Premodern Healthscaping

Students in twelfth-century Paris held slanging matches, branding the English drunkards, the Germans madmen and the French as arrogant. On Crusade, army recruits from different ethnic backgrounds taunted each other’s military skills. Men producing ethnography in monasteries and at court drafted derogatory descriptions of peoples dwelling in territories under colonization, questioning their work ethic, social organization, religious devotion and humanness. Monks listed and ruminated on the alleged traits of Jews, Saracens, Greeks, Saxons and Britons and their acceptance or rejection of Christianity. 

Ethnicity in Medieval Europe 950-1250, Medicine, Power and Religion (Boydell and Brewer, 2021), provides a radical new approach to representations of nationhood in medieval western Europe, the author argues that ethnic stereotypes were constructed and wielded rhetorically to justify property claims, flaunt military strength, and assert moral and cultural ascendance over others. The gendered images of ethnicity in circulation reflect a negotiation over self-representations of discipline, rationality and strength, juxtaposed with the alleged chaos and weakness of racialized others. Interpreting nationhood through a religious lens, monks and schoolmen explained it as scientifically informed by environmental medicine, and ancient theory that held that location and climate influenced the physical and mental traits of peoples. Drawing on lists of ethnic character traits, school textbooks, medical treatises, proverbs, poetry and chronicles, this book shows that ethnic stereotypes served as rhetorical tools of power, crafting relationships within communities and towards others.

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Janna Coomans

Through vaccination campaigns and lifting restrictions, authorities across the globe are promoting the idea of a return to normal, yet which form the ‘end’ of the COVID pandemic will take is uncertain. There may be celebrations and post-war-like baby booms, or public festivities, which are, in a way, secular versions of religious processions thanking God for lifting the curse of plague. Others foresee a more gradual liberation, with many relapses. The pandemic may also stay, and for a long time impact both physical and mental communal wellbeing – as did the Second Plague Pandemic, which lasted in Europe from the mid-fourteenth to the late eighteenth century. Moreover, historical comparisons reveal important links between crises and routine health practices.

The past two years have made it very clear that public health is as much about spaces, movements and economic and political stakes as it is about access to hospitals and doctors. There is, moreover, a new interest in long-term histories of health. Modern democratic states are no prerequisite to establish public health policies, which can entail any intervention to avoid disease and promote wellbeing at a group level. Preventative health was as pertinent and political during the later Middle Ages as it is today.

A recent effort has been made by historians to ‘clean up’ the Middle Ages. This was not an era characterized by urbanites spending their lives in an apex of dirt and chaos. Neither did things improve in any linear progression towards the ‘true’ birth of public health in the nineteenth century. My study of the medieval Low Countries subscribes to that important intervention. Yet the question ‘how dirty a medieval city was’ may not even be the most important one. Rather, concerns for sanitation and health were integrated into the routine governance of a medieval city. Urban community politics were negotiated and performed through daily activities, and dealing with routine health risks and organising sanitation were crucial arenas in which that happened.

Based on the foci and subjects that Netherlandish archival sources convey, the pursuit of a healthy medieval city can be divided into four main goals, namely: 1. well-functioning infrastructures; 2. sufficient and high-quality water and food; 3. organized (but not necessarily centralised) waste disposal; and, 4. finally, a morally healthy community. Managing all kinds of matter, including animals, waste, and people, was therefore also linked to an idea of social and moral union. Controlling those resources gave a sense of security, indeed secured power. In sum, balancing flows, in combination with balancing morality, defined communal health practices during the later Middle Ages. It was therefore at once more environmental and more spiritual than its twenty-first-century Euro-American counterpart. Further, responsibilities were divided differently. The water-rich lands of the late medieval Low Countries were populated by a large number of semi-independent towns and cities. This gave the region a distinct political profile, in which public health at an urban level played a key role. Besides regional and urban authorities, others such as guilds, parishes, religious orders and neighbourhoods also participated in health practices. Thus, facilities like sewage and waste collection, now in the hands of municipalities, were often organised among households or artisans.

There were also ‘shocks’ to routines: epidemic disease, famines, disasters such as floods and large fires, and political conflicts could impact public hygiene profoundly. Plague was one important factor and accelerator. However, it was not the start of thinking about communal health, as scholars earlier assumed. There is an important parallel to be made here: rather than perceiving the COVID crisis on its own, it is crucial to relate its experience and sense of collapse to structural everyday health practices, if we want to understand its societal impact, and think about future preventative efforts.

This post first was published on fifteeneightyfour.

Claire Weeda

On 26 March 1215, the brash Bolognese rhetorician Boncompagno da Signa read aloud his manual of rhetoric, Rhetorica antiqua,in front of the college of professors of civil and canon law. If some of his students had nodded off by the time he reached book VI, about the art of writing letters of consolation, they might have jolted awake when laughter arose in the classroom. For at that point, Boncompagno injected some comic material into his lesson, ridiculing several ethnic groups in Europe. In the section on how to address peoples in mourning, he mocks the northerners and their typical drinking habits, claiming that ‘the English, Bohemians, Poles, Ruthenians and Slavs mix their tears with drink until they reach a state of drunkenness, and thus consoled, they retain their usual merriment’. On the other hand, he continues, the Germans lament in soft voices – which is a playful inversion of their stereotypically harsh voices, that were sometimes likened to barking dogs or rattling carts. The more southern people of Romagna and Lombardy typically use artifice, however, whereby ‘in order to simulate lamentation there are many who wet their eyes with saliva or prick their eyelids’. Thus, Boncompagno actively put into practice his own lessons on the art of rhetoric. The textbooks of rhetoric and poetry indeed advised writers to capture their audience’s attention, and to be convincing, by incorporating common stereotypes, alluding to the typological traits of women, peasants and noble men, old-aged persons or ethnic groups.

Following on from literary composition, I wanted to understand the functioning of those ethnic and racial stereotypes in social contexts and power relations, their construction and the meaning attributed to them outside of the nation-state. My research suggests that the stereotypes employed by monks, schoolmen, poets and historians in western Europe in the period 950-1250 certainly were not random. English drunkenness, for instance, was a widespread image attached to northern peoples that was used in multiple contexts. Thus, in 1213, Stephen Langton, the archbishop of Canterbury, suggested that English drinking was passed down from father to son and was hereditary. He did so in the context of the interdict pronounced by Pope Innocent III over England in 1207, thus attributing England’s woes to the collective guilt of gluttony and drunkenness. The Benedictine monk William of Malmesbury, writing a century earlier, claimed the English on the eve of the Battle of Hastings acted as drunkards, ‘eating till they were sick and drinking till they spewed’. Their drinking ushered in their defeat at the hands of the Normans. In fact, English drinking was such a ubiquitous trope that Walter Daniel (fl. 1150–67), a Cistercian monk at the abbey of Rievaulx who referred to himself as a medicus, in the Centum Sententiae portrayed the English drinker sitting, holding in one hand a siphon to his mouth to drink, and in his other hand his own pipe – his penis – to eject urine.

Ethnic stereotypes abound in all kinds of texts produced between the tenth and thirteenth centuries in Latinate Europe: poems, histories, lists, encyclopaedias, medical tracts, proverbs and letters. My research shows that besides in the classroom and in social relations, the rhetorical use of ethnic and racial stereotypes occurred foremost in the military sphere and in ethnographic description in the context of colonization, advanced by men in the rising schools and courts. The ethnic tropes were used to categorize the traits of fighters and labourers within and outside the Christian imperium, holding them up to norms of strength, manliness, courage, industry and rational thought – to levels of discipline. In doing so, schoolmen and courtiers were making arguments about who qualified to lead the defence of the sweet patria in conflicts within Europe’s Christian imperium, as well as justifying the expropriation of land outside it.

The production of such images was aided by already circulating texts, such as Vegetius’s military manual De re militari, biblical commentaries, and Latinate ideas about governance, embedded in Graeco-Arabic environmental deterministic theories about how climate determines physiology and character. The monks, schoolmen and courtiers thereby integrated various traditions of thought: religious ideas about sin and the fall of mankind, genealogy and prophesies of the translation of power and knowledge; medical environmental theory about bodies, minds and places; and rhetorical-legal discussions about ownership of land and the fruits of labour, governance and the organization of society. The ethnic self-representations that the schoolmen forged and appropriated reflect an idealized image of the social elite, emphasizing discipline, but also urbanity and eloquence. These were prerequisites for administering governance well, as laid out in the ubiquitous regimens produced at this time.

The stereotypes, crucially, give weight to legal arguments pertaining to property and dominium, set in an environmentally deterministic narrative of progress, offering a justification of the colonization of ‘squandered lands’. In ethnographic description, those fertile lands are populated by allegedly semi-pagan, irrational, lawless beings, on a sliding scale of human-animalistic traits. Images of the self and the other thereby work in dialogue, within the same framework, drawing from Graeco-Arabic, Roman and religious ideas. Negative tropes place others in a different space and timeframe, in a backward past, as a form of temporal and spatial othering.

In my view we can only begin to understand ethnic or racial stereotypes of others, if we understand how ideas of the self are constructed. The imagined nation, or ethnotype, stands in a long and fluid textual and oral tradition, whereby the relevance and power of those stereotypes depends on the context in which they are employed, the discourses on which their validity is based and the authoritative voices that wield them. This underscores ethnotypes’ status not as outcomes of political and cultural processes but, rather, as verbal ammunition to be used in negotiations over social status, property and power, along with intergroup bonding. My book thus presents a snapshot of how monks and schoolmen, in the period 950-1250, talked about ethnicity. I would like to add that it does not work with beginnings and outcomes of the development of nationhood, but instead looks at processes in which constellations of marks of distinction are negotiated. Hopefully, my book will contribute to understanding how such configurations influenced the colonization discourses in other regions as well, in yet other contexts and places.

This post first was published on Boydell & Brewer.