Publications

As Europe began to grow rich during the Middle Ages, its wealth materialized in the well-made clothes, linens, and wares of ordinary households. Such items were indicators of one’s station in life in a society accustomed to reading visible signs of rank. In a world without banking, household goods became valuable commodities that often substituted for hard currency. Pawnbrokers and resellers sprang up, helping to push these goods into circulation. Simultaneously, a harshly coercive legal system developed to ensure that debtors paid their due. Focusing on the Mediterranean cities of Marseille and Lucca, Legal Plunder explores how the newfound wealth embodied in household goods shaped the beginnings of a modern consumer economy in late medieval Europe. The vigorous trade in goods that grew up in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries entangled households in complex relationships of credit and debt, and one of the most common activities of law courts during the period was debt recovery. Sergeants of the law were empowered to march into debtors’ homes and seize belongings equal in value to the debt owed. These officials were agents of a predatory economy, cogs in a political machinery of state-sponsored plunder.

In later medieval Europe, a rising tide of wealth changed the material regime and, with it, the relationships that defined the matrix of persons and things. Some of our best evidence for the changes afoot in the era can be found in the massive documentation generated by the legal institutions of the period. Featured in this chapter are household inventories and inventories of debt collection from the cities of Marseille and Lucca. Although the things found in these documents are not tangible, the approach known as “documentary archaeology” allows us to treat the words that describe them as fragments or traces left by things that once existed. Many of the things found in people’s houses were used for the purposes of social distinction, whether that means the individual pursuit of prestige or status, through competitive consumption and display, or a group’s pursuit of group identity, through the display of badges or totems that define membership in a group. The use of materiality for the purposes of distinction has a deep natural history. But in exploring distinction, it is important to bear in mind that prestige goods had other affordances and lent themselves to other ends. Particularly prominent in many human societies, including that of later medieval Europe, is the capacity for things to serve as stores of value. Also important is the fact that people form emotional connections with things. The complex nature of the relationship between people and things in the later Middle Ages is best understood if we treat things as part of the extended phenotype of persons, or as part of a matrix or network that treats both humans and things as equivalent nodes.

This contribution seeks to describe the contexts in which textual evidence concerning the recycling of objects, drawn in this instance from the archives of later medieval Marseille, can complement archaeological finds, and how, by bringing history and archaeology together, we can develop a more thorough understanding of modes of recycling in medieval Europe. In addition, the habits of recycling surveyed in this contribution encourage us to question not only the ontological status of household objects but also our own typological assumptions regarding the classification of objects.

In the past few decades, the efforts of museums and other cultural institutions to digitize and make their collections accessible online have made massive amounts of information about artifacts available to the general public and researchers alike. From Harvard alone, one can obtain detailed information about hundreds of thousands of objects, ranging from those in museums, such as the Art Museums (250,000 objects) or the Peabody (700,000 records), to those of individual projects, such as the Sardis Expedition, featured in the Spring 2017 issue of In Situ.

By studying the objects seized from debtors during the process of debt collection, this article seeks to understand the material culture of the poor in the city and region of Lucca in the fourteenth century. In point of fact, neither textual nor archaeological sources lend themselves to the study of the material dimensions of poverty. Among other things, the kinds of things owned or used by the poor in the Middle Ages were not necessarily any different from those used by the better off. Records of debt collection suggest an understanding of poverty that is not related to the material qualities of the objects possessed by the poor. Instead, the most important quality of virtually all the objects possessed by poor debtors is that they could be transformed through legal and political processes into commodities.

Using records of debt collection from the city of Lucca in the fourteeth century, this contributions explores the relationship between endebtedness and asset seizure.

This contribution concerns the seizure of goods for the repayment of debt, one of several mechanisms for guaranteeing consumer credit in later medieval Europe. Consumer credit was ubiquitous in the late medieval European economy, and as practices of lending on pledges such as pawnbroking indicate, credit was often secured, in fine, on materiality. Using evidence for debt collection in late medieval Lucca, I argue that the state-sponsored system of debt collection involving the seizure of goods was functionally equivalent to pawnbroking, where the only major difference lies in the temporality of the two types of transaction. If this claim holds up to scrutiny, it suggests how the development of new legal mechanisms in late medieval European jurisdictions contributed to expanding the supply of consumer credit.

Using a variety of legal/judicial sources from the cities of Marseille and Lucca in the later middle ages, this study explores juridical processes and cultural institutions for estimating the value or price of goods.

Drawing on archival sources concerning the collection of debt from the city of Lucca in the 1330s, this contribution explores how objects, like bodies, were subjected to judicial coercion.