G. Geltner

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

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.

A Cell of Their Own: The Incarceration of Women in Late Medieval Italy

Based on materials excavated from a number of Italian archives, this article traces the early development of women’s prison wards in late medieval Europe and analyzes the female prison experience from an original perspective. In doing so, it addresses key questions in the criminology and penology of women, especially concerning the relations between female deviants’ numeric marginality and their perceived neglect by officialdom.

Mendicants as victims: scale, scope and the idiom of violence

This article establishes the scale of violence perpetrated against mendicant friars in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe, and provides a list of these events in an on-line appendix. It underscores and analyses the wide variety of contexts in which such incidents took place and examines the ramifications for the history of the mendicant orders and medieval urban society generally. Violence was a subtler form of communicative action than is sometimes recognised, and the paper points to the inverse relationship between power and violence in medieval urban conflicts.

Center and Periphery

Center and Periphery honors Willliam Chester Jordan on the occasion of his 65th birthday. The essays by his former doctoral students examine the complexity of negotiating power at the center and margins of society in medieval Europe and the Mediterranean.