Seven ostrich eggshells in the mezzanine
Object of the Month
On the 24th of July in the year 1397, two sisters, Venguesseta and Stereta, appeared before a judge of the city of Marseille to report the death of their father, Astrug Mosse, who had died the previous week. Aided by their cousin and guardian, Boniaquet Cohen—the record makes no mention of their mother, who we have to assume had died previously—the girls conducted an inventory of their late father’s estate. To judge by the contents of the estate, the family were at best middling in wealth....
The precocious inventory of the scribe Ambrosius
Inventory of the Month
The inventory of Ambrosius scriba of Genoa, edited and published by the distinguished historian Roberto Sabatino Lopez in 1936, is one of the oldest in the DALME collection. As such, it is interesting not only for the many fascinating items listed in the inventory but also the manner in which its legal form reflects the reception of Roman law. At the outset, the inventory names Paschal Vicecomes as the legal actor, serving in his capacity as guardian for Genuinus, Luchetus, and Paschalinus,...
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.
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We are grateful to the following organizations for supporting the project.
