Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities by Carole Rawcliffe (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities by Carole Rawcliffe Meg Bernstein Carole Rawcliffe, Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2013) 445 pp. Rawcliffe has long been one of the clearest and loudest voices on the topic of medieval health, healing, and hospitals; among her myriad publications in that field are Leprosy in the Middle Ages (2006) and Medicine for the Soul: the Life, Death, and Resurrection of an English Medieval Hospital (1999). In Urban Bodies, Rawcliffe departs from her previous works that focused primarily on case studies in Norwich, where she is based at the University of East Anglia. In this book, she looks broadly at English health in terms of the urban population; she also makes frequent mention of useful comparanda on the continent. The result is a study that is both usefully broad while also remaining extremely attentive to specific documentary sources. Urban Bodies is composed of an introduction, six chapters thoughtfully organized into thematic subsections, and a conclusion. Additionally, Rawcliffe provides an appendix titled “National and Urban Epidemics, 1257–1530,” which remediates the problem of cataloguing some of the smaller and lesser-known outbreaks. Paragraph long descriptions provide references to documentary evidence for each case, which is illuminating to the reader, and reflective of an impressive facility with a tremendous number of sources. The first chapter, “Less Mud-Slinging and More Facts,” sets the historiographical stage for Rawcliffe’s project. Here, she carefully combats the Victorian idea that England in the Middle Ages was foul, polluted, and populated by people uninterested in improving poor conditions. Instead, she establishes a more nuanced picture of the period, writing about vernacular texts [End Page 292] on health-related topics, including manuals on disease prevention, and the laws created by and censures delivered to public officials on the topics of sanitation and disease prevention (46–49). In the second chapter, “Urban Bodies and Urban Souls,” Rawcliffe addresses the civic concerns of public health in later medieval England; this chapter picks up on the pun of the title which addresses both physical bodies and corporate identity. She acknowledges the commonly held belief that plague was punishment for sins by God, and discusses the institution by both prelates and kings of acts of public contrition to seek forgiveness for sin (94–95). Here she considers the notion of cleanliness and health as civic virtues, as well as the material effects of plague. She addresses the impact of depopulation due to disease on the urban landscape, showing that developed areas reverted, parish churches were closed, and building projects were halted due to pestilence (70). The remaining four chapters, “Environmental Health,” “Water,” “Food and Drink,” and “Sickness and Debility,” deal with specific thematic issues. Each of these is divided into between six and ten subsections, which address such diverse themes as “Vicious dogs and marauding pigs,” “Cooks and pie-bakers,” and “Care for the sick poor.” In “Environmental Health,” Rawcliffe discusses waste management, smells, and fire prevention. She examines London’s comparatively early waste pick-up system (137), showing that all classes, not just the elite, sought waste management. The chaos of the urban environment is evidenced by reports of stray animals wandering the streets and sometimes engaging in scuffles, but laws and bans enacted against these practices shows the widespread desire for containment (154–155). “Water” deals with the expulsion of waste and the challenge of sourcing clean water. The chapter opens with Rawcliffe gesturing to the crucial role of the friars in initiating these systems, and argues against the idea that ruling elites were “disinclined either to promote schemes for the amelioration of public water supplies, or even to shoulder the burden of maintaining whatever rudimentary facilities were already in place” (179–180). This chapter also addresses the medical beliefs about water, including the importance of Arabic texts such as Ibn-Sina’s Canon of Medicine, which discussed the health risks of consuming infected water (189). Rawcliffe showed that some of the trades were the worst offenders in terms of water purity, but that “the considerable sums of money expended on aqueducts, conduits, dike, wells and gutters...