Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms
Edited by Curtis Perry
The phrase ‘cultural materialism’, coined by Raymond Williams in 1977, names an approach to cultural analysis that interrogates the socio-economic conditions within which artefacts are produced as well as their participation in other ideological and material fields of culture. This approach, which has led to the emergence of cultural studies as a discipline, has also contributed to a sea-change within medieval and Renaissance scholarship. Disciplines that have traditionally studied cultural artefacts like literature and painting have increasingly emphasized the kinds of questions Williams articulated, focusing on the material production and ideological operation of objects once thought of in idealized or purely aesthetic terms. By the same token, historians – whose work, of necessity, has always tended to deal with the material traces of culture – have increasingly been willing to consider the social and ideological importance of art. The increasing popularity of this cultural studies approach to the past has in turn spurred investigation into other kinds of materiality. Recent historical and literary scholarship, for example, has become increasingly aware of the ways in which the lived materiality of the human body informs a range of cultural discourses. Insofar as it still typically attends to the material/ideological significance of the artefacts it considers, such scholarship falls within the generous confines of cultural studies. But where the Marxist tradition inherited from Williams tends to see economic relations as basic, this school of thought sees the experience of the body – always historicized, and understood as the basis for constant symbolic appropriation into other fields of discourse – as an alternative and perhaps more fundamental kind of materiality. Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance attests to the vitality of these approaches to materialist scholarship within and across different periods, disciplines, and national traditions.
- Edited by Curtis Perry
Other Titles in this Series
At the Table
Metaphorical and Material Cultures of Food in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Volume 18
Reinventing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Constructions of the Medieval and Early Modern Periods
Volume 1
Future of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Problems, Trends, and Opportunities for Research
Volume 2
Crossing Boundaries
Issues of Cultural and Individual Identities in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Volume 3
Translatio or the Transmission of Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Modes and Messages
Volume 13
Reading the Natural World in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Perceptions of the Environment and Ecology
Volume 46
Similar Books
Beyond Sovereign Courts
Agents and Practices in Early Modern Spanish and Habsburg Diplomacy
Volume 3
Circulation, Use, Impact
The Consumption of Architectural Books in the Early Modern Eastern Adriatic
Volume 1
Innovation and Medieval Communities
The Circulation of Ideas and Practices in and out of the Town (1200-1500)
Volume 63
Medieval Yeghegis, Armenia
History, Archaeology, Society. Local Multiplicities and Global Connections of a Rural Centre on the Silk Road(s)
Naples as Laboratory / Laboratorium Neapel
Style Options, Artistic Rivalry and Self Fashioning in Neapolitan Baroque Painting / Plurale Stilbildung, Kunstlerkonkurrenz und Self Fashioning in der neapolitanischen Barockmalerei
Power and Women in Southeast and Central Europe in Late Medieval and Early Modern Period (1300-1600)
Volume 10
Women in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
Studies from Western Europe and North Africa
Volume 44
Los oficios de los diplomas latinos de la Cataluna altomedieval
Estudio de las innovaciones lexicas: XI Premio Internacional de Tesis Doctorales Fundacion Ana Maria Aldama Roy de Estudios Latinos
Volume 106
A Communication Ethic of Dialogic Reformation
Nicholas of Cusa on Care for Communities in Crisis
Volume 106
Ambiguum 10 of Maximus the Confessor in Modern Study
Papers collected on the Occasion of the Budapest Colloquium on Saint Maximus, 3-4 February 2021
Volume 97