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| CENTRE FOR REFORMATION AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES |  |
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EVERYDAY OBJECTS: MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN MATERIAL CULTURE AND ITS MEANINGS The Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon 27th-30th June 2007 Centre for Reformation and Early Modern
Studies NEW: Download a programme here and a booking form here. NEW: Information on student bursaries here. Confirmed speakers include: Julian Bowsher, Museum of London Tarnya Cooper, National Portrait Gallery Flora Dennis, V&A Chris Dyer, University of Leicester Geoff Egan, Museum of London David Gaimster, Society of Antiquaries Maria Hayward, AHRC Textile Conservation Centre Stephen Kelly, Queen’s Belfast Natasha Korda, Wesleyan Lena Orlin, UMBC Giorgio Riello, Warwick Barbara Rosenwein, Loyola John Styles, University of Hertfordshire John Thompson, Queen’s Belfast Jennifer Tiramani, Globe Theatre Bob Tittler, Concordia Evelyn Welch, Queen Mary UL
Reconstructing spaces through objects Books Music Shoes Pottery Land and property London’s Southbank culture; Feasting objects Domestic linen Paintings Tthe application of modern methods to the study of pre-modern objects.
Material culture has become an increasingly important aspect of the study of medieval and early modern societies. Always the foundation of museum practice and the subject of enquiry for archaeologists and social anthropologists, ways of presenting the objects themselves and the findings of research into them have been the focus of increasing critical attention and hence new methodologies. Material culture has more recently become a key feature of scholarly negotiation with a variety of social behaviours across a much wider range of Humanities disciplines. Within literature departments it has provided an invaluable way of negotiating the relationship between literary productions, their original forms and meanings, and the way they were consumed by their various audiences. Within history departments it has, although initially driven by late modern consumption work, begun to offer a focus for the study of production and consumption in earlier periods, a focus which takes account of the motivations of consumers, and therefore offers the possibility of bridging the historiographical gap between economic and social change. As a particular kind of discourse of contact with past societies, it has found its way into departments such as art history, where art objects have been treated both as objects of exchange, use and display and, more equivocally, as forms of historical evidence about the world of material things. More or less central to all these developments has been an interest in the access material culture study gives to lived experience at the level of the individual.
Participants will be encouraged to address the relationship between objects and, for example, gender, power, taste, ideology, space, morality, identity, skill, value, culture, ritual, use, narrative, process, choice, individual response, continental and colonial influence, materiality, emotion, technical innovation, regional and national identity, inclusion and exclusion, status, competition and social mobility, location and locality, political climate and legislation. In the course of these discussions, it is hoped that several significant subsidiary questions arising from the categorisation of medieval and early modern objects will be addressed. The study of material culture offers the possibility of cutting across the binary oppositions of traditional historiographies, and contributors are therefore encouraged to discuss 'everyday objects' as a way of questioning the relationship between public and private life and the changing connections between the sacred and the profane. However, it is also hoped that discussion will involve changes in contemporary categories of object more generally, and the boundaries between the usual and the unusual.
For further information please contact:
All images courtesy of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon |
This conference aims to encourage heritage practitioners
and academics from different disciplines to debate the key terms of its title.
It encourages them to discuss the methods by which they analyse material
culture, but also the way they present their findings: how the analytical
languages and methods of presentation used within their disciplines reconstruct
material culture for a wider audience. Those working on such issues both within
and outside the periods under consideration are invited to come and talk about
the transferability of methodologies - to debate the existence of a specifically
pre-modern material culture.
This conference will address the difficulties inherent in a
dialogue between diverse disciplinary research agendas, and it is therefore
structured in a way which foregrounds such debates. It aims to marry two
different approaches: one exploring the meaning of key terms and investigating
ways of writing about material culture within and across disciplines; the other
grouping papers around specific objects and categories of object to which
curators and scholars from different disciplines are invited to speak.