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.

This paper describes DALME's digital infrastructure.

This paper examines the household inventory of Count Eudes de Nevers

This keynote address explored practices and understandings of space in medieval household inventories.

This paper explores a practice found in estimates of value whereby values were bundled.

This paper examines evidence of reading, writing, and books in Florentine household as documented in inventories from the DALME Florentine Wards collection.

In this paper, the author argues that digital ways of knowing are extensions of the innate capacity of our brain to apprehend and process information.

This paper examines the vernacular ontologies that informed the compilation of household inventories in the later middle ages.

This article examines a corpus of over forty Italian civic histories produced from the mid-thirteenth to mid-fourteenth century, when the wealth of many of the peninsula's inhabitants increased significantly. Evidence from this corpus demonstrates that attitudes about wealth in historical writing changed over time and argues for a shift from a more static to a more dynamic representation of material goods in these texts. The novel mechanisms for accruing wealth that developed in the Italian urban context were important factors in the historigraphic turn, but as the period wore one, changes in the types of people writing history also contributed to modified presentations of wealth in their writings. Whether describing the display of luxury or its regulation, civic improvements or the destruction of a town's buildings by warring factions, taxation in a city or the corruption of its offiicials, views towards material goods in medieval Italian urban histories were neither wholly positive nor negative. Rather, the historiographic value of material goods was complex. The frequency with which wealth was a topic of discussion in civic histories highlights how the peninsula's inhabitants were coming to terms with the influx of wealth and the material goods they could acquire as members of their urban communities.

The ephemeral nature of computer-enabled historical work is a well-documented concern within the field of history. The quick pace of technological change often renders digital scholarship obsolete, which in turn encourages historians to retreat to the stable and durable comfort of print, even as digital methodologies enrich our research and expand the audience for it. What has been missing so far in the conversation about digital history is a clear understanding of how it differs from traditional historical products, what can be gained from it, and how we might document the work undertaken using these machine-based methodologies. Because it is best understood as a process rather than as a product, digital history must have a history of its own to tether it to the scholarly commu- nity and to ensure that it endures past the active phase of any project. This article argues that digital historians should catalog their work using a normalized template following the Digital Documentation Process, a guide for producing documentation that is suitable for computer-based historical scholarship and tailored to its specific parameters. Self- documentation is beneficial to those who create digital history and those who consume it. It is urgent to establish a field-wide expectation that digital history will be consistently documented as a matter of course, lest we lose scholarship that has already been produced and forgo the enormous opportunities that computer-enabled methodologies offer to historians.

Among his many distinguished intellectual achievements, Laurent Feller has made signal contributions to one of the most important methodological turns in recent historiography. As Laurent Feller and others are argued, written documents preserved in archives should not be seen as containers of information useful to historians solely because they passively preserve or reflect historical facts, ideas, or habits of thought. Instead, written documents, and the processes that generated them, should be understood as devices that act recursively in the world, creating the very facts and ideas that they appear to merely reflect. This contribution applies Feller’s approach to the study of estate inventories and other lists of household possessions from later medieval Europe (13th-15th centuries). With the revival of Roman law in the twelfth century, the members of a decedent’s family and the executors of his or her estate were invited to compile post-mortem inventories listing the estate’s contents. This invitation to contemplate goods and possessions induced members of the laity to develop material ontologies, that is to say, the frames of thought necessary for the task of organizing descriptions of material culture and grappling with abstract concepts such as belonging and value.

This brief essay offers a set of remarks on the post-mortem inventory of a Jew from the city of Marseille who died in 1397. The inventory, which lists all the assets in the estate, had been compiled by the decedent's daughters and was then presented to the court in order to be registered. Like many inventories from the region, it proceeds room-by-room, and offers valuable glimpses of Jewish material culture as well as the folk ontology governing the classification of things. The article includes a translation of the inventory, recording strikethrough deletions and interlineations.

This study uses an extensive body of archival evidence from Latin-Christian sources to explore economic and social interactions between Provençal Jews and Christians. Evidence discussed in section one indicates that the city’s Jewish and Christian com-munities interacted to a significant degree, and not just in the domain of moneylending. Data derived from a network analysis suggests that Jews were prominent in providing brokerage services. In the second section, analysis of a small sample of Jewish estate inventories indicates that the material profiles of Jewish and Christian families were very similar. In the third section, an analysis of a register of debt collection shows that Jews were involved in credit relations at a rate that was proportional to their popu-lation. Jewish moneylenders filled an economic niche by providing Christians with the liquidity to pay off structural debts generated by the political economy of rents and taxes.

Offers a reading of an inventory of a woman whose family died during the Black Death.

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.