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Persons and Things in Marseille and Lucca, 1300–1450

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.