Miscellaneous Inventories

This collection houses sets of inventories that are currently not large enough to constitute a collection in their own right. Many of these inventories have been provided by contributing scholars and associates.

These acts were edited and transcribed by Vito Vitale in Documenti sul castello di Bonifacio nel secolo 13 (Genova: Regia Deputazione di Storia Patria per la Liguria, 1936). Click here to explore this subset.

The acts presented here concern Castello di Bonifacio, a town located on the southern tip of the island of Corsica. They are found in the Archivio di Stato di Genova because at the time, in 1239, Corsica was under the political control of Genoa.

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The Archives départementales de la Côte d’Or preserve an exceptional number of household inventories from Dijon in the later middle ages. These inventories featured prominently in many of the works of the historian Françoise Piponnier. Many records are now edited and available in Les inventaires après décès de la ville de Dijon à la fin du Moyen Âge (1390-1459) (vol. 1 and vol. 2), under the editorial direction of Guilhem Ferrand and Jean-Pierre Garcia. An open-access edition of volume 1 is available here. A sample consisting of five records has kindly been prepared for the DALME site by Dr. Ferrand, and we refer viewers to the published volumes.

The current sub-set available on DALME also includes an inventory of the silver of Bonne d’Artois, which, along with the resulting auction, was preserved in a record of the Duke of Burgundy's household accounts. These two records have been transcribed and edited by Dr. S.C. Kaplan. Sara McDougall and Laura Morreale have also contributed the inventory of Petit Clairvaux from 1484.

Click here to explore the records from Dijon.

The acts from Douai have been transcribed and edited by Dr. Lise Saussus of the Université Catholique de Louvain. The set features several post-mortem inventories of canons and accounts of auctions for the cathedral chapter of Saint-Amé in Douai. They were produced between the mid fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. At present, they are the only inventories in the DALME environment kept in Picard, the vernacular of the Low Countries and northern France. Click here to explore this subset.

The inventories from Dublin presented here offer a sample drawn from Henry Fitz-Patrick Barry, ed., Register of Wills and Inventories of the Diocese of Dublin in the Time of Archbishops Tregury and Walton, 1457-1483: From the Original Manuscript in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin. (Dublin: University Press for the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 1898). Click here to explore this subset. The records have been prepared for publication by Ryan Low and Sama Mammadova.

The existing records in this set have been collected, transcribed, and contributed by Sarah Hinds. Click one of the links below to explore the associated record(s).

The post-mortem inventories in this series all originate from the records of the medieval courts of the Archbishopric of Canterbury, now divided between The National Archives of the United Kingdom and Lambeth Palace Library. Surviving inventories date primarily from the latter half of the fifteenth century with the majority produced under the Archbishopric of John Morton between 1486 and 1500. In this period the Prerogative Court of Canterbury had jurisdiction over the probate of testators who died with notable goods (bona notabilia) in more than one diocese. These inventories therefore tend to represent the moveable possessions of some of the wealthiest people in fifteenth-century England. They do, however, include examples of burgess, peasant, gentry, and priestly decedents and provide insights into the material culture of a variety of elite late medieval English households.

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The Archivio di Stato di Genova holds the oldest and richest collection of notarial registers extant from anywhere in later medieval Europe. Post-mortem and other estate inventories from Genoa, however, were often incomplete, lacking a full list of the movable goods. Curiously, the notary sometimes left space in the register but did not trouble to fill it in.

In his Studi sull'economia genovese nel medio evo (1936), Roberto Lopez transcribed inventories and other acts associated with twenty estates of decedents in thirteenth-century Genoa. These form the core of the collection from Genova. Certain editorial components have been silently altered for the editions published here, including elements listed in the notes such as blank spaces that have been incorporated in the text.

The DALME team will be adding additional acts shortly. Click here to explore the subset.

The inventories from Messina presented here were edited by Ferdinando Gabotto in “Inventari messinesi inediti del Quattrocento,” Archivio Storico per La Sicilia Orientale 3, no. 1 (1906): 251–76. The edition prepared by Gabotto includes an extensive set of notes and an excellent glossary; these elements were published in the same volume, pp. 479-487, as well as Vol. 4, number 1, pp. 154-164 and pp. 483-495. Click here to view the subset.

The inventories from Paris, at present, include an inventory of Merot, the son-in-law of Benoest de Saint-Denis, edited by Antoine Le Roux de Lincy, and an inventory edited by Dr. Katherine Baker. Click here to view the subset.

The lists of goods in this collection have been edited and/or contributed by Marco Tomaszewski, who has also authored a DALME essay highlighting some features of the collection. Click here to view the collection.

A literary genre from the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period in which material objects were thematized are the so-called "poems of household goods." In this collection, six German examples are presented. They comprise handwritten as well as printed versions and include anonymous texts as well as poems of well-known authors like Hans Sachs and Hans Folz.

These poems of household goods contain lists of what is needed to run a household, enumerating, among others, household goods and food supplies. Thus, the poems not only provide vivid insights into the material furnishings of late medieval and early modern households, but also reveal discourses on material objects. Twelve German poems have been handed down since the 14th century, while similar ones already existed in the 13th century in French.

The German poems presented here can be divided into two groups (Assion 2012). The texts of the first group deal with privations and poverty in matrimony. These texts enumerate what is lacking in the household. The poems of the second group are didactic in nature, giving lessons to young people who intend to get married. The inventories in these poems are intended to illustrate the large expenses which were necessary for running a household. In doing so, these poems point to the risk of poverty related to marriage and the foundation of a household.

Bibliography

• Assion, Peter. 2012. "Hausratgedichte". Verfasser-Datenbank [online]. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. Available from: https://www.degruyter.com/document/database/VDBO/entry/vdbo.vlma.1582/html. [Accessed 2021-07-16]
• Blosen, Hans. 1993. "Nürnberger Hausratgedichte: Hans Paur, Hans Folz, Hans Sachs." In Über die Ehe. Von der Sachehe zur Liebesheirat, edited by Ursula Rautenberg, 73–86.
• Busch, Nathanael and Kanz, Claudia. 2015. "‘Was man als haben muß‘. Nürnberger Dichtung vom Hausrat." In: Nürnberg. Zur Diversifikation städtischen Lebens in Texten und Bildern des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts, edited by Heike Sahm and Monika Schausten, 25–42. Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie Sonderheft 134: Berlin: Erich Schmidt.
• Gaston, Raynaud. 1899. "Le dit des outils de l’hotel (Ms. Du Musée condé)", Romania 28:109, 49-60.
• Hampe, Theodor. 1899. Gedichte vom Hausrat aus dem XV. und XVI. Jahrhundert, in Facsimiledruck. Drucke und Holzschnitte des XV. und XVI. Jahrhunderts in getreuer Nachbildung. Strassburg: J.H.E Heitz.
• Jeay, Madeleine. 2006. Le commerce des mots: l’usage des listes dans la littérature médiévale (XIIe-XVe siècles). Publications romanes et françaises 241. Genève: Droz.
• Nyström, Urban. 1940. Poèmes français sur les biens d'un ménage depuis “L'Oustillement au villain” du XIII. siècle jusqu'aux “Controverses” de Gratien du Pont. Texte critique accompagné d'une étude littéraire et matérielle. Helsinki.
• Tomaszewski, Marco. 2021. "Die Hausväter und die Anderen. Männlichkeitsentwürfe und soziale Ungleichheit in städtischen Familienbüchern und Hausratgedichten (14.–17. Jahrhundert)." In Die Stadt und die Anderen. Fremdheit in Selbstzeugnissen und Chroniken des Spätmittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Andreas Rutz, 71-91. Städteforschung A 101: Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, https://doi.org/10.7788/9783412521073.

The records in the Teutonic Order subset of the Miscellaneous Inventories collection have been edited by Patrick Meehan. Two inventories are currently available, from Pawlowa and Zheleznodorozhny from Kaliningrad Oblast in what is now Russia. Click a link to explore the inventory associated with it.