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IMC 2019: Sessions

Session 219: Borrowed, Traded, Loaned, Repossessed?: Debt, Object Exchange, and the Fluid Nature of Material Culture, II

Monday 1 July 2019, 14.15-15.45

Organisers:Jenny Adams, Department of English, University of Massachusetts
Susie Phillips, Department of English, Northwestern University
Moderator/Chair:Daniel Smail, Department of History, Harvard University
Paper 219-aDebts, Clothes, and Signs in Paris at the End of the Middle Ages
(Language: English)
Julie Claustre Mayade, L’UFR d'Histoire, Université de Paris I - Panthéon-Sorbonne
Index terms: Economics - Trade, Law, Social History
Paper 219-bTrust and Contract in the 15th Century
(Language: English)
Hannah Robb, Department of History, University of Manchester
Index terms: Economics - Trade, Law, Social History
Paper 219-cIn Whom Do We Trust?: Fides and Debt in Boccaccio's Decameron
(Language: English)
Filippo Petricca, Department of Romance Languages & Literatures, University of Chicago
Index terms: Economics - Trade, Language and Literature - Italian
Abstract

The recent turn toward material culture has brought back into focus the objects that circulate through our literatures, histories, and archives. Less work has been done on the ways in which certain material and economic practices transform one object into another. Does the collateralization of an object change the status of the object itself? How do objects disappear under the impress of debt, and how do the documents of debt take on a new life as material objects? How might a culture of borrowing generate a new language - new vocabularies, metaphors, syntaxes, and images - that begins to circulate alongside objects themselves? This panel takes up the questions/problems surrounding the use of objects for borrowing and lending. It welcomes papers on many aspects of object exchange but particularly seeks ones that think through the language of debt, the cultural understanding of collateral, and/or lending as represented or imagined.