Perception of Air Quality in the Czech Lands of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
The result's identifiers
Result code in IS VaVaI
<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F44555601%3A13410%2F24%3A43898926" target="_blank" >RIV/44555601:13410/24:43898926 - isvavai.cz</a>
Result on the web
<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783111387635-014" target="_blank" >http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783111387635-014</a>
DOI - Digital Object Identifier
<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783111387635-014" target="_blank" >10.1515/9783111387635-014</a>
Alternative languages
Result language
angličtina
Original language name
Perception of Air Quality in the Czech Lands of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Original language description
The issue of quality of air is nowadays considered one of the most important global challenges, which is further understood as a part of humanity's effort to counter global warming. However, if we want to build better relationship between humans and the environment today, we cannot ignore the relationship of individuals to the environment already in the past. Concern about the environment can be tracked back to the late Middle Ages and early modern period, in the Czech lands to a greater extent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In terms of perceiving a connection between air quality and human health, it is necessary to realize that medicine since the times of Hippocrates and Galen until the modern period was based mainly on the art of regimen (dietetics), which included the overall lifestyle. Its principle was balance and harmony of human activities, as well as the use of six things "not natural" (sex res non naturales), where the first field of interest was light and air. Thus, the authors who were interested in air quality at that time were primarily doctors, but in a broader sense lay scholars. However, secular authorities, representatives of municipalities and later also authorities of a central character did not remain aside and paid attention to this issue as well. Nevertheless, it is necessary to realize that this interest was not driven by consideration for nature, but by the effort to preserve people's health or by the interest in maintaining the functioning of the economy, which was fundamentally dependent on the sufficiency and quality of input sources (water, forests, livestock, animals, and air as a medium that enters all foregoing sources).This study tries to answer the following questions: Was the landscape and nature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also judged from the point of view of a "good place to live," which reflected air quality/air pollution, as is the case today, e.g., in the choice of house lots? Were the people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries already sensitive to the perception of sources of air pollution, or is the individual assessment of air quality ("smells"/"does not smell") only a question of the twentieth century? Was there in the mentality of the contemporary people anything like a "pollution industry," which could be compared to modern industrial production? And was there an interest of early modern secular authorities and scholars in preventing air pollution in towns to affect its inhabitants? The thesis is based on the analysis of anti-plague prints written by doctors and lay scholars, and official regulations of early modern Bohemia. The contemporary topographies that describe the landscape and air will be used as additional sources.
Czech name
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Czech description
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Classification
Type
C - Chapter in a specialist book
CEP classification
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OECD FORD branch
60101 - History (history of science and technology to be 6.3, history of specific sciences to be under the respective headings)
Result continuities
Project
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Continuities
S - Specificky vyzkum na vysokych skolach
Others
Publication year
2024
Confidentiality
S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů
Data specific for result type
Book/collection name
Nature in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Times: Exploration of a Critical Relationship
ISBN
978-3-11-138723-9
Number of pages of the result
20
Pages from-to
415-434
Number of pages of the book
597
Publisher name
Walter de Gruyter
Place of publication
Berlin - Boston
UT code for WoS chapter
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