CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Vadas, András |
|---|---|
| Title | Who Stole The Water? The Control and Appropriation of Water Resources in Medieval Hungary |
| Summary | The dissertation addresses the problems surrounding water management, a space where different economic and other socio-political interests met and sometimes clashed. Modern politics focuses on who has legitimate rights to claims in such disputes, but for historians, it is certainly more relevant to understand how such conflicts were approached and resolved in the past by posing questions about how pre-modern societies dealt with these same problems. These questions include what kind of disputes unfolded with regard to the use of water and the degree to which water conceived as private or as ‘common’? How were different interests aligned with each other? In this dissertation I raise these questions in the context of Central Europe, and more particularly, in the Kingdom of Hungary in the Middle Ages (from the ca. tenth century to the mid-sixteenth century), i.e. the period of the re-appearance of literacy in the area after the Roman period. Throughout the different chapters of the dissertation I argue that use of water by the societies of the Kingdom of Hungary in the Middle Ages gave rise to fairly complex sets of customs and norms that, until the Modern times, were the most important principles in settling water use related disputes. |
| Supervisor | Choyke, Alice M.; Szende, Katalin |
| Department | Medieval Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/vadas_andras.pdf |
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