A pair of handcuffs
Object of the Month
Up to 1500 or so, it is rare to find structures specifically built and designed to be prisons. Depending on the importance of the town or village and the nature of the jurisdictions in which they were embedded, prisons were typically jury-rigged spaces carved out of existing rooms and spaces located within the walls of other buildings, such as city walls and doors, palaces, castles, and especially towers. In his study of fifty jails in the Kingdom of France, the historian Romain Telliez...
The Church of Saint-Lazare of Apt
Inventory of the Month
In January of 1382, Bertrandus Barbani, prior of the church of Saint-Lazare of Apt, transferred the priory to his brother Guillelmus. The church, located outside the walls of Apt, possibly along the modern Rue Saint-Lazare in the hills across the Calavon River, was modest. The notary found several ragged altar coverings, broken crucifixes, and a worthless painting of the Virgin Mary. The inventory included garments for a parish priest, studied elsewhere in DALME, notably a red silk...
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.