Daniel Lord Smail offers a thoughtful examination of the history and anthropology of objects. His book, written in a smooth and accessible prose, demonstrates all the skill and craft of the master historian steeped in questions of culture and symbolism who exploits written records for archaeological ends. Following in the footsteps of French and United States archaeologists, Smail adopts the posture of documentary archaeology to show how “every object, regardless of its prestige value, has something to say” (9).
The grand purpose of the book is to explain how, as late medieval society became more materialistic, Europeans developed systems of credit and debt. Failure to repay debts sometimes resulted in property seizure. On a deeper level, Smail's analysis demonstrates how people and groups construed value, ascribed meaning to objects in a symbolic economy, and invested in things to liquidate when pressed. Within this system, credit brought status and honor; debt brought shame and violence.
For his evidence, Smail “sacrificed geographical breadth for interpretive or investigative depth” (20). In fact, the author compares two late medieval Mediterranean cities, Marseille and Lucca. Marseille's modern archive preserves hundreds of notarial and court registers, including various types of household inventories, many drawn up postmortem, in preparation for the settling of estates. Lucca's archive preserves an even larger quantity of records, including tens of thousands of late medieval lists of everyday objects. All told, Smail analyzed 100 early fourteenth- and mid-fifteenth-century household inventories from Marseille plus another sampling of records of court-ordered property seizures from Lucca, 1333–1342. To this sumptuous archival evidence, he adds a healthy number of comparisons with other places. The book does, therefore, speak to a Latin Christian context, and will be of serious interest to most scholars of the late medieval West.
Legal Plunder begins with a helpful preface and a brief section on currencies, calendars, and units of measure. It then develops its arguments around the commodification of debt over five chapters. Chapter 1 describes how people and groups valued goods, and determines the range of property they acquired. Chapter 2 examines money and forms of credit. It dwells on information originally preserved in a telling household account ledger and considers the place of coinage in everyday exchange. One of the important conclusions of this chapter is how urban dwellers lived day to day in a system of microcredit and microdebt, relying on pawnbrokers, re-sellers, and friendly lenders to enable quotidian subsistence. Chapter 3 shows how late medieval court operators spread their monopoly over property reclamation. Individual distraint was costly and could result in legal penalties. Increasingly, individuals, thus, used courts to seize debtors’ possessions against what was owed. Courts, in response, developed expertise and procedural mechanisms to assess property values. Their fees were substantial: in Marseille they amounted to between 8% and 19% of the amount that the municipality collected annually through direct taxation. More shocking, perhaps, is the sheer volume of predation conducted by the courts of Lucca, where “one in ten households suffered an act of predation each year” (175). Although this legal plunder was widespread, both Lucca and Marseille also maintained greater deterrents: debtors’ prisons.
Chapter 4 presents a rich analysis of objects seized, and will be of interest to anyone working on the history of material culture. Among its details, Smail maps the space of predation in the Lucchesia. More importantly, he posits that pawning and predation were two sides of the same coin. He builds on his earlier study of Massilian courts to argue persuasively that property seizure piggybacked on sovereignty. Lucca profited financially from the fees associated with predation, but it also benefited in other ways from the facilitation of personal financial concerns; for example, predation gave its officers legitimacy and visibility. Chapter 5 considers how the symbolic levels of violence inherent in property seizure far surpassed any actual physical violence committed by courts upon bodies. But humiliation and debt collection, like judicial violence and torture, served deeper structural purposes beyond deterrence. Predation underscored the power dynamics surrounding lending and borrowing: “the condition of being in debt, like a pale version of slavery, binds people to their economic masters. Acts of predation, in this view, represent those moments when power flexed its muscle” (244).
There are only a few quibbles with this otherwise fascinating study of everyday objects. First, it is not clear how, methodologically, Smail conducted his sampling of the Massilian and Lucchese corpuses. Second, the preface invites readers who are curious about the records (and maps and graphics) to consult Smail's academic Web site which, unfortunately, simply notes “maps and figures to come,” and provides no information on primary sources. Third, although the book contains abundant endnotes, there is no bibliography, which was surely the press's decision, not the author's, and here Smail's Web site does provide his bibliography of secondary sources. Fourth, as the author points out in his preface, the local vocabulary of household objects poses a challenge. It is unfortunate that, doubtless to improve stylistics, Smail chooses to provide the Provençal or Italian terms somewhat inconsistently. His text cannot, therefore, serve as a reliable translation tool for household items. Still, such trifles detract neither from the book's importance nor from its significant accomplishments.
For Smail, ownership is co-evolutionary, and even mundane objects have historical agency. “The point is,” Smail relates, “that things, like plants, animals, and microorganisms, are perfectly capable of using humanity in order to reproduce themselves” (272). If true, then Smail's book matters enormously because it provides an analytic framework, backed up by diligent, scientific research, to explain not only the world of the fourteenth century, but also that of today. As our species becomes awash in plastics, strangled by our own conspicuous consumption, we should all consider its cultural lessons.
