284 tehmina goskarmaterial culture a certain freedom to chip away at established canons based primarily
on political and cultural change (for example, Roman, Islamic, Neo-classical) or to cut
through taxonomies obsessed with form and function (for example, domestic, cos-
tume, tool). It is the comparison of experience across time and geography which
remains to be explored. We want the result to be a Mediterranean focused on people
in their material worlds. This will allow us to better understand what people had in
common across borders and across time, as well as identify difference and hybridity
(Epstein, this volume). A regional study of material culture should be full of contours,
not a selection of beautiful parts loosely placed upon a flat vista, leaving us feeling
remote both from the world of objects and an idea of what the Mediterranean means.
To achieve this we will look at Mediterranean material culture outside the Mediterranean
and compare the phenomena we find in the region with similar phenomena outside it.The idea of Mediterranean material culture
and Braudel’s other paradigm
Thirty years after defining many of the paradigms with which Mediterranean scholars
grapple, Fernand Braudel wrote a captivating book on material culture that most histo-
rians have ignored. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century (1981 [1979]), orig-
inally written during the last major European economic crisis, has of course been read as
a treatise on capitalism rather than a discourse on the inter-relationship of material life
and economic life, which is exactly what it is. What struck Braudel—and this is the
paradigm—is how historical time moves very differently when viewed through material
culture. In a similar vein to that explained above, Braudel expected to find the material
aspects of civilization in societies which have “expended a vast amount of skill on redis-
covering their former selves, their tools, costumes, houses, practices, even their tradi-
tional songs. Their museums are there to be visited” (1981: 64). Let us look through
Braudel’s eyes to shape an idea of what Mediterranean material culture looks like.
Citing the material evidence in Burgundian wills, Braudel suggests that the paucity
of the day laborer or farmer’s worldly goods in the eighteenth century is self-evident:the pot-hanger, the pot in the hearth, the frying pans, the quasses (dripping-pans), the
miex (for kneading bread) ... the chest, the bedstead with four pillars, the feather pillow
and guédon (eiderdown), the bolster, sometimes a tapestry (cover) for the bed, the drugget
trousers, the coat, the gaiters, a few tools (shovels, pickaxe). (Braudel, 1981: 283)Rewind 500 years to twelfth-century Apulia, southern Italy, and the inventories of
wills and marriage contracts are not of peasants but of well-to-do households of pro-
fessionals and nobility, yet their contents are remarkably similar. The inventory from
a dowry redacted in Terlizzi in 1191 is typical of the range of material culture we find
in the region in this period:a bed, mattress, feather pillow, pair of sheets, bed-cover, bed-canopy, bed-curtain, cover,
three linen shirts, three linen cloaks, three kerchiefs, two table-cloths, napkins, foot-stool,
coat or skirt, bench, kneading trough, cauldron and trammels. (Carabellese and
Magistrale, 1899: no. 156: 177–78, my translation)0002063960.INDD 284 2/17/2014 11:38:26 AM