Astrugona's oralh
Object of the Month
During the later middle ages, the city of Arles, like many of its sister cities across southeastern France, was home to a large and vibrant community of Jews whose doings are documented in the region’s extensive notarial archives. Louis Stouff, the great modern historian of Arles, collected a number of Arlesian inventories, including inventories of Jewish households, and analyzed them in his pioneering contributions to food history.✱ This month’s featured object comes from the first of what...
Remnants of a past life... for a new one?
Inventory of the Month
In October of 1388, a recently widowed woman named Pasqualeta came before a notary to register an inventory of the goods left by her late husband, Gil Civera. Gil was a butcher and a citizen of Barcelona, and had died several weeks earlier. Pasqualeta had come to the notary especially to request an inventory of the goods she owned outright as part of her dowry, some of which she subsequently auctioned off. The case of Pasqualeta is valuable because both the inventory and auction records are...
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.
SUPPORT
We are grateful to the following organizations for supporting the project.
