Guy Geltner
Biographic Data
| ID | 203072 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Guy Geltner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Guy |
| FAMILY NAME | Geltner |
| SIGNATURE | GELTNER G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7827-1298 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 22 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
(Under)mining Preindustrial Europe: Ecology, Society, and Cultural Change, 1180–1550
Europe’s first mining boom began in the twelfth century amid favorable climatic, political, and demographic conditions. Despite its seemingly simple technologies and modest energy regimes, manual mining triggered a cascade of processes, altering ecologies and landscapes; stimulating migration; creating privileged occupational communities; prompting debates on the costs and benefits of ore extraction; and generating insights about humans’ place in…
A geochemical survey of the Antas Valley, Sardinia: Medieval metallurgy and modern slag recycling
International audience
Prospections géochimiques dans la vallée d’Antas (Sardaigne)
IntroductionAu centre du bassin méditerranéen, la Sardaigne est une « île aux filons d’argent » exploitée pendant plusieurs millénaires, de l’Antiquité à la fin du xxe siècle. Abondamment repris entre les xiie et xive siècles, les gisements qui se concentraient dans les montagnes d’Iglesias firent de l’île l’une des principales argentières de la Méditerranée médiévale. Sur cette marge byzantine, des Allemands sont signalés dès le xiie siècle, pui…
The healthscaping approach: Toward a global history of early public health
This article presents a modular, multidisciplinary methodology for tracing how different communities in the deeper past adapted their behaviors and shaped their environments to address the health risks they faced, a process also known as “healthscaping.” Historians have made major strides in reconstructing preventative health programs across the pre- or non-industrial world, thereby challenging a common view of public health as a product of Euro-…
Mine Air Makes Free? Rural Liberty, Materiality, and Agency in Europe’s Long Thirteenth Century
Mines and miners began to proliferate in Europe from the late twelfth century on, in lockstep with the region’s accelerating economic integration and urbanization. Mining communities were often rural and remote, reflecting landlords’ capacity to attract workers through freedoms that echoed the era’s incentives for urban migration. If, according to the adage, “city air makes free,” so apparently did the mine. Yet the specific affordances of mines’…
Rural Policing in the Long Trecento: An Urban Project and Its Obstruction
The intricacies of urban–rural relations surface with rare detail from the records of Italian field wardens (campari) from the late thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth century. Focusing on the region of Piedmont, in the peninsula’s north-west, this article traces the policing of numerous sites and species by the campari as part of an urban bio- and agropolitical project. The office reflects the growing desire of towns to control their surrounding cou…
Underground and Over the Sea: More Community Prophylactics in Europe, 1100-1600
Public health historians have repeatedly shown that the theory, policy, and practice of group prophylactics far predate their alleged birth in industrial modernity, and regularly draw on Galenic principles. While the revision overall has been successful, its main focus on European cities entails a major risk, since city dwellers were a minority even in Europe’s most urbanised regions. At the same time, cities continue to be perceived and presente…
Kinetic health: Ecologies and mobilities of prevention in Europe, c . 1100-1600
This article coins and deploys the term kinetic health as part of a broader attempt to historicize the mobilities paradigm from the standpoint of past community prophylactics. It uses the example of Galenic or humoral medicine, which for millennia organized individual and group health as a dynamic systems balance among several spheres of intersecting fixities and flows. The radical situatedness it fostered emerges clearly from tracing preventativ…
The dynamics of healthscaping: Mapping communal hygiene in Bologna, 1287–1383
This article traces how urban communities operating with a humoral or Galenic medical paradigm understood and confronted the health challenges facing them, using the extraordinarily well-documented case of Bologna, Italy. Working within a GIS environment, the authors spatially analyse over 3,500 events recorded by the Ufficio del fango concerning violations of the city's health-related ordinances, augmented by other demographic and material data.…
Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome
Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome. Pamela O. Long. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. xii + 370 pp. $45. - Volume 73 Issue 1
The Path to Pistoia: Urban Hygiene Before the Black Death
When the Black Death struck Western Europe in late 1347, city dwellers across the region were already practising public health, in part by building, maintaining and monitoring infrastructures whose prophylactic value emerged from the experience of intensified urbanization. The demands of a new urban metabolism, evident from the twelfth century, prompted numerous cities, including Pistoia, to develop preventative health programmes in anticipation …
A Tale of Three Thirsty Cities: The Innovative Water Supply Systems of Toledo, London and Paris in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century
A Tale of Three Thirsty Cities: The Innovative Water Supply Systems of Toledo, London and Paris in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century. Jaime-Chaim Shulman. Technology and Change in History 14. Leiden: Brill, 2018. xiv + 398 pp. $159. - Volume 72 Issue 4
Building Regulations and Urban Form, 1200–1900
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Prigionia di guerra nel medioevo. Un’altura in mezzo alla pianura: L’Italia dell’’ ‘incivilimento’, by Hannelore Zug Tucci
Tens of thousands of war captives were integral to medieval Europe’s history, but from a markedly vulnerable position. Yet these ubiquitous marginal figures are usually absent from the historiography on the era’s ‘others’, which tends to focus on inmates of physical institutions (hospitals, prisons, mental asylums, almshouses, leprosaria, women’s reformatories), or semi-segregated groups such as prostitutes and Jews, with occasional glances at (o…
Anti-corruption in History
Anticorruption in History is the first major collection of case studies on how past societies and polities, in and beyond Europe, defined legitimate power in terms of fighting corruption and designed specific mechanisms to pursue that agenda. It is a timely book: corruption is widely seen today as a major problem, undermining trust in government, financial institutions, economic efficiency, the principle of equality before the law and human wellb…
Corruption and Anticorruption in Democratic Athens: From Antiquity to the Modern Era
The chapter examines a major corruption scandal that involved the Athenian orator Demosthenes and an official of Alexander the Great. This episode reveals how tensions between individual and collective decision-making practices shaped Athenian understandings of corruption and anticorruption. The various and multiple anticorruption measures of Athens sought to bring ‘hidden’ knowledge into the open and thereby remove information from the realm of …
Hostages in the Middle Ages, by Adam J. Kosto
For most of recorded history, the giving of hostages was integral to the way polities safeguarded the settlement of their disputes. From Antiquity to the cusp of modernity treaties designed to obviate battle or to define the terms upon which a war would end often stipulated the number and kind of hostages to be presented by one party to another, either as a surety for compliance or as a penalty for violating the agreed-upon terms. Throughout the …
En la calle y en los baños públicos: Galenismo Medieval en Acción
En este artículo combinamos la perspectiva de la higiene urbana medieval con los hallazgos de los historiadores de la medicina y de la intelectualidad, analizando algunas de las formas con que los habitantes y los gobiernos urbanos medievales intentaron limitar las enfermedades y promover la salud mediante medidas preventivas. En las dos regiones que se toman en consideración (las calles italianas y los baños holandeses), se hizo un esfuerzo de r…
A Cell of Their Own: The Incarceration of Women in Late Medieval Italy
Based on materials excavated from a number of Italian archives, this article traces the early development of women’s prison wards in late medieval Europe and analyzes the female prison experience from an original perspective. In doing so, it addresses key questions in the criminology and penology of women, especially concerning the relations between female deviants’ numeric marginality and their perceived neglect by officialdom
Healthscaping a medieval city: Lucca's Curia viarum and the future of public health history
In early fourteenth-century Lucca, one government organ began expanding its activities beyond the maintenance of public works to promoting public hygiene and safety, and in ways that suggest both a concern for and an appreciation of population-level preventative healthcare. Evidence for this shift (which is traceable in and beyond the Italian peninsula) is mostly found in documents of practice such as court and financial records, which augment an…
Poverty, Heresy and the Apocalypse: The Order of Apostles and Social Change in Medieval Italy, 1260–1307, by Jerry B. Pierce
Deviance: Brethren Behaving Badly
This chapter tracks religious mendicants’ gross misbehavior as it emerges mostly from the orders’ internal documents. Rather than taking polemicists and other authors at their word, it carefully gauges the frequency and profile of deviance among the brethren, especially but not exclusively Dominicans. Given the brethren’s strong presence in urban centers and in episcopal and secular courts, their misconduct was hard to conceal and even harder to …
The Making of Medieval AntifraternalismPolemic, Violence, Deviance, and Remembrance
A case study in opposition to religious authority in the pre-modern period, Geltner treats a phenomenon known as antifraternalism from a fresh methodological and documentary perspective.
Public Health and the Pre‐Modern City: A Research Agenda
How and to what extent did pre‐modern people go about creating healthier environments? Can we reasonably talk about public health when it comes to earlier urban societies? This essay briefly surveys a few tenacious misconceptions about preventative (as opposed to curative) health care in pre‐modern cities, and then proceeds to review a budding scholarly literature that explores how urban dwellers, organizations, and governments, especially in med…
Mendicants as victims: Scale, scope and the idiom of violence
This article establishes the scale of violence perpetrated against mendicant friars in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe, and provides a list of these events in an on-line appendix. It underscores and analyses the wide variety of contexts in which such incidents took place and examines the ramifications for the history of the mendicant orders and medieval urban society generally. Violence was a subtler form of communicative action than is…
Kinetic health: Ecologies and mobilities of prevention in Europe, c . 1100-1600
This article coins and deploys the term kinetic health as part of a broader attempt to historicize the mobilities paradigm from the standpoint of past community prophylactics. It uses the example of Galenic or humoral medicine, which for millennia organized individual and group health as a dynamic systems balance among several spheres of intersecting fixities and flows. The radical situatedness it fostered emerges clearly from tracing preventativ…
The dynamics of healthscaping: Mapping communal hygiene in Bologna, 1287–1383
This article traces how urban communities operating with a humoral or Galenic medical paradigm understood and confronted the health challenges facing them, using the extraordinarily well-documented case of Bologna, Italy. Working within a GIS environment, the authors spatially analyse over 3,500 events recorded by the Ufficio del fango concerning violations of the city's health-related ordinances, augmented by other demographic and material data.…
Healthscaping a medieval city: Lucca's Curia viarum and the future of public health history
In early fourteenth-century Lucca, one government organ began expanding its activities beyond the maintenance of public works to promoting public hygiene and safety, and in ways that suggest both a concern for and an appreciation of population-level preventative healthcare. Evidence for this shift (which is traceable in and beyond the Italian peninsula) is mostly found in documents of practice such as court and financial records, which augment an…
Detrusio , Penal Cloistering in the Middle Ages
Throughout the Middle Ages, monasteries were viewed and occasionally served as prisons for laymen. The present article explores this relatively obscure role of monasteries in the settlement of disputes, underlining its attendant problems – logistical, political, and social. Difficult as it was to execute, however, detrusio revises the accepted history of the prison by suggesting that punitive incarceration was considered and at times applied beyo…
Underground and Over the Sea: More Community Prophylactics in Europe, 1100-1600
Public health historians have repeatedly shown that the theory, policy, and practice of group prophylactics far predate their alleged birth in industrial modernity, and regularly draw on Galenic principles. While the revision overall has been successful, its main focus on European cities entails a major risk, since city dwellers were a minority even in Europe’s most urbanised regions. At the same time, cities continue to be perceived and presente…
Coping in medieval prisons
Based on archival research in several Italian city-states, this article examines medieval prison life, its attendant pains, and inmate coping strategies by substantially engaging the variety of scholarship on modern incarceration. It demonstrates the limited degree to which current hardships overlap with those of earlier forms of captivity, and underscores the diversity of inmates' social positions in both eras. Medieval prisoners were marginaliz…
The healthscaping approach: Toward a global history of early public health
This article presents a modular, multidisciplinary methodology for tracing how different communities in the deeper past adapted their behaviors and shaped their environments to address the health risks they faced, a process also known as “healthscaping.” Historians have made major strides in reconstructing preventative health programs across the pre- or non-industrial world, thereby challenging a common view of public health as a product of Euro-…
Rural Policing in the Long Trecento: An Urban Project and Its Obstruction
The intricacies of urban–rural relations surface with rare detail from the records of Italian field wardens (campari) from the late thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth century. Focusing on the region of Piedmont, in the peninsula’s north-west, this article traces the policing of numerous sites and species by the campari as part of an urban bio- and agropolitical project. The office reflects the growing desire of towns to control their surrounding cou…
The Path to Pistoia: Urban Hygiene Before the Black Death
When the Black Death struck Western Europe in late 1347, city dwellers across the region were already practising public health, in part by building, maintaining and monitoring infrastructures whose prophylactic value emerged from the experience of intensified urbanization. The demands of a new urban metabolism, evident from the twelfth century, prompted numerous cities, including Pistoia, to develop preventative health programmes in anticipation …
Public Health and the Pre‐Modern City: A Research Agenda
How and to what extent did pre‐modern people go about creating healthier environments? Can we reasonably talk about public health when it comes to earlier urban societies? This essay briefly surveys a few tenacious misconceptions about preventative (as opposed to curative) health care in pre‐modern cities, and then proceeds to review a budding scholarly literature that explores how urban dwellers, organizations, and governments, especially in med…
Brethren Behaving Badly: A Deviant Approach to Medieval Antifraternalism
Clizia, the titular protagonist of Machiavelli's play, was trapped between her master's sexual advances and her mistress's attempt to avoid scandal. For their part, and with no arbiter in sight, husband and wife remained at strategic loggerheads as to whom the young girl should marry. After lengthy bickering, a solution finally emerged: Sofronia: Who should we turn to? Nicomaco: Who else but to our own confessor fra Timoteo, who is a little saint…
Medieval Prisons: Between Myth and Reality, Hell and Purgatory
When were medieval prisons founded? What was life inside them like? How did contemporary observers perceive them? Addressing such questions, this article brings together over a century of scholarship that undermines the traditional dating of the prison's “birth,” sheds light on the tolerable realities of medieval captivity, and identifies a range of contemporary interpretations of prison life and spaces
Medieval Prisons: Between Myth and Reality, Hell and Purgatory
When were medieval prisons founded? What was life inside them like? How did contemporary observers perceive them? Addressing such questions, this article brings together over a century of scholarship that undermines the traditional dating of the prison's “birth,” sheds light on the tolerable realities of medieval captivity, and identifies a range of contemporary interpretations of prison life and spaces
The Medieval Prison: A Social History
The modern prison is commonly thought to be the fruit of an Enlightenment penology that stressed man's ability to reform his soul. The Medieval Prison challenges this view by tracing the institution's emergence to a much earlier period beginning in the late thirteenth century, and in doing so provides a unique view of medieval prison life. G. Geltner carefully reconstructs life inside the walls of prisons in medieval Venice, Florence, Bologna, an…
Detrusio , Penal Cloistering in the Middle Ages
Throughout the Middle Ages, monasteries were viewed and occasionally served as prisons for laymen. The present article explores this relatively obscure role of monasteries in the settlement of disputes, underlining its attendant problems – logistical, political, and social. Difficult as it was to execute, however, detrusio revises the accepted history of the prison by suggesting that punitive incarceration was considered and at times applied beyo…
Coping in medieval prisons
Based on archival research in several Italian city-states, this article examines medieval prison life, its attendant pains, and inmate coping strategies by substantially engaging the variety of scholarship on modern incarceration. It demonstrates the limited degree to which current hardships overlap with those of earlier forms of captivity, and underscores the diversity of inmates' social positions in both eras. Medieval prisoners were marginaliz…
Defenders and Critics of Franciscan Life: Essays in Honor of John V. Fleming
Mendicants as victims: Scale, scope and the idiom of violence
This article establishes the scale of violence perpetrated against mendicant friars in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe, and provides a list of these events in an on-line appendix. It underscores and analyses the wide variety of contexts in which such incidents took place and examines the ramifications for the history of the mendicant orders and medieval urban society generally. Violence was a subtler form of communicative action than is…
Brethren Behaving Badly: A Deviant Approach to Medieval Antifraternalism
Clizia, the titular protagonist of Machiavelli's play, was trapped between her master's sexual advances and her mistress's attempt to avoid scandal. For their part, and with no arbiter in sight, husband and wife remained at strategic loggerheads as to whom the young girl should marry. After lengthy bickering, a solution finally emerged: Sofronia: Who should we turn to? Nicomaco: Who else but to our own confessor fra Timoteo, who is a little saint…
Chronicling History: Chroniclers and Historians in Medieval and Renaissance Italy
Journal Article Chronicling History: Chroniclers and Historians in Medieval and Renaissance Italy Get access Chronicling History: Chroniclers and Historians in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. Sharon Dale, Alison Williams Lewin and Duane J. Osheim (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State U.P., 2007; pp. xx + 332. $25). G. Geltner G. Geltner University of Amsterdam [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Googl…
Deviance: Brethren Behaving Badly
This chapter tracks religious mendicants’ gross misbehavior as it emerges mostly from the orders’ internal documents. Rather than taking polemicists and other authors at their word, it carefully gauges the frequency and profile of deviance among the brethren, especially but not exclusively Dominicans. Given the brethren’s strong presence in urban centers and in episcopal and secular courts, their misconduct was hard to conceal and even harder to …
The Making of Medieval AntifraternalismPolemic, Violence, Deviance, and Remembrance
A case study in opposition to religious authority in the pre-modern period, Geltner treats a phenomenon known as antifraternalism from a fresh methodological and documentary perspective.
Public Health and the Pre‐Modern City: A Research Agenda
How and to what extent did pre‐modern people go about creating healthier environments? Can we reasonably talk about public health when it comes to earlier urban societies? This essay briefly surveys a few tenacious misconceptions about preventative (as opposed to curative) health care in pre‐modern cities, and then proceeds to review a budding scholarly literature that explores how urban dwellers, organizations, and governments, especially in med…
En la calle y en los baños públicos: Galenismo Medieval en Acción
En este artículo combinamos la perspectiva de la higiene urbana medieval con los hallazgos de los historiadores de la medicina y de la intelectualidad, analizando algunas de las formas con que los habitantes y los gobiernos urbanos medievales intentaron limitar las enfermedades y promover la salud mediante medidas preventivas. En las dos regiones que se toman en consideración (las calles italianas y los baños holandeses), se hizo un esfuerzo de r…
A Cell of Their Own: The Incarceration of Women in Late Medieval Italy
Based on materials excavated from a number of Italian archives, this article traces the early development of women’s prison wards in late medieval Europe and analyzes the female prison experience from an original perspective. In doing so, it addresses key questions in the criminology and penology of women, especially concerning the relations between female deviants’ numeric marginality and their perceived neglect by officialdom
Healthscaping a medieval city: Lucca's Curia viarum and the future of public health history
In early fourteenth-century Lucca, one government organ began expanding its activities beyond the maintenance of public works to promoting public hygiene and safety, and in ways that suggest both a concern for and an appreciation of population-level preventative healthcare. Evidence for this shift (which is traceable in and beyond the Italian peninsula) is mostly found in documents of practice such as court and financial records, which augment an…
Poverty, Heresy and the Apocalypse: The Order of Apostles and Social Change in Medieval Italy, 1260–1307, by Jerry B. Pierce
Hostages in the Middle Ages, by Adam J. Kosto
For most of recorded history, the giving of hostages was integral to the way polities safeguarded the settlement of their disputes. From Antiquity to the cusp of modernity treaties designed to obviate battle or to define the terms upon which a war would end often stipulated the number and kind of hostages to be presented by one party to another, either as a surety for compliance or as a penalty for violating the agreed-upon terms. Throughout the …
Anti-corruption in History
Anticorruption in History is the first major collection of case studies on how past societies and polities, in and beyond Europe, defined legitimate power in terms of fighting corruption and designed specific mechanisms to pursue that agenda. It is a timely book: corruption is widely seen today as a major problem, undermining trust in government, financial institutions, economic efficiency, the principle of equality before the law and human wellb…
Corruption and Anticorruption in Democratic Athens: From Antiquity to the Modern Era
The chapter examines a major corruption scandal that involved the Athenian orator Demosthenes and an official of Alexander the Great. This episode reveals how tensions between individual and collective decision-making practices shaped Athenian understandings of corruption and anticorruption. The various and multiple anticorruption measures of Athens sought to bring ‘hidden’ knowledge into the open and thereby remove information from the realm of …
Prigionia di guerra nel medioevo. Un’altura in mezzo alla pianura: L’Italia dell’’ ‘incivilimento’, by Hannelore Zug Tucci
Tens of thousands of war captives were integral to medieval Europe’s history, but from a markedly vulnerable position. Yet these ubiquitous marginal figures are usually absent from the historiography on the era’s ‘others’, which tends to focus on inmates of physical institutions (hospitals, prisons, mental asylums, almshouses, leprosaria, women’s reformatories), or semi-segregated groups such as prostitutes and Jews, with occasional glances at (o…
A Tale of Three Thirsty Cities: The Innovative Water Supply Systems of Toledo, London and Paris in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century
A Tale of Three Thirsty Cities: The Innovative Water Supply Systems of Toledo, London and Paris in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century. Jaime-Chaim Shulman. Technology and Change in History 14. Leiden: Brill, 2018. xiv + 398 pp. $159. - Volume 72 Issue 4
Building Regulations and Urban Form, 1200–1900
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The dynamics of healthscaping: Mapping communal hygiene in Bologna, 1287–1383
This article traces how urban communities operating with a humoral or Galenic medical paradigm understood and confronted the health challenges facing them, using the extraordinarily well-documented case of Bologna, Italy. Working within a GIS environment, the authors spatially analyse over 3,500 events recorded by the Ufficio del fango concerning violations of the city's health-related ordinances, augmented by other demographic and material data.…
Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome
Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome. Pamela O. Long. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. xii + 370 pp. $45. - Volume 73 Issue 1
The Path to Pistoia: Urban Hygiene Before the Black Death
When the Black Death struck Western Europe in late 1347, city dwellers across the region were already practising public health, in part by building, maintaining and monitoring infrastructures whose prophylactic value emerged from the experience of intensified urbanization. The demands of a new urban metabolism, evident from the twelfth century, prompted numerous cities, including Pistoia, to develop preventative health programmes in anticipation …
Underground and Over the Sea: More Community Prophylactics in Europe, 1100-1600
Public health historians have repeatedly shown that the theory, policy, and practice of group prophylactics far predate their alleged birth in industrial modernity, and regularly draw on Galenic principles. While the revision overall has been successful, its main focus on European cities entails a major risk, since city dwellers were a minority even in Europe’s most urbanised regions. At the same time, cities continue to be perceived and presente…
Political science (21 works) · Sociology (21 works) · History (16 works) · Law (16 works) · History (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Criminology (8 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works)