The lowly ladder
Object of the Month
Like many of the more mundane objects listed in household inventories, ladders of all kinds appear throughout the DALME corpus. These objects for climbing, which might be considered furniture, tools, or even parts of the buildings in which they were located, generally attract little attention. Even so, they can tell us much about the lives of the medieval people who owned them.At times, ladders appear in expected places, where one can easily conclude how they were used. For example, one of...
In the house of Nicolaua Petre
Inventory of the Month
In March of 1396, Lucia, the widow of Antoni de Roussillon, appeared before a judge in Marseille to announce the death of her sister, Nicolaua, the widow of Jacme Petre. In her last will and testament, drafted five years earlier, Nicolaua had named her sister Lucia as her universal heir, from which we can infer that she and her husband had no surviving children of their own. Following normal procedure, Lucia asked and received permission to conduct an inventory of her sister’s estate. The...
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.
