INVENTARIA The Making of Inventories as Social Practice

Castles have long enjoyed great popularity. In terms of research topics, though, politics and the military have dominated to date, reflecting a mainly traditionally male and hierarchical look at castles. This project takes a different approach, asking what life was like in medieval castles. We are interested in exploring the different people who lived and worked in castles, especially the women. Through the keyhole we are looking into the interior of selected castles on the territory of historical Tyrol to view spaces and objects there. Our research is based on special texts: inventories. These are lists of furniture and equipment that existed in castles. Usually these lists were drawn up on the occasion of a change in ownership or administration. This makes them snapshots and at the same time statements of what the castle contained. How did people go about cataloguing and describing all the objects found in a castle? How did they inspect the spaces, and which spaces were not included? Who was involved in these processes and how was the wealth of large and small pieces of equipment captured in words? These are the main questions for our interdisciplinary team to work on. Previously inventories were mainly used to hunt for specific, usually valuable, artwork. Our take on inventories, in contrast, is to look at them as historical texts that tell stories in their listing of objects and spaces. They provide valuable insights into the everyday life and social history, into the acts, emotions, memories, knowledge and sensual experiences linked to objects. For the castles on the territory of historical Tyrol, such inventories are available in significant number for as early as the 14th to the 16th century. In our project we will process 130 such inventories, using digital methods to gain information on spaces and their equipment as well as on the people who used them. We work on the hypothesis that inventories reveal information about the act of creating an inventory, when different individuals walked through the rooms, capturing and describing everything. In this way the documents show the relations between objects, people, activities, spaces and the terms used for them. Digital methods allow us to trace these relations and the act of drawing up an inventory. Such visualizations reveal castles as social living spaces. We will also take selected castles as sample cases to visualize the historical spatial structures. The project is a cooperation of historians (Antenhofer, Matschinegg, Salzburg/Krems), linguists with a digital methods focus (Posch, Rampl, Gruber-Tokic, Innsbruck) and experts in digital humanities and data modeling (Hiebel/Innsbruck) as well as in architectural and building history.