A navigational compass
Object of the Month
As described in the grand narratives of the history of technology, Europe in the later middle ages straddles the era during which alembics, sundials, clocks, astrolabes, navigational compasses, and similar technological devices began to enter everyday use. As noted in a previous feature essay, alembics are frequently attested in the DALME collections, especially in records from the Crown of Aragon and the region of Greater Provence. In the collection, there are some rare but interesting...
The Palazzo Madama
Inventory of the Month
On 19 December 2025, the exhibition “Il castello ritrovato. Palazzo Madama dall’età romana al medioevo” opened in Turin at the Museo di Palazzo Madama. The exhibition, which runs until March 26, 2026, explores the medieval past of a castle that played a significant role in Italian history from the early modern period onward, eventually becoming the seat of the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy. But the castle also has a medieval past that remained relatively unknown and only marginally...
The Starkenberg feud and the siege inventory of Greifenstein Castle from 1426
To this day, castle sieges still spark the collective imagination about the Middle Ages. In reality, however, it is only possible to record and reconstruct the details of a few individual siege cases using surviving yet oftentimes fragmentary records. The manuscript “Hs. 198” from the Tyrolean State Archive (Tiroler Landesarchiv) provides a rare insight into the details of a late medieval castle siege in the Alpine region by providing information on the so-called Starkenberg feud, including...
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.
