Tapping into a combination of court documents, urban statutes, material artefacts, health guides and treatises, *Policing the Urban Environment in Premodern Europe* offers a unique perspective on how premodern public authorities tried to create a clean, healthy environment. Overturning many preconceptions about medieval dirt and squalor, it presents the most outstanding recent scholarship on how public health norms were enforced in the judicial, religious and socio-cultural sphere before the advent of modern medicine and the nation-state, crossing geographical and linguistic boundaries and engaging with factors such as spiritual purity, civic pride and good neighbourliness.

[Carole Rawcliffe](https://people.uea.ac.uk/c_rawcliffe) is Professor Emerita of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia, and is the author of many books and articles on health, medicine and disease in the Middle Ages, especially in an urban context.[Claire Weeda](https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/claire-weeda#tab-1) works as an assistant professor at the History Department of Leiden University. She is specialized in ethnic identity, medicine, and community formation in the period 1100-1500.

Introduction Carole Rawcliffe and Claire Weeda 1 Cleanliness, Civility, and the City in Medieval Ideals and Scripts Claire Weeda2 The View from the Street: The Records of Hundred and Leet Courts as a Source for Sanitary Policing in Late Medieval English TownsCarole Rawcliffe3 Urban Viarii and the Prosecution of Public Health Offenders in Late Medieval Italy G. Geltner4 Food Offenders: Public Health and the Marketplace in the Late Medieval Low CountriesJanna Coomans5 Policing the Environment of Late Medieval DordrechtPatrick Naaktgeboren6 Muddy Waters in Medieval Montpellier Catherine Dubé and Geneviève Dumas7 Regulating Water Sources in the Towns and Cities of Late Medieval NormandyElma Brenner8 Policing the Environment in Premodern Imperial Cities and Towns: A Preliminary Approach Annemarie Kinzelbach9 Official Objectives of the Visitatio Leprosorum: Ambiguity, Ambivalence, and Variance Luke DemaitreIndex