Session Abstract

In recent years historians have become increasingly interested in material culture and the histories objects can relate. This is a timely interest. The rise of globalization – which has rendered objects and artifacts once regionally specific increasingly ubiquitous – has intersected with the aftermath of profound disasters like the destruction of the World Trade Center, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, the earthquake in Haiti and the destruction wrought in Japan in 2010. These events have brought to the fore the power of objects to connect us to a past, to inform identities, and to speak poignantly if silently to events and their meaning. Many journalists, historians and sociologists of contemporary culture have suggested the parallel between modern object use and a medieval interest and cultivation of relics and other objects. By looking at the meaning and significance of material culture in the medieval past, this session addresses the histories material culture can illuminate with a particular focus on the relationship between objects and faith in the Middle Ages. Objects suggest facets of belief and religious practice that cannot be reconstructed from documents or elite texts. Papers would address how objects contributed to different understandings of belief and religious practice, whether they were constitutive of faith, such as shrines and tombs, or aids to spiritual practice like devotions books and reliquaries. How the ordinary became sanctified, or where and when the holy became mundane, routine, or remade, sheds light on issues of gender, domestic culture, consumption, circulation habits and mental world of men and women in the distant past. The intention of this session is to move beyond texts about material culture, to address what material alone makes clear. In this sense this session also addresses methodological questions crucial for historians more broadly, particularly as the study of material culture moves beyond the disciplines of archeology and anthropology. That material mattered, not only in the sense of value, but more tellingly in the symbolic sense of meaning given to or made by an object is a topic of increasing relevance for historians. The role of material objects in understanding religion, faith and its perception is also critical.