Sanitation in Urban Britain, 1560–1700

Skelton, Leona (2015) Sanitation in Urban Britain, 1560–1700. Perspectives in Economic and Social History . Routledge, London. ISBN 9781317217909, 9781315620756

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

Popular belief holds that throwing the contents of a chamber pot into the street was a common occurrence during the early modern period. This book challenges this deeply entrenched stereotypical image as the majority of urban inhabitants and their local governors alike valued clean outdoor public spaces, vesting interest in keeping the areas in which they lived and worked clean.

Taking an extensive tour of over thirty towns and cities across early modern Britain, focusing on Edinburgh and York as in-depth case studies, this book sheds light on the complex relationship between how governors organised street cleaning, managed waste disposal and regulated the cleanliness of the outdoor environment, top-down, and how typical urban inhabitants self-regulated their neighbourhoods, bottom-up. The urban-rural manure trade, sanitation infrastructure, waste-disposal technology, plague epidemics, contemporary understandings of malodours and miasmatic disease transmission and urban agriculture are also analysed.

This book will enable undergraduates, postgraduates and established academics to deepen their understanding of daily life and sensory experiences in the early modern British town. This innovative work will appeal to social, cultural and legal historians as well as researchers of history of medicine and public health.

Item Type:	Book
Subjects:	L700 Human and Social Geography V100 History by period V300 History by topic
Department:	Faculties > Arts, Design and Social Sciences > Humanities
Depositing User:	Paul Burns
Date Deposited:	30 Jul 2018 12:53
Last Modified:	17 Nov 2023 14:30
URI:	https://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/35167

Downloads