Premodern Crime and Punishment Policing the Urban Environment in Europe

This book addresses the ways in which authorities across Western Europe attempted to control urban space for the common good and how the wider population responded to these initiatives. Tapping into a combination of court documents, urban statutes, material artefacts, health guides and treatises, Policing the Urban Environment in Premodern Europe offers a unique perspective on how premodern public authorities tried to create a clean, healthy environment. Overturning many preconceptions about medieval dirt and squalor, it presents the most outstanding recent scholarship on how public health norms were enforced in the judicial, religious and socio-cultural sphere before the advent of modern medicine and the nation-state, crossing geographical and linguistic boundaries and engaging with factors such as spiritual purity, civic pride and good neighbourliness.

Pagina's: 318, Editie: Eerste editie, Paperback, Routledge