Material culture
More general subjects:
Travelling Matters across the Mediterranean
Rereading, Reshaping, Reusing Objects (10th–20th centuries)
In the last two decades objects have become increasingly relevant to historical studies as the primary focus of research discussing cross-cultural relations. Objects are produced used modified preserved and destroyed according to historically specific political and cultural settings thus providing researchers with information and insights about their original background. However they can also throw light on a large array of cross-cultural encounters when their mobility is put to the fore. Objects can move by being bought gifted bartered and sold borrowed or stolen collected and dispersed just as they can be modified repaired reshaped repurposed and destroyed in the process.
The Mediterranean as a barrier and as a meeting place for different polities and communities and as the setting of conflicted experiences of cultural political economic and social transformation easily lends itself to this kind of historical analysis. Featuring articles on Byzantine imperial silks and bronze doors from southern Italy eastern luxuries in Istanbul and African bolsas from the Canary Islands Arabic geographies and Hebrew religious texts travelling from shore to shore and from manuscript to the press and the ‘dead’ bodies of holy women and men this volume intends to tackle objects as sources and subjects of the history of cross-cultural encounters in innovative ways: focusing on the ‘second-handedness’ of displaced objects across the Mediterranean the volume intersects different chronologies — from antiquity to the present-day — and varying scales from the individual objects to the much larger one of the histories of their reinterpretation and repurposing.
Magnification and Miniaturization in Religious Communication in Antiquity and Modernity
Materialities and Meanings
Human agents might not be the measure of all things. Nonetheless human bodies and their bodily dimensions often are with size impacting on the ways in which we conceive of interact with and relate to the world around us. The scaling up or down of features - magnification and miniaturization - is particularly evident in the creation of anthropogenic items intended for use in religious ritual and here sizing can be employed as a deliberate strategy to encourage shock and awe admiration and deterrence among spectators.
Taking as its starting point the concept of ‘materialities and meanings’ this volume explores how human perceptions and understanding of magnified and miniaturized forms and structures are shaped and changed both synchronically and diachronically by our understanding of the human body and its size and the impact that this has in our relationship with the wider world in the context of ritual practices. The chapters collected here consider a range of questions from a discussion on the essentials of magnification or miniaturization to an exploration of the impact of such strategies on humans and their wider socio-political ramifications. Together these chapters contribute to a unique discussion that offers new insights into ‘materialities and meanings’ the creation of items for ritual and the ways in which they influence human perception and understanding.
Maternal Materialities
Objects, Rituals and Material Evidence of Medieval and Early Modern Childbirth
Although little is known of the process surrounding early modern childbirth the lack of written testimonials and technical descriptions does not preclude the possibility of reconstructing the reality of this elusive space: drawing on the evidence of clothing food rites and customs this collection of essays seeks to give tangible form to the experience of childbirth through the analysis of physical objects and rituals.
An important addition to the literature of material culture and ‘wordly goods’ this collection of twenty-three essays from international scholars offers a novel approach to the study of pre- and early modern birth by extending its reach beyond the birthing event to include issues concerning the management of pregnancy and post-partum healing.
Grouped into five broad areas the essays explore the material advantages and disadvantages of motherhood the food and objects present in the birthing room the evidence and memorialization of death in childbirth attitudes towards the pregnant body the material culture of healing and the ritual items used during childbirth.
Perception and Awareness: Artefacts and Imageries in Medieval European Jewish Cultures
What did the world look like for Jews living in medieval Europe? How did they perceive and make use of the elements of their daily life from items on the street to religious iconography within holy spaces — in particular synagogues and at the exterior of churches — and profane elements from the home? And how did they experience the visual and material cultures of their non-Jewish neighbours?
These questions form the core of this volume which explores pre-modern Jewish approaches to images and material objects from a variety of perspectives. From clothing to manuscripts and from lighting devices to the understanding of the invisible the chapters gathered together in this multifaceted volume combine analyses of images and artefacts together with in-depth analyses of texts to offer fresh insights into the visual cultures that informed the world of European Jews in the Middle Ages.
The Museum of Renaissance Music
A History in 100 Exhibits
This book collates 100 exhibits with accompanying essays as an imaginary museum dedicated to the musical cultures of Renaissance Europe at home and in its global horizons. It is a history through artefacts-materials tools instruments art objects images texts and spaces-and their witness to the priorities and activities of people in the past as they addressed their world through music. The result is a history by collage revealing overlapping musical practices and meanings-not only those of the elite but reflecting the everyday cacophony of a diverse culture and its musics. Through the lens of its exhibits this museum surveys music’s central role in culture and lived experience in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe offering interest and insights well beyond the strictly musicological field.
The Nun’s Cell as Mirror, Memoir, and Metaphor in Convent Life
Study of the Models of Nuns’ Cells from the Collection of the Trésors de Ferveur
In the eighteenth through the early twentieth century French nuns from various orders created miniature simulacra of the cells in which they slept studied and performed their devotions. Each diorama contains an effigy of the nun a prie-Dieu devotional objects such as a crucifix handiwork and artifacts to foster study and contemplation. This book examines the lives of the brides of Christ as depicted in these dioramas proposing that the material objects found in the chambers trace the contours of the collective and individual identities of the nuns who created these cells. Viewed as a type of memoir the cells furnish the sisters a stage upon which to rehearse the meaning of their lives. The dioramas create a tension between the private and public presentations of the self between verisimilitude and self-fashioning and between reality and representation. The book contextualizes the miniature cells within the larger discourse of gender identity self-representation monastic devotion and the power wielded by the aesthetics of scale.
Medieval Art at the Intersection of Visuality and Material Culture
Studies in the ‘Semantics of Vision’
Over the last two decades the historiography of medieval art has been defined by two seemingly contradictory trends: a focus on questions of visuality and more recently an emphasis on materiality. The latter which has encouraged multi-sensorial approaches to medieval art has come to be perceived as a counterpoint to the study of visuality as defined in ocularcentric terms.
Bringing together specialists from different areas of art history this book grapples with this dialectic and poses new avenues for reconciling these two opposing tendencies. The essays in this volume demonstrate the necessity of returning to questions of visuality taking into account the insights gained from the ‘material turn’. They highlight conceptions of vision that attribute a haptic quality to the act of seeing and draw on bodily perception to shed new light on visuality in the Middle Ages.
Les transferts culturels dans les mondes normands médiévaux (viii e–xii e siècle)
Objets, acteurs et passeurs
Les objets des transferts culturels sont innombrables et leur étude est particulièrement importante pour comprendre les mondes normands médiévaux et leurs multiples interfaces avec le monde scandinave les îles Britanniques l’Europe orientale et la Méditerranée. Cet ouvrage s’intéresse aux processus de transmission et de réception d’adaptation d’adoption ou de rejet en montrant comment ces dynamiques font évoluer les cultures entre le VIIIe et le XIIe siècle. Différents types d’objets sont ainsi abordés qu’ils soient matériels (broderie ; accessoires du costume ; artefacts en fer ; monnaies ; manuscrits ; monuments funéraires ; sculptures…) ou immatériels (savoir-faire modèles littéraires langue pratiques religieuses et funéraires idéologie du pouvoir serment…) dont quelques-uns sont des ‘monuments’ emblématiques des mondes normands (la Tapisserie de Bayeux ; les mosaïques du sol de la cathédrale d’Otrante). Une attention particulière a été attachée à la mise en contexte de ces objets permettant d’en saisir la réinterprétation dans des environnements socio-culturels différents. L’ouvrage permet également de questionner le rôle et l’implication des acteurs des transferts culturels (élites aristocratiques hommes d’Église marchands artisans lettrés copistes …) du fait de leur statut ou leur fonction mais aussi selon leur aptitude à promouvoir un transfert. Il met en lumière des liens et des réseaux jusque-là mal connus la circulation des modèles qui intéresse une multitude d’objets et de productions et il contribue ainsi à explorer des situations de contact entre des populations différentes et la construction de leurs interactions.
Means of Christian Conversion in Late Antiquity
Objects, Bodies, and Rituals
This volume presents the proceedings of the conference Materiality and Conversion: The Role of Material and Visual Cultures in the Christianization of the Latin West organized by the Centre for Early Medieval Studies in 2020. Its contributions thus focus on the Christianization of the Roman Empire between the fourth and sixth centuries. The studies examine the religious change through the “material turn” approach building on the material and sensorial dimension of Christian conversion and especially the baptismal rite as one of the key components of the process. The material and visual cultures are regarded as vectors and witnesses of conversion to Christianity while human body is viewed as one of the agents in ritual actions. The volume covers a wide range of topics including the prebaptismal purification the moment of immersion in the baptismal font the postbaptismal alteration of perception as well as the continuous changes in funeral forms. As such the papers attempt to shed more light on the role of materiality in the complex and rapid conversion to Christianity in Late Antique West.
Liturgy and Sequences of the Sainte-Chapelle
Music, Relics, and Sacral Kingship in Thirteenth-Century France
The book revolves around some of the most important relics of Christendom - chief among them the Crown of Thorns - and the ways in which they became effectively personal objects of devotion notwithstanding their ostensibly universal appeal. It was France that laid claim to the Passion and other relics in the middle of the thirteenth century in a campaign that involved the construction of a new magnificent chapel - the Sainte-Chapelle - designed specifically to display the relics and the composition of new liturgies to celebrate and focus attention on them. As inert objects relics could not accomplish much without being ‘activated’ one way or the other whether in prose poetry paintings statues or in music. It is these modes of activation that endowed the substance of relics with identity and meaning that made them so powerful and effective. The liturgies studied in this book were some of the most critical mechanisms of activation; they enabled the power of the Sainte-Chapelle relics articulated the nature of that power and proclaimed it far and wide. Nowhere is this more evident than in the sequences memorializing these relics which were chiefly cultivated and championed at the Sainte-Chapelle. This book examines these sequences and the ways in which they give prominence to the underlying agenda of the French monarchy by promoting and naturalizing the notion of sacral kingship rooted in biblical kingship.
Meanings of Water in Early Medieval England
Water is both a practical and symbolic element. Whether a drop blessed by saintly relics or a river flowing to the sea water formed part of the natural landscapes religious lives cultural expressions and physical needs of medieval women and men.
This volume adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to enlarge our understanding of the overlapping qualities of water in early England (c. 400 – c. 1100). Scholars from the fields of archaeology history literature religion and art history come together to approach water and its diverse cultural manifestations in the early Middle Ages. Individual essays include investigations of the agency of water and its inhabitants in Old English and Latin literature divine and demonic waters littoral landscapes of church archaeology and ritual visual and aural properties of water and human passage through water. As a whole the volume addresses how water in the environment functioned on multiple levels allowing us to examine the early medieval intersections between the earthly and heavenly the physical and conceptual and the material and textual within a single element.
The Hidden Life of Textiles in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean
Contexts and Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Islamic, Latinate and Eastern Christian Worlds
The book contains published papers of the conference 'Textiles & Identity in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean: Paradigms of Contexts and Cross-Cultural Exchanges' of the British School at Athens held at the (Benaki) Museum of Islamic Art in 2016 as well as some new contributions.
The focus in this wide-ranging collection of studies by key scholars in the field is on textiles and their functions in various Mediterranean contexts (and beyond) during medieval and post-medieval times (ca. 10th-19th c.). The scope of the contributions encompasses archaeological anthropological and art historical perspectives on a great variety of subjects such as textiles from the Byzantine Empire and the Medieval Islamic World (e.g. Spain Mamluk Egypt Seljuk Anatolia) as well as the production and use of textiles in Italy the Ottoman Empire Armenia and Ethiopia. The volume offers a state-of-the-art of an often still hardly known area of study of textiles as historical and cultural sources of information which makes it essential reading for scholars and a larger audience alike.
The book includes contributions by Laura Rodríguez Peinado Ana Cabrera-Lafuente Avinoam Shalem Scott Redford Maria Sardi Vera-Simone Schulz Nikolaos Vryzidis Marielle Martiniani-Reber Elena Papastavrou Jacopo Gnisci and Dickran Kouymjian.
Games and Visual Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance games were not an idle pastime but were in fact important tools for exploring transmitting enhancing subverting and challenging social practices and their rules. Their study through both visual and material sources offers a unique insight into medieval and early modern gaming culture shedding light not only on why where when with whom and in what conditions and circumstances people played games but also on the variety of interpretations that they had of games and play. Representations of games and of artefacts associated with games also often served to communicate complex ideas on topics that ranged from war to love and from politics to theology.
This volume offers a particular focus onto the type of games that required little or no physical exertion and that consequently all people could enjoy regardless of age gender status occupation or religion. The representations and artefacts discussed here by contributors who come from varied disciplines including history literary studies art history and archaeology cover a wide geographical and chronological range from Spain to Scandinavia to the Ottoman Turkey and from the early medieval period to the seventeenth century and beyond. Far from offering the ‘last word’ on the subject it is hoped that this volume will encourage further studies.
Luxury and the Ethics of Greed in Early Modern Italy
This book unravels the complex interaction of the paradigms of luxury and greed which lie at the origins of modern consumption practices. In the Western world the phenomenon of luxury and the ethical dilemmas it raised appeared for the first time since antiquity in early modern Italy. Here luxury emerged as a core idea in the conceptualization of consumption. Simultaneously greed - which manifested in new and unrestrained consumption practices - came under close ethical scrutiny. As the buying power of new classes gained pace these paradigms evolved as they continued both to influence and be influenced by other emerging global cultures through the early modern period.
After defining luxury and greed in their historical contexts the volume’s chapters elucidate new consumptive goods from chocolate to official robes of state; they examine how ideas about and objects of luxury and greed were disseminated through print diplomacy and gift-giving; and they reveal how even the most elite of consumers could fake their luxury objects. A group of international scholars from a range of disciplines thereby provide a new appraisal and vision of luxury and the ethics of greed in early modern Italy.
The Power of Textiles
Tapestries of the Burgundian Dominions (1363–1477)
Textiles were used as markers of distinction throughout the Middle Ages and their production was of great economic importance to emerging and established polities. This book explores tapestry in one of the greatest textile producing regions the Burgundian Dominions c. 1363-1477. It uses documentary evidence to reconstruct and analyse the production manufacture and use of tapestry. It begins by identifying the suppliers of tapestry to the dukes of Burgundy and their ability to spin webs between city and court. It proceeds by considering the forms of tapestry and their functions for urban and courtly consumers. It then observes the ways in which tapestry constructed social relations as part of gift-giving strategies. It concludes by exploring what the re-use repair and remaking of tapestry reveals about its value to urban and courtly consumers. By taking an object-centred approach through documentary sources this book emphasises that the particular characteristics of tapestry shaped the strategies of those who supplied it and the ways it performed and constructed social relations. Thus the book offers a contribution to the historical understanding of textiles as objects that contributed to the projection of social status and the cultural construction of political authority in the Burgundian polity.
Travels and Mobilities in the Middle Ages
From the Atlantic to the Black Sea
This collection of research which brings together contributions from scholars around the world reflects the range and variety of work that is currently being undertaken in the field of travel and mobility in the European Middle Ages. The essays draw on diverse methodological approaches from the archival and literary to the art historical and archaeological. The collection focuses not just on key medieval modes of travel and mobility but also on themes whose relevance continues to resonate in the modern world. Topics touched upon include religious and diplomatic journeys migration mobility and governance gendered mobilities material culture and mobility mobility and disability travel and status and notions of home and abroad. Broad themes are approached through case studies of individuals families and groups ranging from kings queens and nobles to friars exiles and students. The geographical reach of the collection is particularly broad encompassing travellers from Southern Western Northern Central and Eastern Europe and journeys to destinations as diverse as Scandinavia the Black Sea the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. A wide-ranging and detailed introduction situates the collection in its scholarly context.
At the Table
Metaphorical and Material Cultures of Food in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
This volume surveys recent studies of the metaphorical and material facets of food in medieval and early modern Europe. Ranging from literary historical and political analyses to archaeological and botanical ones this collection explores food as a nexus of pre-modern European culture. Food and feasting are understood not simply as the consumption of material goods but also as the figurative and symbolic representations of culture. To understand the myriad ways in which discourses about food and feasting are mobilized during this period is to better understand the fundamental role food and feasting played in the development of Europeans’ habitual patterns of behavior and of thought.
Borders, Barriers, and Ethnogenesis
Frontiers in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages
This collection addresses an audience of early medievalists with an interest in material culture and its use in building ethnic boundaries. The traditional concept of frontier is a subject of current debate by historians and archaeologists alike but sometimes without reference to each other. For instance the social and cultural construction of (political) frontiers remains outside the current focus of post-processualist archaeology despite the significance of borders for the representation of power one of the most popular topics with archaeologists interested in symbols and ideology. Similarly historians of the early Middle Ages have only recently developed an interest in the political manipulation of cultural difference across state frontiers. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this new direction of research is the emphasis on political frontiers as crucial for the creation rather than separation of ethnic configurations. Recent work on the relation between monastic communities and political frontiers has shown the potential for a study of frontier symbolism. The idea of the present volume grew out of the realization that there was a great deal of new work being done in this direction which deserved a wider audience. This was true both of studies of late antique frontiers and of more recent research on medieval frontier societies. In addition several authors address the issue of religious identities and their relations with ethnicity and state ideology. In that respect the book is directed to a large audience particularly because of its wide geographical range from Iberia and the Balkans to Cilicia and Iran.
Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms
The phrase ‘cultural materialism’ names an approach to cultural analysis that interrogates the socio-economic conditions within which artefacts are produced as well as their participation in other ideological and material fields of culture. Disciplines that have traditionally studied cultural artefacts like literature and painting have increasingly focused on the material production and ideological operation of objects once thought of in idealized or purely aesthetic terms. By the same token historians - whose work of necessity has always tended to deal with the material traces of culture - have increasingly been willing to consider the social and ideological importance of art. The increasing popularity of this cultural studies approach to the past has in turn spurred investigation into other kinds of materiality. Recent historical and literary scholarship for example has become increasingly aware of the ways in which the lived materiality of the human body informs a range of cultural discources.