Enlivening the Archive: Glimpsing Embodied Consumption Practices in Probate Inventories of Household Possessions

This is a paper about historical texts but also about lived practices. More specifically, it is an appeal for historical geographers and historians to renew their relationship with archival texts and to view them not as mere representations of the past but as forensic evidence of history in the making. Throughout the paper I use the example of one particular historical documentary source, namely probate inventories (as we shall see later these are lists of the chattels, or moveable goods, of recently deceased individuals), to argue that historical texts do not only reflect but also bear material witness to past practices. In particular, I argue that the language employed within historical texts is teeming with life. Ways of writing reflect ways of speaking and ways of speaking are both embedded within everyday practical copings with the material world (discourse) and are capable of intervening with that world (performativity).