David Gentilcore

‘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. 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 in hydraulic 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). Although all societies are in some sense hydraulic, dependent as they on water management and distribution; nowhere is this more important than the Mediterranean, where fresh water has always been unpredictable.