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Healthscaping a medieval city: Lucca's Curia viarum and the future of public health history

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2013

G. GELTNER
G. GELTNER*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Amsterdam, 134 Spuistraat, 1012 VB, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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Abstract:

In early fourteenth-century Lucca, one government organ began expanding its activities beyond the maintenance of public works to promoting public hygiene and safety, and in ways that suggest both a concern for and an appreciation of population-level preventative healthcare. Evidence for this shift (which is traceable in and beyond the Italian peninsula) is mostly found in documents of practice such as court and financial records, which augment and complicate the traditional view afforded by urban statutes and medical treatises. The revised if still nebulous picture emerging from this preliminary study challenges a lingering tendency among urban and public health historians to see pre-modern European cities as ignorant and apathetic demographic black holes.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , August 2013 , pp. 395 - 415
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

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11 Archivio di Stato di Lucca (ASLu), Curia delle vie e de’ pubblici (CVP), 1–13. Volume 12 of this series is currently missing. The series is described in Bongi, S. (ed.), Inventario del R. Archivio di Stato in Lucca, vol. I (Lucca, 1872), 299–300Google Scholar. Foliation in this article follows modern pencil enumeration whenever possible. Personal and place names have been Italianized from the Latin.

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13 Bongi (ed.), Inventario del R. Archivio di Stato in Lucca, vol. I, 299; Corsi, D. (ed.), Statuti urbanistici medievali di Lucca (Venice, 1960), 15–20Google Scholar, which also demonstrates how the offices were intermittently intertwined even before the Curia viarum was subsumed under the Fondaco. The latter office has left a far greater footprint in the archives (some 4,895 registers) and is the subject of a future study.

14 Corsi (ed.), Statuti urbanistici medievali di Lucca, 11–12.

15 Ibid., 43–64. Corsi traces the institutional history of the organ up to the early modern era.

16 See Biow, D., The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy (Ithaca and New York, 2006)Google Scholar.

17 ASLu, CVP 1, fol. 2r: ‘et solvat pater pro filio, tutor pro pupillo de bonis pupillj, et vir pro uxore et frater pro fratre, dominus seu domina pro famulo et famula, de feudo ipsorum’.

18 There is a parallel between the statutes’ emphasis on pursuing seemingly minor violations and the strategies espoused by modern-day ‘broken windows’ theory. See Kelling, G.L. and Coles, C.M., Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities (New York, 1996)Google Scholar.

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21 My impression is that the cases are divided more or less equally between accusatorial and inquisitorial procedures, but their precise percentages, as well as the ratio of secret to public allegations remains to be established. On the development of these procedures in the Italian context, see Vallerani, M., Medieval Public Justice, trans. Blanshei, S. Rubin (Washington, DC, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 ASLu, CVP 3, fasc. 3, fol. 6r: ‘dolose et fraudulenter et contra formam statuti dicte curie posuit et poni fecit in stratam et viam publica[m] certam quantitatem fabarum, occupando dictam stratam et viam contra formam statuti dicte curie et in grave dapnum Luc. omunis et curie viarum’. See also CVP 5, fasc. 5, fol. 25r–v (1342).

23 ASLu, CVP 3, fasc. 3, fol. 12r: ‘habet et tenet in quadam sua domo posita in comune sancti Salvatoris in muro in brachio fontane quedam aquarium quod ducit aquam putridam in viam publicam contra formam statuti’.

24 ASLu, CVP 6, unnumbered fol.: ‘scienter et malo modo imisit ad mollandum in puteum existentem in via publica . . . certam maximam quantitatem lupinorum rem’. Florina's case was later dismissed because the water allegedly contaminated was already putrid, there were no eyewitnesses and Florina was poor.

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27 ASLu, CVP 3, fasc. 3, fols. 9r–10r. Rural communes are common offenders from the perspective of the extant documents, which contain hundreds of accusations most often regarding neglect of infrastructure and loose animals. On urban–rural relations in this period, see Dean, T. and Wickham, C. (eds.), City and Countryside in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Essays Presented to Philip Jones (London, 1990)Google Scholar; and Waley, D. and Dean, T., The Italian City-Republics, 4th edn (Harlow, 2010), 67–84Google Scholar.

28 ASLu, CVP 2, fols. 139–42 (28 Jul.–24 Oct. 1335). See also CVP 4, fasc. 4, fols. 20v–21r (11 Feb. 1340).

29 ASLu, CVP 10, fasc. 2, unnumbered fol.: ‘dictus Datuccius . . . proiecit et decurrere permisit de eius stufa quam detinet . . . aquam putridam in viam publicam que est ante et circa domum stufe, ex qua aqua putrida fetor exivit et emanavit ad vicinos circumstantes’. And see ibid., fasc. 3, unnumbered fols. (25 Aug. 1354).

30 Once again, further work is required to trace the particular trajectory of these power dynamics, taking into consideration each player's agenda and circumstances. The point here, in any case, is that the regime considered health a useful term by which to impose or extend its authority.

31 Cipolla, Miasmi ed umori.

32 Rawcliffe, C., Leprosy in Medieval England (London, 2006), 94–5Google Scholar; Stearns, J.K., Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Premodern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean (Baltimore, 2011), 91–105Google Scholar.

33 ASLu, CVP 6, unnumbered fol.: ‘non destruxit seu coperuit vel actavit dictum necessarium set ipsum retinavit et retinet discopertum, ita et taliter quod euntes . . . aqua ad quemdam fontem ibi ipse existens videre possunt putrida et fetida lebentia de necessario suprascripto’.

34 ASLu, CVP 6, unnumbered fol. (31 May–4 Jun.: ‘transeuntes et euntes per viam publicam et ad ecclesiam supradictam videre possunt putrida et fetida descendentia per necessarium suprascriptum’.

35 ASLu, CVP 9, fasc. 3, unnumbered fol.: ‘scinderunt et destruxerunt et cavaverunt viam publicam . . . in pluribus partibus ipse vie per quam ire et redire consuerunt et soliti sunt homines et bestie honerate et dishonerate’. The case continues at some length later in the fascicule.

36 ASLu, CVP 4, fols. 75r–79r (28 Apr.–12 Dec. 1339).

37 ASLu, CVP 13 (unnumbered, penultimate fol.). And see CVP 11, fasc. 4. On the cost of contemporary labour and construction materials see Goldthwaite, R., The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History (Baltimore and London, 1980), esp. 171–41 and 287–350Google Scholar. I cannot as yet determine what this amount meant in relative terms. But see J. Haemers and Ryckbosch, W., ‘A targeted public: public services in fifteenth-century Ghent and Bruges’, Urban History, 37 (2010), 203–25Google Scholar, according to whom ‘[t]he largest of spending on public services, 7.7 per cent, was taken up by the expenses for public works and infrastructure’ (207).

38 Between Feb. and Jun. 1344, for instance, the officials collected 76 lire, 11 soldi and 5 denari from individuals and communes. ASLu, CVP 7, fol. 11r.

39 See Trexler, R.C., ‘Measures against water pollution in fifteenth-century Florence’, Viator, 5 (1974), 455–67CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, which implies that that an ecological, as opposed to a purely economic, dimension of Florentine legislation on the maintenance of waterways trailed behind Lucca's.

40 ASLu, CVP10, fasc. 1, fol. 2r (Jan.–Jun. 1354). And see above, n. 28.

41 ASLu, CVP 5, fasc. 1, fols. 2v–3r, 84r–v.

42 ASLu, CVP 8, fasc. 12, fols. 39r–40v. And see CVP 11, fasc. 6, unnumbered fol. (5–6 Mar. 1374) for later communications in the vernacular.

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44 ASLu, CVP 9, fasc. 3 unnumbered fol. (20 Apr.–27 Jun. 1352).

45 A broader and better-grounded social map of offenders, private accusers and witnesses is no doubt in order. My point here is that it is both possible and worthwhile carrying out on the basis of these records.

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49 McVaugh, Medicine before the Plague, 226–7; Stilt, K., Islamic Law in Action: Authority, Discretion, and Everyday Experience in Mamluk Egypt (Oxford, 2011)Google Scholar.

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51 Orsellino del Iuncta was fined 10 lire after a wall (clausura) delimiting his property collapsed and, being situated on a main road, endangered pedestrians and mounted traffic with its accompanying animals (‘ita quod pedes et eques secum aliis animalibus iri non posset sine periculo’). ASLu CVP 6, unnumbered fols. (20 Feb.–9 Apr. 1343).

52 In 1343, Andreuccio Cuicchini and Giovanni Lupucci were accused of disobeying the injunction ‘de non retinendo in eorum apoteca sive domo aliquas pelles putridas vel fetidas recentes vel siccas’. ASLu, CVP 5, fasc. 6, unnumbered fol. Case continues in CVP 6, unnumbered fols. (2 and 20 Apr. 1343).

53 Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe, 115–22. On prison inmates’ access to medical care see Geltner, G., The Medieval Prison: A Social History (Princeton, 2008), 17, 19, 34, 66Google Scholar.

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56 Fine doubled if waste was left before someone else's house.

57 Edifice can be destroyed by the Roads Officials.

58 Animals can be taken or killed by anyone with impunity.

59 Actual fine determined by type of damage and the offender's status.

60 Failure to report carries a 40 soldi fine.

61 Bongi, S. (ed.), Bandi Lucchesi del secolo decimoquatro (Bologna, 1863), 188–90Google Scholar, prints three of these four brief texts, without specifying a source. It is likely, however, that he drew upon a consolidated series of communal promulgations rather than the Roads Officials’ registers since his rather orthographic transcription differs from mine in many places.