sehepunkte 25 (2025), Nr. 4

Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw: Cleaning Up Renaissance Italy

Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw's Cleaning Up Renaissance Italy: Environmental Ideals and Urban Practice in Genoa and Venice opens with a fascinating discussion of Jacopo Tintoretto's The Last Judgment in the Church of the Madonna dell'Orto in Venice. This dramatic and dynamic painting serves as a powerful illustration of the Venetian experience of water and flooding - not as a distant catastrophe but as a mundane, lived reality. By anchoring the study in this compelling visual source, Stevens Crawshaw underscores the symbolic and psychological weight of water in Venetian culture. Given the strength of this opening, it is somewhat surprising that more sustained engagement with artworks does not follow in the rest of the book. Additional references to visual culture - paintings, sculptures, or urban iconography - would have enriched the analysis, especially in a context where the physical and symbolic presence of water so deeply shaped urban life.

The volume offers a compelling exploration of how two prominent Renaissance port cities addressed environmental challenges to promote public health and urban cleanliness between 1400 and 1600. Drawing from extensive archival research, Stevens Crawshaw delves into the multifaceted approaches undertaken by both governmental authorities and local communities to manage waste, regulate water quality, and mitigate urban congestion. By focusing on these two major maritime centers, she provides a richly detailed account of the intersection between environmental management and civic governance in early modern Italy.

The book is structured into two main sections. The first, The Ebbs and Flows of Daily Life, examines the practical measures implemented to maintain sanitary conditions in Genoa and Venice. Initiatives such as street cleaning, canal dredging, and the development of flood defences are explored not only as functional necessities but also as practices imbued with symbolic significance, reflecting contemporary social and religious values. The second section, Bodies: Concepts of Balance and Blame, investigates cultural narratives surrounding health and the environment, illustrating how different social groups - including courtesans, fishermen, and the urban poor - engaged with and influenced environmental policies. This part of the book highlights how public health was a collaborative enterprise, shaped by both official regulations and community-driven initiatives.

One of the key strengths of the volume is its interdisciplinary approach, bridging urban history, environmental studies, and social history. Stevens Crawshaw successfully demonstrates that environmental management was deeply intertwined with notions of morality, social order, and communal identity. By focusing on the cities of Genoa and Venice, she highlights how sanitation and public health were not merely practical concerns but also social, political, and cultural issues. Her analysis challenges traditional narratives that depict urban sanitation and environmental awareness as purely modern concerns, showing instead that Renaissance city governments and communities engaged in systematic efforts to manage waste, water, and disease.

The book's contribution extends to recent historiographical trends emphasizing the role of marginalized groups in shaping environmental policy. Rather than presenting environmental regulation as a top-down imposition, Stevens Crawshaw examines the interactions between city governments, guilds, and marginalized populations. This approach aligns with broader shifts in environmental history that move beyond elite perspectives to consider how ordinary citizens experienced and contributed to environmental governance.

While Cleaning Up Renaissance Italy makes significant contributions, there are areas where the book could be further developed. Although it offers a thorough case study of Genoa and Venice, its broader European implications could be more explicitly drawn out. Additionally, while the book provides a strong analysis of urban sanitation and water management, further engagement with climate change and its impact on early modern Italian cities would have enhanced its scope. Stevens Crawshaw's work contributes to the growing body of literature exploring how pre-modern societies managed environmental crises. It aligns with recent scholarship in early modern environmental history that challenges the idea that significant environmental awareness or policies only emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries. Works such as Richard Hoffmann's An Environmental History of Medieval Europe and Craig Martin's Subverting Aristotle: Religion, Science, and Early Modern Mechanics have examined how early modern Europeans understood and interacted with their environments. Cleaning Up Renaissance Italy complements these studies by focusing specifically on urban sanitation and environmental intervention in Renaissance Italy, adding a much-needed dimension to the literature.

This book also fits within a broader scholarly conversation on public health and urban infrastructure in Renaissance Italy. Carlo Cipolla's Faith, Reason, and the Plague in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany and John Henderson's Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City explore how Italian city-states responded to disease outbreaks, providing valuable context for Stevens Crawshaw's arguments. Similarly, Katherine Rinne's The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City and David Gentilcore's Water and Rural Society: Irrigation, Drainage and Agriculture in Northern Italy, 1500-1800 examine the management of water systems, which played a crucial role in maintaining urban sanitation.

Overall, Cleaning Up Renaissance Italy is a valuable contribution to the fields of environmental history, urban studies, and Renaissance history. By situating its analysis within the broader framework of early modern environmental management, it offers crucial insights into how Renaissance societies actively shaped their urban environments. The book's interdisciplinary approach and detailed archival research make it an essential read for scholars interested in the history of public health, sanitation, and environmental governance in early modern Europe.