Devices and vessels for alchemy in the inventories of the Counts of Gorizia
Object of the Month
In 1501, a series of inventories of the entire property of the Counts of Gorizia were created. With the death of Leonhard as the last member of his dynasty in 1500, the inheritance passed to the Habsburg dynasty.✱ Maximilian I, now governor of these extensive lands, decided to sell some of the Gorizian estates, including the manor of Lienz with Bruck Castle, their former residence. With the handover to the new owners, the Barons of Wolkenstein-Rodenegg,✱ the rooms of the castle were...
Five Dijon Households
Inventory of the Month
In conjunction with the major exhibition entitled, "Passés intérieurs: une immersion numérique dans l'habitat médiéval de Dijon," on view at Le 1204, Dijon’s center for architecture and heritage, DALME has published the five inventories featured in the exhibition. The documents come from a remarkable archival collection: nearly 700 post-mortem inventories drawn up by the clerks of the Dijon mairie between 1390 and 1459. Whenever a resident died leaving minor children or unknown heirs, the...
The Starkenberg feud and the siege inventory of Greifenstein Castle from 1426
To this day, castle sieges still spark the collective imagination about the Middle Ages. In reality, however, it is only possible to record and reconstruct the details of a few individual siege cases using surviving yet oftentimes fragmentary records. The manuscript “Hs. 198” from the Tyrolean State Archive (Tiroler Landesarchiv) provides a rare insight into the details of a late medieval castle siege in the Alpine region by providing information on the so-called Starkenberg feud, including...
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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