Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries

Janna Coomans is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project 'Healthscaping Urban Europe'. She obtained her PhD on public health in the medieval Low Countries cum laude, which received the Praemium Erasmianum and Pro Civitate prizes. Her main research interests are the history of cities, health and environments, as well as gender, crime and daily politics.

• Introduction; 1. Galenic Health and the Biopolitics of Flow; 2. The Purged Urban Heart: Municipal Sanitation; 3. Food, Health and the Marketplace; 4. Good Neighbours: Nuisance and Harmony in Living Environments; 5. Plague in Urban Healthscapes; 6. Building Community, Balancing Public Health and Order; Conclusion: Urban Health Expeditions.

'It is thoughtfully and inventively theorized, with an original interpretation solidly grounded in primary sources … Coomans provides a useful demonstration of how public health initiatives and principles could be implemented in places with different sociopolitical realities. The book is a regional case study rooted in a range of primary source genres but should be valuable to urban historians of other regions and periods as well. Coomans explicitly avoids facile comparisons with the failures and successes of contemporary public health strategies. She engages thoughtfully, however, with the conspicuously relevant questions of how multifaceted and decentralized public health strategies can be effective and the implications of conceptualizing public health as a common good.' Lucy C. Barnhouse, H-Sci-Med-Tech