POSTPONED: Workshop with Daniel Lord Smail: ‘Conceptual Entities and the Documentary Archaeology of Domestic Life in Medieval Europe’
Friday 27th March, 2020
14:00, ArtsTwo SCR (Senior Common Room)
*This event has been postponed due to the current situation regarding COVID-19.* Daniel Lord Smail (Harvard) will host a workshop entitled ‘Conceptual Entities and the Documentary Archaeology of Domestic Life in Medieval Europe: Sources and Prospects’ at 2pm on Friday 27 March 2020 in ArtsTwo SCR. All welcome, in particular PGRs, PDRs, and ECRs.
Focus
The study of the relationship between humans and things in deep time makes vital contributions to present-day conversations about sustainability. Given the enormous volume of textual and archaeological evidence at our disposal, medievalists, historians and geographers of all stripes have a lot to contribute to these conversations. Following a discussion of papers by Dan Smail and Ian Hodder on the entanglement of human nature and material culture, this workshop will explore the methodology being developed by the DALME project (the “Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe”) to make lists of domestic objects, and the conceptual entities with which they associated, available to scholars interested in the comparative study of late medieval material culture.
Readings
- Daniel Lord Smail et al. “Goods.” Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present, by Andrew Shryock et al., (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), pp. 219–241.
- Ian Hodder, ‘The Entanglements of Humans and Things: A Long-Term View’, New Literary History 4 (2014): 19–36.
Please contact Evelien (e.c.g.lemmens@qmul.ac.uk) if you would like a copy of the readings.
This workshop has been co-organised by the Centre for Studies of Home and the Centre for the History of Emotions.
Biography
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 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 recently published 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 recovery from Lucca and Marseille. Smail’s work in deep history and neurohistory has addressed some of the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of these approaches to the human past. His most recent article in this vein asks whether there is a history of the practice of compulsive hoarding. His books include The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423 (2003); On Deep History and the Brain (2008), and, with Andrew Shryock and others, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (2011).
The talk will take place in ArtsTwo SCR (4th Floor), Mile End Campus, London E1 4NS. For directions to Mile End and a campus map, see bit.ly/QMcampusmap.