“The Nourishment of Infections”

This chapter addresses the role that water management played in creating and maintaining healthy local environments. The city government of late medieval Valencia, like other cities, sought to promote health through a variety of means, but the scale of its engagement with water is particularly striking. While a network of canals irrigated the land around the city and made it one of the richest agricultural areas around the Mediterranean, not all water was created equal. Stagnant water, such as that used to flood rice fields, was believed to cause infections, illness, and death throughout the city and the surrounding countryside and required constant calibration and oversight. Managing health and disease on the Valencian landscape, therefore, was largely a matter of encouraging and maintaining water flow.