Preliminary Programme

In premodern society, the use of open fire was pervasive. It was clear for contemporaries that fire disasters were caused by humans, often by careless humans, or by those with bad intentions. It was also clear that blazes were fed by and spread rapidly through flammable building materials, jumped corners in small alleys, and sprang from open hearths, bakers’ ovens and smithies’ forges. This paper explores responses to mitigate fire risks by using the concept of a fire ecology or regime, defined broadly as the social, political and economic and cultural function of fire within specific periods and regions. Especially before the later nineteenth century, when other energy sources replaced (open) fire to warm, heat and (industrially) produce, scholars see a persistent centrality of fire in a complex of practices and beliefs systems. During some specific periods and in specific places, assertive steps were taken by a range of agents to alter fire regimes, as a way to create social change. This paper argues that this is the case in the Low Countries during the later Middle Ages. Fire prevention measures in the Low Countries are arguably the first instance of official interference with the construction and use of private properties. Between the thirteenth and sixteenth century, Netherlandish cities transformed due to their increased use of stone (verstening or petrification). However, grasping the importance and the impact of fire prevention practices on the urban community and the built environment across several centuries – linking them as part of a fire ecology– remains to be explored in depth. There is also no comprehensive overview of fire disasters, let alone of safety-promoting practices for the Low Countries. This paper offers a first exploration of these lacunae. (Show less)

Urban water is an important social-natural site, which can be understood as a nexus of human practices and material arrangements (Winiwarter and Schmid, 2020). European cities have had a considerable ‘water plurality,’ where different types of water systems co-existed. (Janssens and Soens, 2019). Recent research on early modern Amsterdam has nuanced the view that the city was wholly dependent on clean water imports from the Vecht river and only relieved of its water problems with the introduction of piped water in the 19th century (Van Roosbroeck, 2019). We now know that the period of pre-piped water in Amsterdam was rather characterized by a mixed system of rain-water harvesting and water imports for direct consumption, while even the ground water and surface water had their roles to play.
In this paper, I examine the interplay of everyday practices, technological infrastructures and urban governance to reconstruct the hydrological assemblage of early modern Amsterdam, taking the system of rainwater harvesting as major case study. For this, I consider various sources such as the encroachment tax registers (precariobelasting) and notarial deeds on everyday urban conflict, to investigate how access to urban waters was facilitated. The encroachment tax registers provide unique insight into the locations where captured rain water was stored on public ground, for private use. The notarial depositions provide snapshots of everyday life, where conflicts about using, owning or maintaining parts of water infrastructures feature prominently. It allows insight in the social-natural agencies that shaped the urban ecology of water access. (Show less)

This paper examines the nature and development of the moral economy of access to water streams in the period 1450-1650. The aim is twofold: first, to move beyond the scholarly trend to associate this question primarily with modernist norms of democracy and rights to nature; and second, to assess the power of ideas in governing premodern urban-rural ecologies. There is no question that flowing water, from substantial rivers and their smaller offshoots to slowly ebbing brooks and moats, was an important resource in premodern Europe. Whether to boost political prestige, to levy tolls, to drive water-powered mills, or simply to moor a small fishing boat, princes, lords, urban authorities and local landowners all had the potential to benefit from access to flowing water. The court records are accordingly rife with legal contests over the right to use such streams, or to control how others were allowed to use them. Scholars working within various historical disciplines have studied this material from different angles, for example to gauge the participation of ordinary people within the legal framework of the budding state, or the coordination of common-pool resources. However, these lawsuits can also be used to explore premodern ideological conceptions of who held a legitimate claim to the streams that criss-crossed the natural landscapes of town and countryside. Based on a select corpus of court cases from three Netherlandish regions (Flanders, Guelders, and Holland), this paper reconstructs these ideas and assesses in what degree they fluctuated or evolved over the period 1450-1650 (Show less)