An alembic made of lead
Object of the Month
Alembics can be found in a number of inventories in the DALME collection, including, at present, four from the Crown of Aragon, two from Florence (where they are known in the singular as "campana da stillare"), and thirteen from the city of Marseille. These numbers are somewhat deceiving, since the Marseille collection is by far the largest in the DALME environment. Considered instead as a ratio, alembics are most commonly found in Aragonese households. The alembic featured here was found...
The goods of Garssanus, a Jew from Aix-en-Provence (1295)
Inventory of the Month
On January 29, 1295, Hugues des Voisins, seneschal of Provence, ordered the mayor of Aix to seize the goods belonging to the town's Jewish households. Criers descended upon their homes to seal chests and doors so that their targets could not move or hide their possessions. Four days later, two notaries, Jean Canavier and Raymond Étienne, entered the homes of about two dozen Jewish households to draw up inventories of their possessions. These inventories are precious windows into the homes of...
Poems of Household Goods: Gendered Inventories of Economic and Social Capital
From the late Middle Ages, peculiar inventories have survived within so-called "poems of household goods." At least twelve of these poems have been handed down in German since the 14th century.✱ Similar poems in French already existed in the 13th century.✱ From today's perspective, they may seem quite strange. Resembling actual inventories, their detailed descriptions of household goods on the one hand give us vivid insights into the material furnishings of late medieval and early modern...
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.
