Anne E. Lester

Introduction: Materiality and Methodology: Ways of Knowing and Narrating

  • History
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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.

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