by Gal Beckerman
On the eve of their marriage in 1682, Hans Hürning and Barbara Herrenmann, like all German couples of their time, invited a local official into each of their homes to catalog every single one of their possessions. The resulting list was exhaustive. It included not just their land and livestock, like his 3 hens and 1 beehive, but every article of clothing (his new calfskin trousers, her old black taffeta bonnet), assorted household goods (1 fire-bucket, 1 grain-husking basket, 1 dung-fork with iron tines), and even the wooden items she made while apparently planning her future (1 diaper-chest without ironwork, 1 cradle). It’s something to behold, a total catalog of a human’s belongings captured — as perhaps only the Germans could — in a meticulously organized and scrupulously detailed list.
Three hundred years after Hans and Barbara made their lists, a graduate student named Sheilagh Ogilvie began searching through the archives of central German villages for a dissertation topic. In every town she visited there would inevitably be reams of such lists, and she was shocked to find how pervasive and untouched these household inventories were. They had been produced by the local municipalities at marriage and death from at least the 17th century onwards, and in many cases nobody had looked at them for centuries: The sand used by scribes to blot the ink just after writing would often fall out onto her lap.
At the time, there were simply too many for her to try to research. But three years ago, armed with computing capabilities that did not exist in the 1980s, Ogilvie — now a professor at the University of Cambridge — began an ambitious project to process every one of the thousands of lists from two towns in the Württemberg region, beginning with the year 1602 and up until the late 1800s.
What has emerged so far is not just a glimpse of German life over three centuries, but also confirmation of a theory of Europe’s economic development. The team has already gone through 28,000 handwritten folios, representing 460,000 separate items of property and their monetary values, and by providing this sort of granular detail into what people owned from 1600 to 1900, Ogilvie has been able to track the beginning of consumerism. When did women start buying butter and beer at the market, instead of churning or brewing at home? When does the first nutmeg grater or coffee cup appear, indicating the arrival of exotic goods? Or for that matter, when do villagers start wearing an imported cotton fabric like calico? These small indicators lend support to a new understanding of the period before the Industrial Revolution, when historians like Ogilvie posit that there was an “Industrious Revolution,” increased consumption of luxury items that led to a desire for more income, changing people’s working habits and spurring the creation of faster, more efficient production models.
A household list might seem a fairly modest starting point upon which to build a whole theory of economic development. But in fact these types of lists are becoming increasingly important to historians — documents produced not as a message to posterity, like a memoir or diplomatic record, but as a simple snapshot of everyday life. Taken as a group, lists offer a rare window into the building blocks of society, economy, and culture — one that is becoming only more valuable as historians gain the processing power to make sense of them.
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On the eve of their marriage in 1682, Hans Hürning and Barbara Herrenmann, like all German couples of their time, invited a local official into each of their homes to catalog every single one of their possessions. The resulting list was exhaustive. It included not just their land and livestock, like his 3 hens and 1 beehive, but every article of clothing (his new calfskin trousers, her old black taffeta bonnet), assorted household goods (1 fire-bucket, 1 grain-husking basket, 1 dung-fork with iron tines), and even the wooden items she made while apparently planning her future (1 diaper-chest without ironwork, 1 cradle). It’s something to behold, a total catalog of a human’s belongings captured — as perhaps only the Germans could — in a meticulously organized and scrupulously detailed list.
Three hundred years after Hans and Barbara made their lists, a graduate student named Sheilagh Ogilvie began searching through the archives of central German villages for a dissertation topic. In every town she visited there would inevitably be reams of such lists, and she was shocked to find how pervasive and untouched these household inventories were. They had been produced by the local municipalities at marriage and death from at least the 17th century onwards, and in many cases nobody had looked at them for centuries: The sand used by scribes to blot the ink just after writing would often fall out onto her lap.At the time, there were simply too many for her to try to research. But three years ago, armed with computing capabilities that did not exist in the 1980s, Ogilvie — now a professor at the University of Cambridge — began an ambitious project to process every one of the thousands of lists from two towns in the Württemberg region, beginning with the year 1602 and up until the late 1800s.
What has emerged so far is not just a glimpse of German life over three centuries, but also confirmation of a theory of Europe’s economic development. The team has already gone through 28,000 handwritten folios, representing 460,000 separate items of property and their monetary values, and by providing this sort of granular detail into what people owned from 1600 to 1900, Ogilvie has been able to track the beginning of consumerism. When did women start buying butter and beer at the market, instead of churning or brewing at home? When does the first nutmeg grater or coffee cup appear, indicating the arrival of exotic goods? Or for that matter, when do villagers start wearing an imported cotton fabric like calico? These small indicators lend support to a new understanding of the period before the Industrial Revolution, when historians like Ogilvie posit that there was an “Industrious Revolution,” increased consumption of luxury items that led to a desire for more income, changing people’s working habits and spurring the creation of faster, more efficient production models.
A household list might seem a fairly modest starting point upon which to build a whole theory of economic development. But in fact these types of lists are becoming increasingly important to historians — documents produced not as a message to posterity, like a memoir or diplomatic record, but as a simple snapshot of everyday life. Taken as a group, lists offer a rare window into the building blocks of society, economy, and culture — one that is becoming only more valuable as historians gain the processing power to make sense of them.
Read more:
