Waterscapes in Premodern CE: Riverine Landscapes as Conflict Enviros
Registration REQUIRED by 12pm on April 11, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the East Central European Center at the Harriman Institute for a lecture by István Deák Visiting Professor András Vadas.
In the past decades, not independent of growing concerns about water access in a rapidly changing world, research into historical water management has intensified but little scholarly interest has been paid to issues of water property rights. Unlike that of lands, the ownership of waters – streams, rivers, or even lakes – in premodern times was a recurrent source of debates that exceeded the limits of simple territorial disputes. They concern issues that going back to Roman legal authors were difficult to resolve such as: who owns the alluvium; how can one own something that moves such as rivers; who owns an island that emerges from the river; what happens if a river that was an estate border relocates itself; how much water can one withhold by a dam in a river? Is it allowed to change the quality of the water running through one’s estate? These questions can be well studied using normative sources, such as law codes, and pieces of pragmatic literacy – charters. The presentation aims to address the above questions using a large pool of sources from late medieval Hungary.
