Book contents
- Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries
- Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought Fourth Series
- Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Currency, Wages and Dates
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Galenic Health and the Biopolitics of Flow
- 2 The Purged Urban Heart
- 3 Food, Health and the Marketplace
- 4 Good Neighbours
- 5 Plague in Urban Healthscapes
- 6 Building Community, Balancing Public Health and Order
- Conclusion Urban Health Expeditions
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Plague in Urban Healthscapes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 August 2021
- Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries
- Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought Fourth Series
- Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Currency, Wages and Dates
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Galenic Health and the Biopolitics of Flow
- 2 The Purged Urban Heart
- 3 Food, Health and the Marketplace
- 4 Good Neighbours
- 5 Plague in Urban Healthscapes
- 6 Building Community, Balancing Public Health and Order
- Conclusion Urban Health Expeditions
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
uses the biopolitical and socio-environmental perspectives on health constructed in the previous chapters to reinterpret municipal responses to plague. This chapter argues that when Netherlandish cities took action against epidemic spread, they applied pre-existing health policies. It challenges two scholarly biases, namely of crisis and of government. First, actions to prevent spread of the plague are often interpreted as radical innovations, yet many subjects targeted in plague ordinances were usual suspects and recurring problems; already regulated outside the context of plague because they were perceived as posing a (combined) threat to physical and moral communal well-being. Cities employed various strategies, from quarantine and street sanitation to spiritual measures and culling dogs. Secondly, there is a clear need to move beyond a top-down perspective and complicate the playing field of daily dealings with an epidemic through networks of plague care, which are discussed here by focusing on the role of hospitals, medical officials and confraternal caregivers, especially the Cellites.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021