DIGITAL HUMANITIES INITIATIVE TALK SERIES

The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe: A Contribution to Digital Scholarship (Zoom)

Speaker: Professor Daniel Lord Smail, Department of History, Harvard University

28 November 2022 (Mon)
10AM (HKT)/ 9PM (EST)
Online via Zoom
Registration: https://bit.ly/3DgoCyj 

About the event:
European archives preserve thousands of household or estate inventories from the period 1250-1500 CE. These records are similar in nature to records known in China as fendan or yizhu, which were generated by the process of household division (fenjia). Estate inventories provide valuable insights into European material culture in an era before the rise of the modern global economy.

The DALME project (https://dalme.org/) seeks to collect, transcribe, publish, and analyze a sample of inventories from later medieval Europe. This talk will present the collection and describe the methodologies and techniques of digital scholarship that Prof. Smail’s team currently developing and implementing.

About the speaker:
Professor Daniel Lord Smail is Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University, where he works on the history and anthropology of Mediterranean societies between 1100 and 1600 and on deep human history. In medieval European history, his work has explored the legal, social, and cultural history of the cities of Mediterranean Europe, with a focus on Marseille in the later Middle Ages. He has covered subjects ranging from women and Jews to legal history and spatial imagination, which was the subject of his first book, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille (1999). His most recent book, Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe (Harvard University Press, 2016), approaches transformations in the material culture of the later Middle Ages using household inventories and inventories of debt collection from Lucca and Marseille. With Gabriel Pizzorno and Laura Morreale and contributors, he recently published the online collection “The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe.” He is currently working on a book featuring an enslaved Berber woman in early fifteenth-century Marseille who engineered her own self-manumission.