Just the Tonic: A Natural History of Tonic Water, by Kim Walker and Mark Nesbitt London: Kew, 2019

Review of Just the Tonic: A Natural History of Tonic Water, by Kim Walker and Mark Nesbitt (London: Kew Publishing, 2019

“Cool and tasty waters”: managing Naples’s water supply, c. 1500–c. 1750

Although Naples was one of Europe’s largest cities (after London and Paris), studies of the management of its water supply during the early modern period are sorely lacking, despite growing interest in the subject at both an Italian and European level. Naples was perhaps unique in relying on a vast and tortuous underground network of reservoirs, cisterns, channels and conduits, accessed by well shafts, all fed by an ancient aqueduct. The present study outlines and evaluates the Neapolitan water supply as it existed in the period, analysing the archival records of the municipal tribunal responsible for the city’s infrastructure, the ‘Tribunale della Fortificazione, Acqua e Mattonata’, and its various ‘Appuntamenti’ (proposals), ‘Conclusioni’ (decisions) and edicts. This is interwoven with reference to pertinent printed accounts, from contemporary guide books to medical regimens and health manuals. We examine both water quantity, in terms of availability and accessibility (by looking at the structure and its management, and the technicians responsible for its maintenance) and water quality (by looking at contemporary attitudes and perceptions). In the process we are able to question the widespread view of early modern Naples as chaotic and uncontrolled, governed by a weak public authority, as well as widely held assumptions about the “inertia” of the pre-modern hydro-social system more generally

The cistern-system of early modern Venice: technology, politics and culture in a hydraulic society

At a time when European cities depended on three sources of fresh water for their domestic and industrial needs – rivers, spring-fed aqueducts and groundwater wells – early modern Venice added a fourth possibility: a dense network of cisterns for capturing, filtering and storing rainwater. Venice was not unique in relying on rainwater cisterns; but nowhere in Italy (indeed in Europe) was the approach so systematic and widespread, the city concerned so populous, the technology so sophisticated and the management so carefully regulated as in the lagoon city. To explore Venice's cisternsystem, a range of primary sources (medical treatises, travellers’ accounts, archival records) and the contributions of architectural, medical and social historians, and archaeologists are analysed. The article examines the system’s functioning and management, including the role of the city’s acquaroli or watermen; the maintenance of freshwater quality throughout the city, in the context of broader sanitation measures; and the place of the “wells” and freshwater in daily life in Venice. As a means of teasing out the myriad links between nature, technology and society in early modern Italy, the article concludes with a brief comparison of the politics of water supply management in the very different urban realities of (republican) Venice, (viceregal) Naples and (papal) Rome

Melissa Calaresu and Helen Hills, eds, New Approaches to Naples, c. 1500–c.1800: The Power of Place, Ashgate: Farnham, 2013; 286 pp., 7 colour plates, 38 b/w illus.; 9781409429432, £70.00 (hbk)

It’s a bit like waiting for the bus: you wait twenty-five years for an English-language collection of essays on early modern Naples and then two are published in close succession. In fact, the last such edited volume was Good Government in Spanish Naples, edited by Antonio Calabria and John Marino (New York 1990). If that collection focused on the political, administrative and social structures of the king- dom of Naples, the two recently published volumes show a significant evolution of historiographical concerns among the editors and contributors. They do so in dif- ferent ways. Tommaso Astarita’s Companion to Early Modern Naples (Leiden 2013) was a scholarly tour de force of 500 pages and 20 distinct contributions (including my own, so I must state an interest here) on a vast range of topics. New Approaches to Naples is on a somewhat more modest scale, but is certainly none the worse for that. A few historians have contributed to both volumes, such as Anna Maria Rao and Melissa Calaresu, while the late John Marino was a trait d’union to all three books: an indication of his importance to the field

"All that pertains to medicine": protomedici and protomedicati in early modern Italy.

In 1621 the vice-protomedico of the Papal States was arrested while inspecting an apothecary's shop and charged with committing financial irregularities in the course of his duties. Giacomo Giacobelli had received his doctorate in 1598 and, in addition to being physician at St John Lateran in Rome, was serving for the third time as vice-protomedico. As Giacobelli told the judges of the Apostolic Chamber, his authority as vice-protomedico in the Papal States outside Rome was analogous to the protomedico's power within the city. © 1994, Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved

The ‘Golden Age of Quackery’ or ‘Medical Enlightenment’? Licensed Charlatanism in Eighteenth-Century Italy

The history of medicine during the enlightenment is full of paradoxes, and nowhere is this more evident than in the phenomenon of charlatanry. On the one hand, for the charlatans' numerical abundance and sheer audacity, historians have sometimes singled out the eighteenth century as the ‘golden age of quackery’. At the same time, it was one of increasing control and severity by the medical elites. In Italy, from the mid-sixteenth century, protomedicato tribunals, colleges of physicians, or health offices (jurisdiction varied from state to state) had required ciarlatani to submit their wares for inspection and, upon approval, pay a licence fee in order to set up a stage from which to perform and sell them. This procedure became an administrative routine, and the ‘licensed charlatan’ – not the paradox it might seem – became a common sight in Italian towns. The licensing regime gives the historian unparalleled opportunities when it comes to the investigation of suspect but generally tolerated categories such as charlatans. This article is partly based on a database compiled from the licences issued to some 1100 different charlatans by the various medical authorities in the states of Italy from 1550 to 1800. During the eighteenth century we notice a downward trend in the number of licences issued (in places such as Siena, Mantua, and Turin), especially from the middle of the century onwards. This was not part of a policy to discontinue the licensing of charlatans, for various reasons (which the article examines), but it did reflect a stricter licensing regime. This is especially evident in the attitude of the authorities to oral (or internal) remedies. Moreover, as of the early 1760s, both the Venetian and Milanese authorities began to reject charlatans' petitions to sell remedies that were not original, resembled medicines already stocked by apothecaries, or were judged to be either harmful or ineffective. The similarity to established remedies that had once helped ensure a charlatan's acceptance and licensing now prevented it. Fewer licence applicants met these criteria; there also appear to have been fewer applicants. The harsh policy may have made charlatanry a less attractive career option or economic opportunity than in previous centuries, reducing the supply and marginalizing charlatanry, economically and geographically

The "Levitico", or how to feed a hundred Jesuits

This article examines the structure and content of what Jacques Revel called a new modèle alimentaire. It does so by reconstructing and analysing the dietary habits of the Roman Province of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, during the seventeenth century. This is made possible by a cluster of archival and printed documents here assembled and studied together for the first time: the financial accounts of the Collegio Romano, the Jesuits’ flagship educational institution, which give annual expenditures on different categories of food; the regulations of the Collegio regarding diet and the maintenance of health; the Levitico, which provided a day-by-day, month-by-month meal plan for the Roman Province, including recipe outlines and portion sizes; and the manuscript recipe collection of Francesco Gaudentio, lay Jesuit at the Collegio’s infirmary. These are integrated with other secondary research into the practices of Jesuits elsewhere in Italy, as well as those of other religious orders during the Counter-Reformation. The Jesuits initiated a new dietary style, in terms of both meal structure and content, that is recognisably “Italian” (at least at this privileged level). It corresponded to contemporary medical notions of how best to nourish the body and maintain its health, with the aim of allowing the Jesuits and those in their care to lead the kind of active, religious life the Society so encouraged