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.
András Vadas is an associate professor with tenure in medieval history at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. He holds a Ph.D. from the same institution (2015) and the Central European University (2020). He was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholarship at Georgetown University. He is the author or editor of about a dozen books in English and Hungarian on the environmental, urban, and economic history of premodern Central Europe. His first English-language monograph, The Environmental Legacy of War on the Hungarian-Ottoman Frontier, c. 1540-1690 was published in 2023 with Amsterdam University Press. His most recent book publication is A Global History of Hungary, which he co-edited with Ferencz Laczó and Bálint Varga (in Hungarian).
