The Medieval History Journal, Volume 26, Issue 2, Page 209-245, November 2023.
This paper takes as a starting point the slippage between bodies and things as an idea and moment to interrogate an epistemology accessible through materiality. I explore the methodology of materiality, suggesting that one of the major contributions of material studies is a renewed attention to the dynamics of materialism embedded in the objects themselves: those unnamed subjects who lie behind or just beyond an object’s presence, who played a role in its making, its movement and its meaning. To this end, the paper takes shape around a series of case studies of bodies and/as things drawn from the crusader world described by Jean de Joinville, namely stones, cloth and captives (bodies made into things). Attendant with these objects were deeper theological and ontological questions about the role of matter in relation to faith and the divine. The period of the crusades was a particularly revealing moment for the tensions and beliefs surrounding the work of material religion. By looking at these case studies I hope to bridge the divide between intellectual and theological concerns with materiality and the material presence of human labour in things and thereby to think sociologically with materiality. This is an invitation to take up the imperative behind material studies to go beyond words and see the subjects behind the objects.
Author Archives: Anne E. Lester
Introduction: Materiality and Methodology: Ways of Knowing and Narrating
The Medieval History Journal, Volume 26, Issue 2, Page 183-208, November 2023.
Over the past 20 years, a renewed interest in material culture, materialism and materiality has shaped the practice of history in new ways moving the discipline ‘beyond words’ to consider the worlds within things. Attention to the dynamics of materials and production has expanded ways of knowing the past and begun to reshape the kinds of narratives that historians craft. Objects and things can be said to constitute an additional archival repertoire, but objects also require their own ways of reading, methods of analysis and theoretical orientations, especially as we integrate materiality into the robust ways of writing history that have traditionally relied upon the written record alone. Most historians agree that it is not possible to offer a materialist reading in the absence of written sources. Yet, how do the two work together? This special issue is dedicated to exploring the following related questions: What does materiality’s methodology entail? What modes of investigation and narration are deployed in a material analysis? How does a material focus shape and change the historian’s possibilities for narrative and argument? How does the study of objects and things in the medieval and the early modern periods open new ways of writing about and conceptualising a broader and more connected world? The essays gathered in this Special Issue contribute to an understanding of materiality that seeks to facilitate a more convergent understanding of our medieval and early modern pasts.
Over the past 20 years, a renewed interest in material culture, materialism and materiality has shaped the practice of history in new ways moving the discipline ‘beyond words’ to consider the worlds within things. Attention to the dynamics of materials and production has expanded ways of knowing the past and begun to reshape the kinds of narratives that historians craft. Objects and things can be said to constitute an additional archival repertoire, but objects also require their own ways of reading, methods of analysis and theoretical orientations, especially as we integrate materiality into the robust ways of writing history that have traditionally relied upon the written record alone. Most historians agree that it is not possible to offer a materialist reading in the absence of written sources. Yet, how do the two work together? This special issue is dedicated to exploring the following related questions: What does materiality’s methodology entail? What modes of investigation and narration are deployed in a material analysis? How does a material focus shape and change the historian’s possibilities for narrative and argument? How does the study of objects and things in the medieval and the early modern periods open new ways of writing about and conceptualising a broader and more connected world? The essays gathered in this Special Issue contribute to an understanding of materiality that seeks to facilitate a more convergent understanding of our medieval and early modern pasts.