András Vadas (Former István Deák Visiting Associate Professor ’24-’25) has completed his latest monograph Whose Water? The Control and Appropriation of Water Resources in Medieval Hungary. The work is a comprehensive analysis of the politics of water management in the Kingdom of Hungary from the foundation of the Christian state to the late medieval period.

Modern politics focuses on who has legitimate claims in water-related disputes, but for historians, it is certainly more relevant to understand how such conflicts were approached and resolved in the past. These questions include what kind of disputes unfolded concerning water use; to what degree water was conceived as a private or common good; and how different interests were aligned with each other. Throughout the book’s chapters, it is argued that the use of water by the societies of the Kingdom of Hungary in the Middle Ages gave rise to complex sets of customs and norms that, until the modern era, were the most important principles for settling water-use disputes.

The eBook will be available on September 21st.