Next, I found ... goodness-knows-what
Object of the Month
To compile inventories, the person responsible for drafting the list of objects walked through the house or shop, entering rooms and pantries, opening chests, and peering into jars to note their contents. Many of the things found in this way were everyday items, such as furniture, linens, and tools, and these were easily identified. But many households and shops contained things that had some unusual properties, such as an imported coverlet with a particular design, an article of clothing...
Accounting for the Guild
Inventory of the Month
Of the eighteen folios comprising the dossier of cloth merchant Simone Baroncelli, only three contain an inventory of his moveable goods, many of which were commonplace items in medieval Florentine households. On the third of these three folios, however, is a remarkable find: a listing of, “all the books and writings found at the Arte di Calimala (the cloth finishers guild)," one of medieval Florence's most wealthy and powerful professional organizations. The folio in Simone's dossier not...
Poems of Household Goods: Gendered Inventories of Economic and Social Capital
From the late Middle Ages, peculiar inventories have survived within so-called "poems of household goods." At least twelve of these poems have been handed down in German since the 14th century.✱ Similar poems in French already existed in the 13th century.✱ From today's perspective, they may seem quite strange. Resembling actual inventories, their detailed descriptions of household goods on the one hand give us vivid insights into the material furnishings of late medieval and early modern...
READ MOREDALME
ALME is a collaborative, cross-disciplinary project that seeks to increase our understanding of Europe’s material horizons during the later Middle Ages, an era when changing patterns of production and consumption altered the material world and transformed the relationship between people and things.
DALME has developed a novel methodology that focuses on the extraction of information about material culture from documentary sources, such as household or estate inventories, in a manner that makes it possible to seamlessly integrate textual objects with their tangible counterparts from archaeological excavations and museum collections.
Drawing upon cross-disciplinary practice and advances in digital scholarship, the project aims to make vast amounts of material culture accessible online as open, well-structured and machine-actionable datasets readily amenable to computational analysis, together with the necessary tools, standards, and documentation to enable new research and facilitate dissemination.
Based in the Department of History at Harvard University, DALME brings together a growing network of researchers from institutions across the US and Europe.
SUPPORT
We are grateful to the following organizations for supporting the project.
