The Ordinary Centuries

Everyday life in the past, one object at a time

Daniel Fortier2 episodes2 min of audio73 playsEpisodic

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S1 · E2Sep 2, 20261:1151 plays Preview

One Cup and the Coffee Houses of Istanbul

A small Iznik coffee cup from around 1600 is the way into the Ottoman coffee house: who went, what they talked about, why the sultan tried to ban it, and how coffee reached Europe.

S1 · E1May 1, 20261:1522 plays Members

A Winter in New France, Starting with Snowshoes

A pair of 1690s snowshoes from a Montreal fur trader's estate inventory opens up his whole winter: the cold, the food, the debts, the Indigenous makers of the shoes, and the spring that paid for it.

About the show

Daniel Fortier worked as a conservator at a Quebec City museum for a decade and spent most of it handling objects nobody famous had ever touched: a chamber pot, a clay pipe, a child's shoe, a wooden spoon worn flat on one side. The Ordinary Centuries is his fortnightly series about how people actually lived in past centuries, told through the things they owned. Each episode of around forty minutes starts with one object and works outward to a whole day: a 1680s Montreal fur trader's winter from his snowshoes, a Hanseatic merchant's wife from her account book, an Ottoman coffee house from a single cup, a Victorian laundress from her mangle, an Edo-period Tokyo apartment from its rented futon. Daniel explains what the object tells us about sleep, food, work, dirt, money, childhood and death, and admits when the evidence runs out. For listeners who find kings boring and want to know how someone got through a Tuesday in 1720.

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