Daniel Lord Smail is professor of history at Harvard University, where he works on deep human history and the history and anthropology of Mediterranean societies between 1100 and 1600. His current research approaches transformations in the material culture of later medieval Mediterranean Europe using household inventories and inventories of debt recovery from Lucca and Marseille. His most recent article asks whether there is a history to the practice of compulsive hoarding. His books include Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille(1999); The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423 (2003); On DeepHistory and the Brain
(2008), and, with Andrew Shryock and others, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present(2011).
Reception to follow.
