Ancient Web: Age of Datini Made Medieval Everyday Objects Searchable

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

History books usually have room for kings and battles. S. Manning's Age of Datini wants to know how people fastened their clothes and what kinds of knives they carried to work.

Visit Age of Datini.

The site's chosen period is roughly 1360–1410 in Italy and neighboring regions. It organizes its evidence into artifact types, original texts, essays, bibliographies, and collections. The artifact index moves from shirts, hose, doublets, hoods, and buttons to working knives, swords, shields, crossbows, beds, and chairs. Some planned entries are openly unfinished.

This is research with the notebook still visible. Manning describes the pages as a commonplace book: a place to record evidence, revise a translation, and return to a difficult phrase after learning more. Many pages are built around citations rather than polished storytelling.

Preservation without pretending to be old

Unlike a personal homepage from 1997, Age of Datini explicitly dates its website to April 2021, while explaining that some research was assembled as early as 2013. That matters. Its inclusion here is an exception for a substantive, independent historical reference archive, not an attempt to pass a recent website off as an old one.

The source index contains, among other documents, regulations governing medieval Venetian garment makers, tailors in French towns, armor-related statutes, and texts about how people were equipped for work or war. Some have links to original-language documents; others remain announced works in progress. The author distinguishes these stages instead of inventing complete translations.

Even the site's publishing method fits its archival purpose. The homepage says it is a static site generated with shell scripts and Pandoc, with a deliberate interest in durable pages and accessible formatting. Its early-2024 redesign added a blogroll and update notes without hiding the older research.

The historical significance belongs primarily to the sources gathered and interpreted, not the age of the domain. This is what independent specialist preservation can look like when the webmaster acts as scholar, indexer, and editor all at once.

Explore the artifact notebook and the source texts.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.