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Apothecary Inventories and the Global Medical Marketplace
Object of the Month
Among the many simple products and medicaments available in apothecaries' shops in centuries past, what can a single item tell us about their stock and their processes of sourcing and mixing medicines? Four inventories of apothecaries' shops from the late-15th to early 17th-century southeastern France can help us answer this question.✱ The first of these inventories records the contents of an apothecary shop belonging to Mathieu Roux, who operated in Marseille at the end of the fifteenth...
![Petit Clairvaux interior.jpeg](https://dalme-app-media.s3.amazonaws.com/media/images/Petit_Clairvaux_interior_fHL2G.466869d5.fill-230x230-c50.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIA5KS6H2GGFBK3VFCN&Signature=wjPJVl8IcAfKdn%2F7vupfgdxUxw8%3D&Expires=1722071242)
Wine, mustard, and the Virgin Mary
Inventory of the Month
The austere "Cellier de Clairvaux" is all that remains today of what was once a vast enclave on the northeast walls of the city of Dijon, property of the Cistercian monks of the house of Clairvaux. From the 13th century on, this enclave, known as Petit Clairvaux (Little Clairvaux), provided lodgings for monks and other clergy as they traveled through Burgundy. In times of peace as well as war, it also served as the Clairvaux Abbey’s main site for the processing, storage, and sale of wine in...
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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.