Roads to Health: Infrastructure and Urban Wellbeing in Later Medieval Italy by Guy Geltner

Abstract

Through case studies of the Italian cities of Lucca, Bologna, and Pinerolo, Geltner shows how road officials were delegated responsibilities that we today would lump under health and sanitation: keeping waste off the streets and gutters flowing, ensuring clean marketplaces and food for sale, and maintaining latrines and water supplies. Medieval public health was “a dynamic and historically contingent set of legal prohibitions, disciplining practices, and subtle insinuations designed to improve health outcomes at the population level” (p. 12). While Foucault had understood biopower as an eighteenth-century development, Geltner pushes the idea back to medieval city-states whose “governments’ and other agents’ quest for authority and control meant aligning their prerogatives with certain forms of health promotion” (p. 17).