Renaissance attachment to things: material culture in last wills and testaments¹

Abstract

Over the past decade ‘material culture’ has become a sub‐discipline of Italian Renaissance studies. This literature, however, has focused on the rich and their objects preserved in museums or reflected in paintings. In addition, the period 1300 to 1600 has been treated without attention to changes in the relationship between people and possessions. The article turns to last wills and testaments, which survive in great numbers and sink deep roots through late medieval and Renaissance cities and their hinterlands. They reveal aspirations and anxieties about things from post‐mortem repairs to farm houses to pillows of monk's wool. These aspirations changed fundamentally after the Black Death. Earlier, during the ‘commercial revolution’, ordinary merchants, artisans, and peasants on their deathbeds practised what the mendicants preached: stripping themselves of their possessions, they converted their estates to coin to be scattered among pious and non‐pious beneficiaries. After the Black Death, testators began to reverse tack, devising ever more complex legal strategies to govern the future flow of their goods. This work of the dead had larger economic consequences. By encouraging the liquidation of estates, the earlier mendicant ideology quickened the velocity of exchange, while the early Renaissance attachment to things did the opposite.

The ‘light touch’ of the Black Death in the Southern Netherlands: an urban trick?

“…This links to Cohn's argument that important changes to testamentary recording occurred in the wake of ‘ pestis secunda ’ as a traumatic reliving of the previous mortality shock of the initial Black Death; Cohn, ‘Renaissance attachment to things’. Benedictow also asserts that wills and testaments are better seen as indicators of attitudes to death rather than mortality outright; Benedictow, Black Death, 1346–1353 , pp.…”

Noves consideracions al voltant de Bernat Fenollar, domer de la Seu de València.

“…Més enllà dels beneficiaris i dels llibres en concret, que tot seguit analitzaré, aquesta pràctica de disposar dels artefactes quotidians com si de béns immobles es tractara traspua una afecció cap a ells que traspassa el seu valor econòmic. I, en realitat, el material turn (Downes, Halloway and Randles 2018) que ha experimentat la historiografia en la darrera dècada posa de manifest que aquesta pràctica era molt més habitual del què se n'havíem adonat, particularment entre els individus benestants (Cohn 2012).…”

Pestilence, poverty, and provision: re‐evaluating the role of thepopolaniin early modernVenice

“…See Cohn, Death and property ; idem, Cult of remembrance ; idem, ‘Testamenti e storia’; idem, ‘Renaissance attachment’.…”