Contadini, Anna (2013) 'Sharing a Taste? Material Culture and Intellectual Curiosity around the Mediterranean, from the Eleventh to the Sixteenth Century.' In: Contadini, Anna and Norton, Claire, (eds.), The Renaissance and the Ottoman World. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, pp. 23-61 (original) (raw)
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Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 2004
A cross the medieval Mediterranean, luxury goods were exchanged as objects of trade, as spoils of war, and as gifts.' For a cultural historian, the interest of exchange or export of goods lies less in the fact of the exchange itself than in why a particular artifact (or type of artifact) was selected for export or import, pillage, or gift exchange and how that object was redefined once it was in a new context. The complexities of trade, war, and diplomacy give way to the ambiguities of socially constructed meaning, which is itself not static: moving an object changes its meaning. Sometimes the new meaning was calculated by the exporter. In 506 Cassiodorus ordered Boethius to take a water clock to the ruler of the Burgundians, and to show the Burgundians how it worked, so that, in Cassiodorus's words, "when they have turned from their amazement, they will not dare to think themselves the equals of us, among whom, as they know, sages have thought up such device^."^ In 757 the East Roman emperor Constantine V may have had similar hopes when he sent the Frankish king Pepin an organ, along with Byzantines to show the Franks how to use it.Xater described by Notker as the "most remarkable of organs ever possessed by musicians,"Qhe instrument-like the clock sent by Cassiodorus to Burgundy-represented technology not available to its recipients, and thus had the potential to demonstrate the superiority of the sender. It is a pleasure to thank participants in the Symposium on Realities in the Medieval Mediterranean, and, later, the Byzantine Seminar at Oxford, for their comments after this paper was delivered. I am grateful to the anonymous readers for helpful comments; to Mayke de Jong, David Ganz, Rosamond McKitterick, and Jinty Nelson for advice on Carolingian bibliography; and, as always, to Chris Wickham. For overviews, see A.
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