Medieval Materiality

Medieval Materiality

Bones, parchment, birthmarks, fossils, angels, crowns, the Eucharist: these are some of the materials of the Middle Ages.  As windows into a past concerned with things and the creation of things, they remind us that the medieval period must have a place in our ideas about and theories of materiality.  This issue of ELN brings together new scholarship from across the disciplines of history, art history, and literature to reflect on the recent interest in materiality – the “new materialism” and the “material turn.”  The contributors consider the making of things, the perception of things, the visual and mimetic function of things, the relationship between texts and things, and the immaterial in relation to the material.  As a whole the issue offers new insights into reading objects as texts, objects in texts, and texts as objects.