Greater Provence

The records from southeastern France, centered on the old county of Provence and adjoining regions, comprise the oldest and currently the richest collection in the DALME corpus. The collection primarily consists of inventories of secular households, both Christians and Jews, from cities and towns as well as the countryside. It also includes a number of inventories of churches and priories as well as several fortresses and castles.

The initial set of inventories, auctions, and other lists of goods was gathered and transcribed by Dan Smail during archival work dating back to the 1990s. This collection, which centered on the city of Marseille and nearby towns and villages, was substantially enlarged in 2011-12 by inventories supplied by Nathan Melson. Additional inventories were gathered in archival campaigns from 2018 onward, including a set of Massiliote inventories previously transcribed and published by the historians Christine Barnel and Juliette Sibon. The collection was published in January of 2021 under the title “Marseille and Its Environs.”

Beginning in 2022, members of the DALME team, led by Ryan Low, began to target inventories from a greater swath of Provence, with Claire Allen joining the team in 2023. The growing set of inventories from the Rhône valley, the Luberon, and lower Alps emerged from a systematic exploitation of dozens of notarial registers held in the Archives départementales of the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, Hautes-Alpes, Bouches-du-Rhône, Drôme, Var, and Vaucluse. The additions of guardianship inventories from Arles and Aix-en-Provence, vernacular inventories from Avignon, and a substantial collection of inventories from rural Provence collected and transcribed by Low and Allen encourage rich comparisons of households from throughout the region. In 2024, the existing collection, “Marseille and Its Environs,” was absorbed into the present collection to reflect its expanded horizons.

Throughout much of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the counties of Provence and Forcalquier formed part of the dynastic realms of the Angevins of Naples. Following the dynastic wars of the late fourteenth century, which pitted the Valois Angevins against their Hungarian cousins, the Durazzo, the Provençal counties split off from Naples, and, for much of the fifteenth century, formed an independent realm. This realm reached its zenith during the era of René I d’Anjou (r. 1434-1480), Duke of Anjou, Count of Provence, and titular king of Naples. Upon René’s death, greater Provence was absorbed into the Kingdom of France. Given the region’s long-standing and stable administrative regime, all the records from the region derive from a common set of practices and legal norms. A dialect of Occitan known as Provençal was spoken across the region, giving a distinctive linguistic flavor to all the records in the collection.

Many of the inventories in the collection derive from acts found in notarial registers, and the wealth of the notarial archives of southeastern France makes the study of Provençal inventories especially fruitful. Typically, inventories are found by leafing through registers in search of acts scattered here and there. Inventories, auctions, and other lists of material culture are also preserved in court registers. The habit of compiling inventories grew over time. By the end of the fifteenth century, the practice had become so common that notaries in Provence and the Comtat Venaissin began to keep registers exclusively reserved for inventories and auctions of household goods.

At present, the sample remains skewed toward Marseille and its surrounding district, and the chronological sample in most regions is somewhat uneven. In other respects, however, the fact that the inventories have been gathered randomly from notarial and court registers means that the sample can be cautiously used for statistical purposes. For the city of Marseille, a substantial number of inventories have been extracted from registers of judicial proceedings, which yield not only post-mortem inventories but also inventories of insolvent estates and confiscation inventories. The records of several of Marseille's hospitals and religious foundations have yielded a dozen or more inventories pertaining to the estates of important benefactors, typically in the form of parchment rolls. Registers of civil proceedings are rare elsewhere in Provence. Notarial registers from the diocese of Apt contain inventories of parish churches in the years following the Great Schism of 1378 alongside postmortem and guardianship inventories typical of the registers of Marseille. In any given region, the sample includes a remarkably broad spectrum of society.

Data from Marseille suggest that notaries typically recorded inventories at the rate of approximately one for every 200-300 acts, at least in urban areas. Given the sizable body of surviving notarial registers from Greater Provence–there are some 15,000 registers from the region–it may be possible to collect as many as 5,000-10,000 inventories from the later middle ages. At present, a major goal of the DALME team is to develop a more robust sample from Aix-en-Provence, Arles, Avignon, and the towns and villages scattered across the region. Dozens of records have been collected from Aix, Arles, and Avignon and are awaiting transcription, and the DALME team has identified several additional records from Manosque and Haute-Provence.

The collection includes some of the earliest lay inventories from modern France, the oldest of which dates to 1258. One of the highlights are the inventories of Jewish households made by Jewish families from Arles and Marseille, some of which preserve traces of Hebrew words for household objects as well as Jewish devotional objects. The archives of Aix-en-Provence also provide an important body of inventories of Jewish households, although these arose from a seizure of goods made in 1295 for non-payment of a tax owed by the Jews of Aix. The collection includes a set of inventories in Provençal from the region of Avignon originally edited and transcribed by the Avignonese érudit Pierre Pansier. A substantial number of inventories in the collection derive from households headed by women. Other highlights include several inventories of apothecaries' shops and several dozen inventories of churches and canonries.

Later medieval Provençal inventories have featured prominently in the work of local historians for more than a century. They have been used for the study of subjects ranging from kitchen equipment and food history to clothing fashions and tools (consult works in the DALME bibliography by C. Barnel, H. Bresc, N. Coulet, P. Herbeth, J. Sibon, and L. Stouff). The Marseille set features prominently in Smail, Legal Plunder, as well as Smail, Pizzorno, and Hay, "Le recyclage et l'ontologie de l'objet."

The inventories in the Marseille collection have been edited following these principles.

• Abbreviations, in most cases, have been silently expanded, including currency units.
• Capitalization has selectively added to personal names, place names, and other words normally capitalized following modern conventions.
• Periods have been introduced to help demarcate object phrases but otherwise only a minimal amount of punctuation has been added.
• Line breaks in the original are reproduced in the edition.
• Object lists are transcribed in full, with the exception of property locations, which have only been selectively transcribed. Other elements of the record that do not list objects, such as the record of any court actions that precede the inventory, have been selectively transcribed, and paraphrases occasionally introduced to indicate the nature of those actions.

The editors of Team Provence, Daniel Lord Smail, Ryan Low, and Claire Allen, are primarily responsible for the transcription and editing of the majority of the records in the collection. Certain records were originally transcribed, wholly or in part, by Christine Barnel, Jean-Pierre Bénézet, Pierre Pansier, Juliette Sibon, and Henri Villard, and by DALME team member Juliette Calvarin; their work is credited in the respective records. Corrections and other contributions have been made by Patrick Meehan and Kathleen Smail, among others.