Putting Health before Production: Hippocrates' Airs, Waters, Places and the Medieval Estate in a Changing Medieval Climate

• In Event: Preservation, Decolonization, and Knowledge Passing Over Time

Abstract

At the turn of the fourteenth century, Pier de Crescenzi was managing an estate in northern Italy and writing Ruralia Commoda, which would become one of the most popular European agricultural treatises for over 200 years. De Crescenzi and the Roman authors he paraphrased understood the health of humans, plants, and animals through Hippocratic medicine. This system is often referred to as Meteorological Medicine, due to its dependence on seasons, weather, and geography to understand air quality, water sources, and soil composition. Throughout this book, Crescenzi used Hippocratic theory and practice to improve the health of humans, animals, and plants living on his estate, even when that might mean producing less on his lands. Using the chapters on beekeeping as a representative sample, this essay explores Hippocratic influences on de Crescenzi’s advice to landowners for constructing healthy environments for people, animals, and plants.

Crescenzi’s work was produced and read during a time of increasingly unpredictable weather. The end of the Medieval Climate Anomaly saw unseasonable rains in the north destroying newly sown fields and sparking disastrous animal murrains. Unseasonable droughts in subsequent seasons caused what some scholars call the Great Famine across most of northern Europe from roughly 1315-1325. Southern European areas saw less devastation, but chroniclers and civic documents record floods destroying crops, levees, and riverbanks. This means that Crescenzi’s choice to put health before production emerged and became popular at moment of significant change in medieval Europe.

Author

• Nicole Archambeau, Colorado State University