Two silver spoons lacking maker's marks
Object of the Month
In August of 1419, a notary of Marseille recorded a very unusual act. Using the form of a comenda contract or business investment partnership, Johan Pico and his wife, Leoneta, transmitted a substantial set of items to the vice-jailer of the city of Marseille. The inventory lists a strange assortment of objects; among them we find thirty bed sheets, five mattresses, five sets of bed curtains, six chairs, three torches, and twelve hammers of different kinds. It is possible that the couple were...
Famous Florentine Families
Inventory of the Month
Although household inventories are the main focus of the DALME project, the documents that accompany them are at times of greater interest than the lists themselves. This is the case with the inventory found in the eight-page dossier of Florentine Piero di Giovanni del Dolce de Pazzi, dated to August, 1389. The household goods enumerated on the third folio of the dossier are fairly unremarkable and include such common items as small bed, three desks, a table, linens, and non-perishable...
Priestly Garb
When Jehan de Graincourt, the master of the school attached to the collegiate church of Saint-Amé in Douai, in Flanders, died in 1451, he left a favorite item of clothing to a poor student: "to Haquin from Bailleux, currently wearing the cloak of the Bons-Enfants, a black houppelande which the deceased wore every day" (a Haquin de Bailleux pour lors portant le cappe des Bons Enfans une noire houpplande que portoit ledit deffunct a toute jour).✱ The student's friend Lyonnel, apparently not...
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.
