Preliminary Programme

Mineral waters gained significant popularity over the course of the eighteenth century, and were sold to the public in increasing quantities, pushed by new spring discoveries and by the prescriptions of eager physicians. Despite the widespread nature of the commerce of mineral waters, the practices surrounding their consumption remain largely unexplored. In this paper, I aim to explore the popular uses of mineral waters, shedding light on their medical application across the diverse social world of the French eighteenth century.
Mineral waters were available in two ways: at the spring or in bottles. Each was characterised by a distinct set of practices. These practices can be studied via the writings of those who distributed and administered this unique market. Spa town intendants, mineral water sellers, state-mandated inspectors, these actors reveal much about the unspoken practices of water drinking. The drinkers were characterised by a broad social diversity. Spas are known for elite visitors, but they were more often frequented by bourgeois, merchants, soldiers and the poor. These various groups had different relations to the medical authorities, but all showed an enthusiasm for the cure offered by waters.
The different modes of consumption highlight an understudied facet of water usage in the eighteenth century. The market of mineral waters had national reach, and despite the low profit margins of most actors in that trade, it only fostered the popularity of mineral waters within the public, who showed a persistent demand for cheap, medically backed and freshly supplied waters. (Show less)

Early modern cities had four main options when it came to obtaining their water: utilising adjacent rivers and streams; building aqueducts and channels to bring water from distant sources; digging wells to access underground water; and harvesting rainwater and storing it in cisterns. Of course, they could also employ a mixture of these. But whatever option was in use, it seems that the urban water-carrier was a universal presence, necessary to augment the supply at time of limited water resources. London’s ‘water-bearers’ each had their own regular clientele and established neighbourhoods where they plied their trade, and there were almost 2,000 porteurs d’eau in eighteenth-century Paris. Yet there is no single study of water-carriers in Italian cities; we know very little of how they operated.

My paper examines the lagoon city of Venice, which, famously, ‘is in water yet has no water’ (according to the chronicler Marin Sanudo). Venice may have been unique in having two distinct categories of water-sellers: in addition to the inferior-status bigolanti, who sold well-water retail to people without easy access to a well, there were the higher-status acquaroli, with their own guild, who brought in fresh water from the river Brenta in special barges and sold it wholesale, topping up the city’s numerous well-cisterns. My paper focuses on these acquaroli, through an analysis of their guild registers which survive in three volumes in Venice’s Museo Correr. The guild registers, or mariegole, contain the 1471 statues of the guild and detail various aspects of their activities (organisational, financial, judicial, devotional) over the following three hundred years, but have never been systematically studied. Their analysis can shed light on the important contribution of the acquaroli to the city’s fresh water supply, as well as the broader social, economic and cultural worlds of which they were a part. (Show less)