David Gentilcore
Research project
The Best of All Things: Drinking Water in the Mediterranean, 1400-1900
Project summary
‘Water is the best of all things’, according to Pindar’s First Olympian Ode (476 BC): on it all human life depends. It is a resource, but on a wide range of levels: economic, social, cultural and political. Water has a significance that is both local and transnational. It thus constitutes a privileged base from which to reconstruct the identity and self-representational forms of any population and culture.The focus of the project will be on drinking water, placing it within the context of the much wider ‘water culture’ of the Mediterranean during the early- and late-modern period. By ‘water culture’, I mean both material aspects (such as hydraulic engineering or water legislation) and nonmaterial features (such as beliefs and practices).Drinking water, both as substance and as cultural and social practice, is the least studied aspect of water culture. The subject is notable by its absence in histories of the early modern period; and yet for the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau access to drinking water was the starting point of language and communication.The difficulty for the historian is water’s very banality and ambiguity, meaning we have to look harder (and in different places) for references to it and interpret wisely. If people in past times drank plenty of wine and beer, the assumption goes, this was because the water was dangerous, a potential source of illness, even death. But this is only part of the story. The prejudice against water as a beverage was due not so much to concerns about its poor quality as to biases inherited from classical culture; if we look at actual practices, water returns to the fore. Communities went to great lengths to procure clean water, from elaborate public works to the construction of public and domestic rainwater cisterns, to the everyday presence of water-sellers in towns. Water resources were everywhere carefully managed and distributed (and fought over).The historian can reconstruct and analyse all of this. The Renaissance witnessed the first attempts to understand and apply the ‘virtues’ ofdrinking water. In the 17th century, medical doctors like the Tuscan Francesco Redi began prescribing specific mineral waters as part oftreatments for their patients. In the next century, Enlightenment doctors made use of the nascent chemical science to investigate their properties in order to make more efficient use of them, such as the survey carried out by the French Société royale de médecine. This would lead to the beginnings of the mineral water industry in the 19th century.Mineral water is just a starting point in the ‘Best of All Things’ project. It will focus on the period beginning with the great resurgence inhydraulic engineering projects and medical interest in water consumption, ushered in by the Renaissance, to the pandemics of the 19th century and the resulting urban waterworks of the late nineteenth century. The approach will be interdisciplinary, bringing together anthropology, geography, archaeology and various branches of history (history of medicine, food history, architectural history).In terms of the project’s geographical reach, the cultural unity of the Mediterranean has been most eloquently expressed by the Frenchhistorian Fernand Braudel, for whom the relationship of man to his environment was the defining constant of human history. Water has a deepcultural and religious importance for all the countries that border the Mediterranean (paradoxically, today, they are all facing a water crisis which few seem willing to confront or admit). Although all societies are in some sense hydraulic, dependent as they on water management anddistribution; nowhere is this more important than the Mediterranean, where fresh water has always been unpredictable—short spells ofoverabundance alternating with longer periods of scarcity.
