The lowly ladder
Object of the Month
Like many of the more mundane objects listed in household inventories, ladders of all kinds appear throughout the DALME corpus. These objects for climbing, which might be considered furniture, tools, or even parts of the buildings in which they were located, generally attract little attention. Even so, they can tell us much about the lives of the medieval people who owned them.At times, ladders appear in expected places, where one can easily conclude how they were used. For example, one of...
"A diamond on a ring": the wealth of a Venetian patrician
Inventory of the Month
Venice's wealth is proverbial, and the inventory featured in this essay is a perfect illustration of that point. It was drawn up at the request of Lunardo, the brother of Polo Morosini quondam Ursati, a member of the Morosini family, one of the most important patrician families in Venice, probably after his death. It consists of twelve pages and displays a luxurious home. The contents of five rooms are described: a study, two “painted” bedrooms, the portego (a central room in Venetian...
The castle of the proud and powerful Alix des Baux
Books and paintings are more than mere objects. Such things convey conversations, preserve meanings and symbols, and, above all, tell us about those who owned them, their values, and their imaginaire, or “social imaginary.” This latter notion, theorized by philosophers such as Sartre and Lacan, highlights the link existing between the real world and the identity we construct for ourselves. Things are symbols, often revealing a person's identity and mindset as well as aspects of his or her...
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.
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We are grateful to the following organizations for supporting the project.
