A Book of Hymns
Object of the Month
Many kinds of writings appear in the households of wealthy Florentines, from the single gatherings of folios called quaderni to the libri di memorie or libri di ragione where official business accounts were kept. Religious, historical, or educational books, written in either Latin or the vernacular also appeared in the inventories, often tucked away in cabinets or chests for safekeeping. However, only one book of music has been found among the items in the Florentine inventories, in the...
The precious goods of a Spanish captain
Inventory of the Month
In July of 1393, one or more Spanish warships, under the command of Franciscus de Cazalis, captain of the Spanish fleet, lay at anchor in the great bay of Marseille. Provisions were needed, and the captain or his purser (dispensator), Sansonus de Mayzonis, made arrangements with a Marseille butcher, Antonius Stephani, to purchase some meat or mutton. The bill came to at least 193 florins. Lacking cash-on-hand sufficient to pay the entire amount owed, the purser and his captain made alternate...
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.
