Cleanliness, Civility, and the City in Medieval Ideals and Scripts

Abstract

Latin and vernacular urban panegyrics, describing the ideal city and its residents, mushroomed in the twelfth century.Painting a utopian view of the city that mirrors the heavenly Jerusalem, they rhetorically conveyed ideals of urbanity for aspiring members of the body politic to emulate.This chapter explores the ways in which the cityscape constructed in these texts, and residents' behaviour (as influenced by conduct anuals and regi es of health), appear embedded in a natural environment reflected through the lens of Galenic medicine.Evoking the benefits of cleanliness and beauty, these concepts of health and hygiene accorded closely with issues of social status.The disciplined quest for moderation and balance offered spiritual and physical health, as well as enhanced personal repute.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.