinal (1200–1900) study.
Preliminary results
- See the Leiden Medievalists Blog
- Read the Letter from Leiden article