An inventory, as the Latin etymology of the word indicates, is a list of things that have been found. Today, we often associate the word with the commercial practice of keeping track of stock on hand. This association is the legacy of *early modern business practices: in Luca Pacioli’s 1494 treatise on *bookkeeping, the goods inventory constituted a key element of a system known as “early perpetual inventory recording.” But the habit of making lists of found things long antedates the commercial function. Ancient temples and sanctuaries kept lists of the objects held within the precinct. Medieval European popes, bishops, and monasteries made inventories of their treasures. By the thirteenth century, royal courts and noble houses had picked up the habit, producing inventories of their wardrobes, household effects, and libraries. The custom persists today in the Oxbridge colleges, whose officers periodically conduct inventories of their colleges’ silver plate.
One of the most ubiquitous types of inventories in the Arabic and Christian societies of western Eurasia and northern Africa was the postmortem or probate inventory. Records of the Cairo Genizah reveal instances of people making postmortem inventories in Fatimid Egypt, and the practice is attested in Islamic documents from fourteenth-century Jerusalem. In Europe, numerous ecclesiastical inventories survive from throughout the Middle Ages, and inventories of the laity appear in archival sources from the thirteenth century onward. The number of extant inventories increases exponentially during the early modern period, and the legal *genre leapt the Atlantic and spread to all parts of the globe touched by European settler colonialism.
The surge in inventory making in early modern Europe was paralleled in the Ottoman world. Here, the words for the genre—muhallefat and tereke—come from Arabic roots that mean “to leave (behind).” In China, similar types of documents, called fendan or yizhu, were generated by the process of household division, fenjia. The people who made these documents, the earliest of which dates to the tenth century, were especially interested in lands, buildings, fishponds, and so on, but they also paid attention to the kinds of movable goods that feature in Ottoman and European sources, such as furniture, livestock, tools, books, and utensils. The documents produced by European, Ottoman, and Chinese legal customs are similar in function. The fact that they draw on different conceptual roots, however, raises the philosophical question of whether it is appropriate to assimilate them into a single genre.
By the eighteenth century, complex changes in law and society were beginning to conspire against the practice of keeping postmortem inventories in European societies. Among other things, the growing volume of household objects, coupled with the declining value of goods relative to the value of financial investments and properties, made full inventories less useful from a financial perspective. Postmortem inventories remained a legal requirement in some regions of the world into the twentieth century, however, and the practice has persisted informally.
The practice of keeping inventories of things or goods is associated with the understanding that goods have value and that they are mobile. This is why goods attract the regulatory instincts of commercial and inheritance law. Yet the genre should not be limited by the horizons of legal or practical necessity. An inventory is a device we use to order and in some cases to commemorate the world of things. When people decide to make inventories of things, they do so in part because the very act of making an inventory is a statement about oneself or one’s loved ones. As the anthropology of consumption has demonstrated, identity is intimately associated with the penumbra of things that envelops all of us. An inventory, in short, is more than just a list of things. It is an act that defines the contours of personhood.
The taking of any inventory, for this reason, can have important symbolic dimensions. During the occupation of France in the Second World War, Nazis entered the households of Jewish families and stripped them of artwork, furniture, clothing, and other things. After the war, members of the families whose goods had been plundered were asked to create inventories of the stolen objects. They did so by entering the palaces of their own memories and listing what they found there retrospectively. The inventories that resulted were ostensibly made in the hopes of recovering the families’ things or laying the groundwork for reparations. As Leora Auslander has suggested, however, the process also provided an opportunity for grieving people to commune with lost things and to take stock of the world that was.
An inventory, as mentioned above, is a list of things that have been found. Each element of this sentence merits attention. As a list, an inventory partakes in a genealogy as old as writing itself. An essential quality of all lists is that they are paratactic, since the ordering of their elements is not derived from verbs or coordinating conjunctions. As Jack Goody has suggested, when lists came into being they invited a form of cognition different from that which governs normal speech. Parataxis also promotes the tabular layout that we often associate with list making. In addition, some lists include typographical devices such as bullet points, stock words such as “item,” and indentations. A list does not have to be tabular, of course. Lists kept in paragraph form are especially likely to include typographical devices that mark the beginnings and ends of object phrases.
A variety of conceptual objects are list worthy: things of many kinds; people (class rosters; censuses; king lists); references (bibliographies; *encyclopedias), and abstract or timeless entities (the periodic table of elements). Regardless of their contents, almost all lists, inventories among them, aspire to completeness. A dictionary, for example, seeks to be a complete list of the words of a language; it would make no sense to have a dictionary that ends with the letter Y. But completeness is a difficult thing to achieve. Unless a given list seeks to record everything there is in the universe, it can aspire to be complete only within a defined domain. For this reason, list making inspires habits of categorization and classification. Contemplating the extant corpus of European postmortem inventories, we can make out an important stage of this history, as the spatial system of classification typical of the late medieval inventory gradually expanded to include systems based on monetary value and object typology.
Although all inventories are lists, not all lists are inventories. No one would say that shopping lists, to-do lists, and wish lists are inventories. More challengingly, a strict definition of the genre would probably exclude catalogs and collection guides kept by librarians and curators. To appreciate the difference, imagine a collection damaged by fire, flood, or theft. Not knowing the extent of the loss, the curator may commission an inventory in order to find out what remains. The resulting inventory could subsequently serve as the basis for a new catalog, of course, but that is a subsequent stage in the life cycle of the document. Some of the earliest catalogs of European library holdings began life in the fifteenth century in just this way, that is to say as components of postmortem royal inventories. With the passage of time, the book list emancipated itself from the inventory, thereby transforming itself into a catalog. The difference is subtle but important: where a catalog describes what purports to be there, an inventory describes what was actually found.
As a list of found things, an inventory results from an inquiry into a single facet of a thing’s identity, namely, the facet of belonging. In a paradoxical way, a postmortem inventory provides a list of things at the very moment when the underlying principle of classification—that they belong to someone—has just winked out of existence. As this suggests, inventories often provide lists of things that will soon be on the move. Since the results of any inquiry into inherently mobile things will be valid for only so long, the early modern postmortem inventory, unlike a dictionary or a catalog, was not designed to record the enduring or the universal. Like a radioactive element, an inventory should be thought of as having a half-life that describes the decay of its own informational utility. Much the same is true for the commercial inventory, although the half-life of utility will vary depending on the type of goods in store.
The inherent ephemerality of the genre raises questions about the informational service that inventories performed. Information consists of sets of things that are given or discovered. In the early modern era, postmortem inventories provided crucial information for probate and related processes. They made it possible for the executors to repay the creditors of the estate and distribute goods among the beneficiaries. But it is crucial to understand that inventories were never designed to record durable information about things. After a few weeks or months, an early modern postmortem inventory will, in theory, no longer carry any meaningful information whatsoever, at least where its original function is concerned. Like all archival sources, early modern inventories survive today because people found it possible to repurpose them for different informational ends, including symbolic ones. The lesson is important: we use inventories today for reasons undreamt of by their makers.
Daniel Lord Smail
See also appraising; archivists; art of memory; book sales catalogs; documentary authority; indexing; libraries and catalogs; lists