Rome, Pollution and Propriety
Dirt, Disease and Hygiene in the Eternal City from Antiquity to Modernity

A study of the history of filth, disease, purity and cleanliness in one of Europe's oldest and most influential cities.

Mark Bradley (Edited by), Kenneth Stow (With)

9781316626597, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 22 September 2016

342 pages, 36 b/w illus.
24.5 x 17 x 2 cm, 0.6 kg

'Rome, Pollution, and Propriety is a series of beautiful chapters offering a collection of inspiring reflections on Rome and its dark sides, approached through case studies spread across two millennia.' Antonella Romano, Isis

Rome, Pollution and Propriety brings together scholars from a range of disciplines in order to examine the historical continuity of dirt, disease and hygiene in one environment, and to explore the development and transformation of these ideas alongside major chapters in the city's history, such as early Roman urban development, Roman pagan religion, the medieval Church, the Renaissance, the unification of Italy and the advent of Fascism. This volume sets out to identify the defining characteristics, functions and discourses of pollution in Rome in such realms as disease and medicine, death and burial, sexuality and virginity, prostitution, purity and absolution, personal hygiene and morality, criminality, bodies and cleansing, waste disposal, decay, ruins and urban renovation, as well as studying the means by which that pollution was policed and controlled.

Introduction Mark Bradley and Kenneth Stow
Part I. Antiquity: 1. Approaches to pollution and propriety Mark Bradley
2. Pollution, religion and society in the Roman world Jack Lennon
3. Purification in ancient Rome Elaine Fantham
4. Pollution, propriety and urbanism in Republican Rome Penelope Davies
5. The 'sacred sewer': tradition and religion in the Cloaca Maxima John Hopkins
6. Crime and punishment on the Capitoline Hill Mark Bradley
7. On the burial of unchaste Vestal Virgins Celia Schultz
Part II. Modernity: 8. Fra Girolamo Savonarola and the aesthetics of Roman pollution Alessio Assonitis
9. Purging filth: plague and responses to it in Rome, 1656–7 David Gentilcore
10. Was the ghetto cleaner…? Kenneth Stow
11. Urban ablutions: cleansing counter-reformation Rome Katherine Rinne
12. The clash of picturesque decay and modern cleanliness in late nineteenth-century Rome Taina Syrjämaa
13. Vile bodies: Victorian Protestants in the Roman catacombs Dominic Janes
14. Delinquency and pederasty: 'deviant' youngsters in the suburbs of Fascist Rome Martina Salvante
Envoi. Purity and danger: its life and afterlife Judith Goldstein.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Population & demography [JHBD], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA], European history [HBJD]