A Cultural History of Objects in the Renaissance

A Cultural History of Objects explores the history of the creation of objects from antiquity to the contemporary period in the western world, the changing ways in which objects have been understood, and their ongoing and cumulative consequences.

Our point of departure in assembling this volume is the observation that the category ‘objects’ represents a particular historical phenomenon that has developed since the first millennium BCE in the western world. This phenomenon comprises human-made artefacts, whether small or large, around which various practices – including production, consumption, commodification, trade and exchange, but also involving a whole range of other activities, attitudes and modes of thinking – have developed, all of which serve to distinguish material ‘objects’ from human ‘subjects’.

In other words, over the past three thousand years the West has seen the creation, maintenance and development of a series of particular attitudes to the material world, at the centre of which is the idea of the object. These attitudes have been worked out and enacted through practices concerned with the creation and use of artefacts. These practices have involved expanding scales of production, commodification, industry, technology and networks of distribution. As anthropology and archaeology has shown, this western history of objects stands in contrast with nonwestern and prehistoric attitudes to material culture, in which distinctions between subjects and objects are often less clearly drawn, or not drawn at all.

For this reason, the volumes will not present a history of technology or a history of artefacts or material culture, in which the geographical scope would necessarily be global and cross-cultural, and the temporal scope drawing from across world prehistory. Instead, the focus of the exercise will be the cultural history of objects – both the idea of objects and the physical enactment of that idea through production, exchange and consumption – from Classical Antiquity to the Modern Period. The introductory chapter to each volume will place the western history covered in the other chapters in a broader context, considering the wider context of cross-cultural exchanges with the non-western world, and the inheritance from previous historical and prehistoric periods.