The Medieval History Journal, Volume 26, Issue 2, Page 353-375, November 2023.
On the 31st of March 1492, the Catholic monarchs Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Aragon and Castile issued the Edict of Expulsion. The Edict ordered that Spain’s Jews depart from Spanish lands. Before his enforced migration to Portugal, Rabbi Frain of Burgos left a small collection of items with his friend Doña Isabel Osorio. In May 1493 a further royal decree ordered that all Jewish goods which were in the possession of Spanish citizens should be handed over to the Crown in order to fund Christopher Columbus’ second journey to the Americas. Rabbi Frain’s belongings were thus sequestered and sold. This article contemplates the Rabbi Frain’s belongings through a theoretical lens, specifically, the work of Jane Bennett and Graham Harman, asking whether history can be told from the perspective of things and objects. The article ends with fabulation, reimagining the trauma of departure, when the borders between things and humans disappear.

The Medieval History Journal, Volume 26, Issue 2, Page 273-292, November 2023.
Roman sarcophagi are some of the most frequently reused objects from the Roman world: whether as spolia for new architectural projects or reused as tombs, as altars or even as flower pots. During the Middle Ages, however, a curious phenomenon emerged, that of the ‘reinvention’ of sarcophagi as tombs of saints. Starting in the eleventh century, a great number of sarcophagi were thought to have been the tombs of saints who had died in Provence during antiquity. The most interesting case in point is the tomb that became associated with Mary Magdalene. In 1279, a late antique tomb with Christian iconography representing New Testament scenes was thought to have been her original tomb. This belief found its origins in an eleventh-century hagiographical life, or vita, that claimed that Mary Magdalene, along with her sister Martha, drifted to Provence after being expelled from the Holy Land and died in the town of Saint-Maximin after having evangelised the region. This essay examines how a tangible thing is reinvented through the lens of a well-disseminated narrative legend.

The Medieval History Journal, Volume 26, Issue 2, Page 293-313, November 2023.
Among the many recipes contained within a fifteenth-century book of secrets housed in Venice’s Biblioteca Marciana, there is a singularly unique one that offers to create the ‘Sword of Roland the Paladin’. The recipe, supposedly learned from a necromancer from Bologna, would create a solution from a mélange of herbs and alchemical salts and would purportedly invest the blade with occult powers. This recipe for creating the ‘Sword of Roland’ promises the potential of an object, rather than an actual physical thing. Nonetheless, this specific recipe offers an exceptional lens through which to investigate the intersection of material objects and magic in the late medieval Mediterranean Basin. It does so in four ways: in the physical space of the Biblioteca Marciana, in the physical codex in which the recipe is found, in the actual objects required to make the solution and in the very urban space of Venice itself.

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.

The Medieval History Journal, Volume 26, Issue 2, Page 246-272, November 2023.
This article focuses on two medieval besamim containers in order to tease out their multisensory potential that appealed to the viewer’s mind and body simultaneously. Intricate and complex in design, the containers evoked a broad range of visually charged associations. The tower form was used in a variety of medieval Jewish ritual objects, appearing in wedding rings, Hanukkah lamps, Torah arks and scroll stave finials. Figured as miniature inhabitable spaces, liminal and ambiguous, they gesture to a vast landscape of real and imagined sites: sites of (be)longing and sites of the encounter with the divine. The besamim boxes in particular became the loci of theological, mnemonic and sensual associations that evoked the city of Jerusalem, terrestrial and celestial, expectantly attainable and eschatologically fraught. Delving into a range of sources—from medieval Jewish exegetical and poetic discussions of the messianic age to the Kabbalistic interpretation of the relationship between the soul and the smell—this article explores some of the ways these objects elicited cognitive, affective and physiological engagement with their users.