La culture matérielle des pauvres à Lucques au XIVe siècle

Abstract

By studying the objects seized from debtors during the process of debt collection, this article seeks to understand the material culture of the poor in the city and region of Lucca in the fourteenth century. In point of fact, neither textual nor archaeological sources lend themselves to the study of the material dimensions of poverty. Among other things, the kinds of things owned or used by the poor in the Middle Ages were not necessarily any different from those used by the better off. Records of debt collection suggest an understanding of poverty that is not related to the material qualities of the objects possessed by the poor. Instead, the most important quality of virtually all the objects possessed by poor debtors is that they could be transformed through legal and political processes into commodities.