material Culture 285Personal possessions were moveable wealth and provided families and individuals
with the ability to negotiate when land and property were not readily in their grasp:
a situation familiar to an eighteenth-century Burgundian peasant as well as a twelfth-
century Apulian merchant. Moveable wealth was also a means by which women could
obtain financial security. This situation resonates with hundreds of inventories found in
the contemporary marriage contracts (ketubeh) of bourgeois Arab Jews of Egypt and
the eastern Mediterranean, part of the archive of the Cairo Geniza (Stillman, 1976).
Until the mass production of textiles in the eighteenth century, good quality cloths,
particularly silk, were moveable, saleable and investible, of which more presently.
The bed provides another example of how material culture defies the logic of linear
time. The idea of the bed as a singular object was interdependent with the organiza-
tion of domestic space and the social structures of the household. In medieval Apulian
inventories, beds and mattresses are omnipresent. Apulian beds were made of wood
or iron and in numerous cases were listed along with canopies and curtains, suggest-
ing the four-poster bed was another item of moveable property that became an essen-
tial capsule of family wealth in this area of the Mediterranean. Change is detected in
the twelfth century when some beds were described grecisco (“Greek-style”) and fran-
cisco (“French-style”) (Goskar, 2011: 202). Whatever their contrasting forms or qual-
ity these labels began appearing in the documents at just the time when southern Italy
was being settled by Norman French who brought a new dimension to the interior
and exterior fabric of urban life in many parts of the Mediterranean.
Further into the eastern Mediterranean, the frequency of beds and bedding in
inventories from the Byzantine Aegean suggests that two forms of domestic architec-
ture were present, those in which there was room for a separate item of furniture and
those with permanent couches built into the walls that could be used for sleeping and
sitting (Oikonómides, 1990: 213–214). And if we consider that beds and bedding in
the Byzantine Empire held a value second only to jewelry we can start to develop a
more compelling theory on how material and economic life were related. Charles
MacFarlane, observing in 1846, described a shepherd’s dwelling in the Abruzzi, cen-
tral Italy, as having only sheepskins for a bed and barely any other types of furniture,
reminding us that even the mundane bed remained a luxury for some (or the many)
even into the nineteenth century (Brettell, 1986: 167). The changes in the use of
certain furniture types like beds cannot just be attributed to increasing wealth and
availability in the West owing to its “taste for change” (Braudel, 1981: 293). If a
twelfth-century Apulian was sleeping on a better quality bed than a nineteenth cen-
tury Abruzzi shepherd what does this say about how we perceive continuity and
change in the Mediterranean through material culture?Carpets and cushions versus tables and chairs
A final Braudelian vignette addresses how a study of material culture can very effec-
tively expose parallel and merging variations in the Mediterranean. The manner in
which people are accustomed to sitting down, and on what, varies from culture to
culture. The material culture of sitting in the Mediterranean has until very recently
been split in two. In early modern Turkey, Islamic North Africa and the Middle East,
sitting on the ground cross-legged remained the norm, just as in Persia. This way of
sitting, Braudel observed, was “impossible or at best difficult for a European” whose0002063960.INDD 285 2/17/2014 11:38:26 AM