Person: Smail, Daniel
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Smail, Daniel
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Publication The Postmortem Inventory of Astrug Mosse, a Jew of Marseille (1397)(Project Muse, 2021) Smail, DanielPublication Archivos de conocimiento y la cultura legal de la publicidad en la Marsella medieval(Editorial CSIC, 1997) Smail, DanielBased on a case study of Marseille in the fourteenth century, this article argues that a foundational metaphor of medieval legal culture was publicity, even in the late medieval world where the written norms of Roman law would seem to dominate. In behaving in an open and public way, men and women managed to inscribe knowledge of basic legal facts, such as age, parentage, title, marital status, and date of death, in the public archives of memory, in an age before written archives consistently recorded such basic facts. The openness and ceremonial nature of such behavior validated and lent authority to the knowledge thereby created. In court cases, as a result, litigants sought to show not only that certain facts favored their position, but also that the facts were part of the "public voice and knowledge." To do so, they frequently recruited witnesses from a broad social spectrum, and the composition of the witness group served to illustrate how widely spread the relevant facts were. According to this argument, the most profound change in European legal culture took place not with the shift from oral and customary law to written law, but with a later shift from easily accessible and public archives of knowledge to the increasingly private, state-controlled archives of the early modern era.Publication Neuroscience and the Dialectics of History(2021-01) Smail, DanielPublication Persons and Things in Marseille and Lucca, 1300–1450(Oxford University Press, 2020-05-07) Smail, DanielIn later medieval Europe, a rising tide of wealth changed the material regime and, with it, the relationships that defined the matrix of persons and things. Some of our best evidence for the changes afoot in the era can be found in the massive documentation generated by the legal institutions of the period. Featured in this chapter are household inventories and inventories of debt collection from the cities of Marseille and Lucca. Although the things found in these documents are not tangible, the approach known as “documentary archaeology” allows us to treat the words that describe them as fragments or traces left by things that once existed. Many of the things found in people’s houses were used for the purposes of social distinction, whether the individual pursuit of prestige or status, through competitive consumption and display, or a group’s pursuit of group identity, through the display of badges or totems that define membership in a group.Publication The Original Subaltern(2010) Smail, DanielThis essay invites readers to consider how exclusions operate in the framing of history. In conventional historical thought, agency was accorded only to the limited few. Marginals, ranging from third world nations to subaltern groups of all types, were excluded from the making of history. The task of recuperating the historicity of marginals has been underway now for decades. As I hope to suggest in this essay, however, we have yet to restore historicity to the original subalterns: the peoples of the Paleolithic. The field of medieval studies, curiously enough, is implicated in their exclusion. In the developmental narratives that emerged early in the twentieth century, medieval Europe was presented as the point of origins from which modernity sprang. To the extent that medievalists continue to reaffirm the prehistoricity of the Great Before, they instantiate the very same historical exclusion that modernists currently impose on the Middle Ages.Publication On the Possibilities for a Deep History of Humankind(Rice University Press, 2010) Smail, DanielPublication History and the "Pre"(Oxford University Press (OUP), 2013-05-24) Smail, Daniel; Andrew, Shryock; Smail, DanielPublication Neuroscience and the Dialectics of History(Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa, 2012) Smail, DanielHistorians, like all social scientists, must make assumptions about how the brain works. This essay suggests how some of the recent findings of the brain sciences might enhance our ability to understand or describe patterns or processes in the past. A key feature of the brain and nervous system is that they are open to developmental and epigenetic influences, meaning that cultural patterns can shape or influence brain structures, at least in the aggregate population. This essay sets out the theoretical basis for a neuroscientific approach to the past, and develops a case study based on the neurobiology of stress.Publication Publication The Rhythms of Vengeance in Late Medieval Marseille(Publications de la Sorbonne, 2015) Smail, Daniel
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