medieval things: materiality, historicism, and the premodern object

© 2008 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Literature Compass 5/6 (2008): 1060–1080, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00588.x

Medieval Things: Materiality, Historicism, and the Premodern Object

Kellie Robertson*University of Wisconsin, Madison

AbstractHow do we read the premodern representation of objects? This essay surveys recentapproaches to medieval literature and culture that focus attention on ‘objecthood’and the debates that it inspired in the premodern period. This work eschews theexclusive focus on ‘subjectivity’ that was the hallmark of late twentieth-centurypoststructuralist accounts of medieval literature in Britain. Subjects do not disappearin these readings, however; they are instead shown to be dialogically produced,always in conversation with things. In offering a genealogy of what has come tobe known as ‘thing theory,’ this survey interrogates a number of related (but notnecessarily compatible) strains of materialism, including those influenced byMarxism, phenomenology, sociology, and New Historicism. Neither a return toold positivist historical models seeking ‘the thing itself ’ nor a retreat from thesignificant questions posed by poststructuralist theory, these object-oriented studiesall seek ways of approaching narrated things that do not render them merely‘mirrors’ of human desires or just signs pointing us toward the ‘inner lives’ ofliterary personas. Instead, this work takes seriously the idea that premodern objectswere endowed with an autonomy and agency that was largely misrecognized inthe wake of Enlightenment empiricism. Taking Geoffrey Chaucer’s CanterburyTales as a point of departure, this essay argues that where and how the linebetween human and nonhuman, subject and object, society and nature getsdrawn is always an ideological process. The work surveyed here attempts to makeavailable some of the manifold cultural pressures that influenced this permeableboundary across the Middle Ages.

A Marchant was ther with a forked berd,In mottelee [parti-colored cloth], and hye on horse he sat;Upon his heed a Flaundryssh [Flemish] bever hat,His bootes clasped faire and fetisly [elegantly].His resons [remarks] he spak ful solempnely,Sownynge [making known] alwey th’encrees of his wynnyng.He wolde the see were kept for any thyngBitwixe Middelburgh and Orewelle.Wel koude he in eschaunge sheeldes selle.This worthy man ful wel his wit bisette [used]:Ther wiste [knew] no wight [man] that he was in dette,

© 2008 The Author Literature Compass 5/6 (2008): 1060–1080, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00588.xJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Medieval Things 1061

So estatly [dignified] was he of his governaunceWith his bargaynes and with his chevyssaunce [borrowing].For sothe he was a worthy man with alle,But, sooth to seyn, I noot how men hym calle.

– General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, ll. 270–841

Insofar as Chaucer’s Merchant is described in terms of both what he lookslike and what he does, he is similar to the majority of Chaucer’s pilgrims,whom the narrator describes with respect to ‘condicioun’, ‘degree’, and‘array’. Chaucer’s colorful descriptions of the pilgrims’ circumstances, socialclass, and clothing showcase a wide variety of medieval objects, includingdirty tunics, ambiguously inscribed rosaries, love-knot pins, fake relics,beaver hats, and sturdy staffs. Some of these items were exotic (such asthe drugs and medicines of the Physician), but most would have beenintimately familiar to Chaucer’s medieval audience (the coverchiefs, girdles,pouches, and food stuffs). In attempting to understand Chaucer’s poeticrepresentation of these objects, critics have turned most frequently to estatesliterature (which represented the moral failings of whole professional classes)and sumptuary legislation (which regulated clothing and consumption onthe basis of an individual’s social class). While such historical discoursesprovide a useful context for thinking about why Chaucer might have asso-ciated certain objects with a given pilgrim, they leave largely unansweredthe arguably more central question of how medieval people envisionedtheir relationships with everyday things.

Moreover, to ask why this particular merchant is associated with theseparticular objects – an expensive beaver hat and elegant boot clasps – isto assume that his character somehow precedes the objects which have, inturn, been ‘chosen’ by ‘him’. The notion that Chaucer’s pilgrims existprior to their tales (or their accoutrements) has been effectively squashedby post-structuralist critics such as Marshall Leicester and Lee Patterson.These critics have effectively argued that we need presuppose neither anexternal poet whose presence guarantees the authentic meaning of thetext nor pre-existing pilgrim narrators who ‘choose’ their own languageor ‘voice’; instead, the subject is an effect of Chaucer’s language. For thesecritics, there is no ‘there’ there, only a text.2 While these importantinsights have helped medieval literary scholars grapple with the problem ofvoice and subjectivity in medieval texts (particularly those with problematicfirst-person narrators), they have also deflected attention away from themateriality of the objects represented in these texts.

This focus on ‘subjects’ and ‘subjectivity’ has obscured the very intenseinterest that medieval texts show in objects and their ability to shapehuman consciousness. Only recently have Chaucerian objects been rescuedfrom the sumptuary limbo where they have long languished. Imagininghow the Merchant is conjured by the things in his portrait (rather thanassuming their presence to be merely the ‘effect’ of a persona, linguisticor otherwise) allows us some access to the radically different way that

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medieval people imagined their own relation to the world of ostensiblyinanimate objects. For many Chaucer critics, a pilgrim’s possessions grantunmediated access to the inner precincts of a pilgrim’s psyche: on thisview, the Merchant’s hat functions either as confirmation of his prosperousand discrete nature or as a subversive clue to his poorly concealed superbia,his inappropriate aping of his social betters, and a mark of his dangeroussocial climbing. These readings move directly from the objects (clothing,hat, boots) to the disposition; the material outside is transparently indexicalin relation to the moral inside.3

While medieval disciplinary practices such as sumptuary laws and thescience of physiognomy encouraged this mode of indexical reading, theMerchant’s description resists this kind of uncomplicated epistemologicalleap, qualifying what we can know about insides from a pilgrim’s outsides,cautioning us about using things instrumentally as a mirror for the human.The narrator knows the provenance of the Merchant’s hat, but not thepilgrim’s name. Similarly, the narrator minutely observes the pilgrim’sboot lacings but is either unable or unwilling to say whether or not theMerchant is in debt. How can the omniscient narrator of the GeneralPrologue know so much about things and know so little about dispositions?Is Chaucer’s audience asked to fill in the knowledge gaps or, instead, tomeditate on the epistemological limitations of this mode of reading itself?To what extent can inanimate objects function as a ‘reflection’ of humansubjects? Moreover, where does the natural world of ‘things’ end and thesocial world of the ‘human’ begin? These questions suggest that to explorethe status of medieval objects inevitably necessitates a reconsideration ofthe status of the medieval subject.

This essay seeks to reconsider the ‘medieval thing’ in light of recentcritical discussion about the ontological status of represented objects pri-marily in the disciplines of history and literature. The essay charts a seriesof arguments, both modern and premodern, about how the historicallycontingent line between the human and the non-human gets drawn inmedieval and early modern Britain. There is an enormous body of workon medieval things to date: literary scholars have explored the narrativeresonance of symbolic objects such as the pearl in the Middle English Pearland the girdle in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; historians have paidcareful attention to the estates and sumptuary implications of clothing andfood stuffs; archeologists and museum curators have documented textiles,pottery, furniture, and other artifacts; art historians have written extensivelyon the representation of every imaginable category of object; and sociol-ogists have explored the nature of commodities and the evolving roles thatthey played in early societies. My discussion will be limited, however, tosurveying recent work that looks specifically at what the premodern thingcan tell us about the dynamic relation between the animate and inanimaterealms – what the nonhuman can tell us about our desires for the human– engaging only peripherally with this larger body of scholarship whose



primary purpose is documenting the instrumental value of objects in anexclusively human history of production and consumption.4

In surveying work in medieval and early modern studies on the statusof the premodern thing, the essay will also investigate why the realm ofphenomenal things has come to be the place where arguments about whatcounts as ‘modern’ have been made in recent years. The historian andphilosopher of science Bruno Latour has argued that the dividing linebetween the human world and the world of natural phenomena – the linebetween subject and object, person and thing – was much more porousprior to the seventeenth century. For Latour, it was the Enlightenmentrationalism of scientists like Boyle that constituted ‘nature’ as an object ofexperimental knowledge, effectively walled off from subjective culture,while philosophers like Hobbes narrowed the rubric of ‘politics’ to referonly to the society of humans, independent from the natural. Latourargues that ‘modernity’ is based on this false binary of nature-culture, abinary dependent on ritualized processes of ‘purification’ that assignednon-speaking things to the domain of the natural as opposed to thehuman. This particular species of seventeenth-century empirical fantasywas what allowed a person to imagine her- or himself as completelyseparate from the world of objects. On this view, the premodern objectwould not have been subject to the sharp differentiation between thecultural and the natural, the human and the thing, subject and object thatfollowed the Enlightenment.

While Latour’s paradigm entails several theoretical problems that arebeyond the scope of this essay, the argument that his work has inspired isuseful for thinking about the ways in which the categories of the ‘human’and the ‘non-human’ are both similarly subject to construction, despite thefact that, since at least the seventeenth century, they have been consistentlymade to appear ‘natural’. Post-Enlightenment common sense encouragesus to view things as inert, mute witnesses to the life of active agents, totrain our attention on the human subjects who look at, move around, andorganize nonhuman things. Premodern things have no such reticence andpremodern subjects are often shown to be at the mercy of ‘their’ things.When looking at the premodern thing and its varied representations, thecritic’s goal is thus not merely to discover what counts as ‘thing’ asopposed to ‘human’ – what is ‘nature’ as opposed to ‘culture’ – in anygiven moment, but to search for the pressures that determined how thedividing line between the two got drawn. For a pre-seventeenth centuryworld, a world where the continuum between humans and things waseven more fluid according to Latour, evidence of the mutually constitutiverelation of humans and things survives in literature, chronicles, legaldocuments, scholastic debates about natural philosophy, manuscriptillumination, and ecclesiastical art among other places. Such representationscan help us to understand where the Merchant begins and his multi-coloredcoat, his hat, and his boots end. Moreover, such sources can help us to



trace the ways that Chaucer’s narrative manifests the mutual constitutionof subjects and objects as well as the potential limits of both representationand human cognition.

Approaching the Premodern Thing

The medieval and early modern word ‘thyng’ covered a broad variety ofsignifiers – some animate, some not. The Old English word ‘þing’ coulddesignate a political or judicial assembly, as when Beowulf boasts toHrothgar that he will ‘gehegan ðing’ – literally, hold a meeting – withGrendel (426). For Chaucer’s Man of Law, ‘to speak of holy things’ (709)meant not to speak of things in the modern sense at all but to speak ofvirtuous wives. Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is lauded as ‘Thou noble thing’(IV.4.122), while Mistress Quickly is subject to Falstaff ’s derogatory, ‘Go,you thing, go!’ in 1 Henry IV (III.3.115). The wide semantic range of‘thyng’ in medieval and early modern English – encompassing as it didboth the human and the non-human – is, of course, lost to us modernsfor whom ‘thing’ designates almost exclusively an inanimate object.

Anatomizing both the modern and the premodern thing has long beenthe domain of historians, economists, archeologists, conservationists,sociologists, anthropologists, and ethnographers. Marx’s notion of‘commodity fetishism’ – the idea that capitalism encourages people tomisrecognize their own labor as inherent in objects rather than as inherentin themselves – was the point of departure for much twentieth-centurydiscussion of how things and humans interact. Moving from the use valueof things that are sold to the cultural value of things that are given orexchanged, the sociologist Marcel Mauss argued that a given objectobtains a quasi-spiritual power that binds receiver and giver together; thegift’s power is an example of how ostensibly inanimate things can constitutehuman communities, blurring the strict line between human and thing,since ‘objects are never completely separated from the men who givethem’. In a similar vein, the structuralist critic Roland Barthes interrogatesobjects familiar in everyday French life – wine, detergent, magazines – inorder to demonstrate how bourgeois culture endows such quotidianentities with their own values and how the objects, in turn, become asignifier for transmitting such values.

These insights formed the basis for the revival of an interest in thingsin the 1980s and 90s. The diverse essays collected in Arjun Appadurai’sinfluential collection, The Social Life of Things (1986), all interrogate thecirculation of commodities and seek to refocus attention on the objectscirculated rather than exclusively on the value judgements made aboutthem by subjects. Appadurai argues that ‘even though from a theoreticalpoint of view, human actors encode things with significance, from amethodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminatetheir human and social context’ (5). This desire to shift the balance from



person to thing, to redress the implicit imbalance found in the earlierworks of Marx and Mauss, is also found in Patricia Spyer’s Border Fetishisms(1998). The authors of these essays all take William Pietz’s interpretationof the fetish – a derogatory term used to denote an object endowed withanimate qualities by so-called ‘primitive’ societies – and its origin inEuropean colonialism as a point of departure for thinking about a numberof ‘hybrid objects’ that blur the boundary between human subjects andnatural or manmade objects: pieces of Sumbanese cloth, Surinamebrooms, stolen Georgian lace, and even Karl Marx’s coat. In their analysesof such objects, most of these essays consider how the social mobility ofproperty influences its owners. Ultimately, however, the central questionof these essays is one of representation: what is at stake in how werepresent objects that appear to straddle the human-thing divide? Thisquestion also began to inform work in literary criticism at this time. Inanalyzing the relation of narrative to its objects, literary critic Susan Stewartfinds that some objects – the miniature, the gigantic – have the power togenerate narrative, while other narratives – of the souvenir, of the collection– generate their own objects: ‘the creation of such narrated objectsdepends upon the fictions and abstractions of the bourgeois self on theone hand and the exchange economy on the other’ (xiii).

The genealogy of how subjects relate to objects is the topic of a specialissue of Critical Inquiry about ‘Things’ (2001) edited by Bill Brown. Theterm ‘thing’ as Bill Brown reminds us, does not name an inert object butrather a subject-object relationship. As anthropologists such as CorneliusCastoriadis and Marcel Mauss have argued, this relation is determined bythe society in which one finds oneself: in some societies, things are active,animated, and sentient, while, in others, they are insensible, passive, andpossessed. Representations of objects are thus less useful for discovering‘epistemological or phenomenological truth’ about the ‘reality’ of pastobjects, and more useful, as Brown makes clear, for discovering ‘the truthabout what force things or the question of things might have in eachsociety’ (‘Things’ 9). Similar re-assessments of the materiality of the thingand its role in the construction of both individual identity and transnationalsystems of value can be found in collections edited by Paul Graves-Brown,Fred R. Myers, and Daniel Miller.

If the explosion of ‘thing theory’ (as it has come to be called) has itsroots in a well-worn groove of historical materialism, it can also becontextualized in terms of the critical long durée. James A. Knapp andJeffrey Pence see this most recent ‘return to things’ as part of a longercyclical movement between the ‘thing’ of nineteenth- and twentieth-century materialist discourses and the ‘theory’ that marked poststructuralistpractices. Identifying the desire for ‘the thing itself ’ in Husserl’s memorablephrase as an on-going quest in Western metaphysics, and ‘thing theory’as but one recent instantiation of this materialist arc, they rightfully notethat this critical stance has had a ‘tendency to impute causality to context



in settling aesthetic questions’ (645). Advocating a ‘middle way’ betweenthing and theory, between ‘empirical zeal and theoretical abstraction’(656), the authors caution that ‘to accept the material turn tout court is tonaturalize the process by which things become objects as a result of theirapprehension by conscious observers’ (663).5

A new understanding of objecthood that may resist some of thesepitfalls may be found in a return to Heidegger’s suggestive (if ambivalent)attitude towards things. Heidegger differentiates between mere objects[Gegenstand ] and the more idealized thing [Ding]. The object, mass-pro-duced and merely useful, lacks the charisma of the ‘thing’, made byhuman hands and untouched by technology. Heidegger’s well-known toolanalysis asserts that we encounter neither objects nor things in our worldconsciously from a perspective that renders them present to our attention.In fact, those tools that we habitually use tend to withdraw from ourconsciousness, which is why Heidegger refers to them as ready-to-hand[zuhanden], present but not at the forefront of our perceptual terrain. Atthe moment that a tool stops working in its accustomed manner or otherwisedraws attention to itself, we notice it. When the pencil lead breaks, when thecomputer freezes, when the radiator overheats, then pencils, computers,and radiators become apparent to us or, for Heidegger, present-at-hand[vorhanden]. The philosopher Graham Harman traces how Heidegger’sthinking about things changes over the course of his writings, and how,in his later work, Heidegger comes to conclude that the ‘thinghood’ ofa thing is independent of the person viewing it. Arguing that this insightposes a radical challenge to the history of Western philosophy, whichfrom Plato and Aristotle onwards had viewed things instrumentally – assomething produced, consumed, or represented by something else – Harmaneffectively argues for the centrality of things in Heidegger’s work, citing itas the founding moment in an ‘object-oriented philosophy’.6

While the majority of scholarship focuses on the status of the ‘modern’thing within capitalist society and takes place largely in the disciplines ofsociology, anthropology, and philosophy, literary criticism has also contributedto this discussion. Literary concern with the ontological status of the thingand its ability to constitute subjects has largely been framed by critics inthe early modern period. New Historicism, while initially focused on thefashioning of subjects, eventually turned its attention to why objects matterin and of themselves. Uniting New Historicism’s emphasis on alteritywith a Marxist emphasis on material culture, early modern objects beganto emerge from the shadow of their owner/consumers in the 1990s. Theintroduction to the well-known Subject and Object in the English RenaissanceCulture (1996), edited by Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, andPeter Stallybrass, argues compelling for a need to reconceptualize our notionof objecthood, to liberate the object from the circumscribed supportingrole that it played in both the Burckhardtian, humanist universe ofautonomous subjects and the traditional Marxist worldview wherein an



object served merely as a potential witness to the alienation of humansfrom their own labor power. The essays – taking up a diverse array ofobjects including paintings, feathers, books, clothes, emblems, and com-munion wafers – question what the editors call ‘the monotonous historyof the sovereignty of the subject’ (4). A similar desire informs RenaissanceCulture and the Everyday (1999), edited by Patricia Fumerton and SimonHunt, a volume that advertises itself as a contribution to a ‘new newhistoricism’, distinguished from the earlier New Historicism by its focuson the common object or the familiar practice examined from a ‘social’rather than purely ‘political’ standpoint. Taking its cue from neo-Marxistcritique as well as the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel deCerteau, this collection focuses not on aristocrats and church officials, butmembers of the lower social groups who ‘tactically and almost invisibly[transform] from within the social structures she or he inhabits’ (5).7

Renaissance clothing emerges from both these volumes as a crucial sitefor reclaiming not just the use-value of everyday objects but their integralrole in symbolic economies of affective exchange. Renaissance Clothing andthe Materials of Memory (2000), by Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass,argues that clothes effectively functioned as both currency and as a brandof ‘material memory’. The early modern period was a ‘worn world’peopled with ‘hybrid subjects’ whose clothing incorporated wearers intoa system of symbolic exchange and obligation. The power of clothing totransform identity is witnessed in complaints about the translation ofsecondhand aristocratic clothes into dramatic costumes, a circulation whichwas seen to destabilize Elizabethan social hierarchies.

In much of this work, Renaissance objects are viewed through the lensof consumption. While lauding critics’ desires to illuminate early modernsubjectivity through networks of things-in-use, the literary critic JonathanGil Harris has interrogated the vocabulary of this return to material culture,identifying several problematic assumptions behind it. First, he suggeststhat a ‘positivist underbelly’ haunts some of this work insofar as the allureof the early modern object seems to be, at least in part, its potential tooffer a firm footing in a critical terrain strewn with epistemologicalsinkholes generated by two decades of poststructuralism. Secondly, Harrisdecries the ‘synchronic bias’ of some of this criticism, which tends to viewobjects ‘not as vessels of and across diachronic history, but as portalsthrough which may be glimpsed the contours of an overarching structureor system’ (114). In these ways, the ‘new new historicism’ has turnedearly modern objects into the equivalent of strange marvels reft from theircontext and displayed in a critical curiosity cabinet; all early modernthings become the equivalent of the narwhal tusk, the Etruscan coin, orthe stone depicting the crucifixion.

This desire to take the early modern object seriously in its own right,to resist the urge to sunder it from historical context and to ‘marvelize’it, inspires Julian Yates’s fascinating Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons



from the English Renaissance (2003). This book provocatively draws onLatour and Michel Serres to interrogate the status of early modern objectsas mediators of knowledge, a status that becomes most apparent whenthe ship wrecks, when the privy reeks, or when the relic turns out to bea fake. For Yates, Renaissance automata are an exemplary test case forexploring the dividing line between the human and the nonhuman.Thomas Nashe’s sixteenth-century description of mechanical birds at aRoman banqueting house shows the ways in which early modern thingscan appear to be ‘self-authored’, consequently making the human ‘irrelevant’(127–9). Approaching early modern texts from the perspective of thehistory and philosophy of science, Yates explores both the ‘tyranny’ of thesubject as well as the idea of the Renaissance as the originary pointfrom which the Burckhardtian subject ‘ “emerges” against a backgroundconstituted by the hardening of the world of things into a realm ofobjects’ (7). The critical genealogy Yates seeks to problematize makesmanifest a central assumption of post-Enlightenment historiographywherein the homogenous construct known as ‘the Middle Ages’ is forcedto take on the role not only of Catholic carnival as opposed to Protestantlent, monolithic faith as opposed to diverse humanisms, but also to fill therole of material world – ‘objecthood’ – over and against the human‘subject’ of the Renaissance.

Yates rightly questions the widespread assumption that the Renaissancewas the origin of the subject-object ‘problem’, demonstrating that suchan assumption can only follow from the otherwise-disavowed teleologiesof Burckhardt and Marx, writers who saw the Renaissance as the originof the individual and the fetishized commodity respectively. One waythat medievalists can contribute to the articulation of the premodernobject is by outlining previous historical and epistemological controversiesthat demonstrate the early modern period to be, not necessarily thepoint of origin, but rather one further episode (with decidedly uniquefeatures to be sure) in an on-going conversation about subject-objectdynamism.

Scott Lightsey furthers the project begun by Yates by tracing the medievalstages of the early modern ‘economy of wonder’ as it is represented inwriters like Chaucer, Gower, and Langland. Medieval automata functionedas ‘quasi-objects’: things that are simultaneously material and discursive,instrumental in their objecthood and autonomous in their idealized exist-ence. In the Squire’s Tale, for instance, Chaucer’s pointed interest in themechanical workings behind the marvelous brass horse resonates withcontemporary scholastic interest in discerning ‘natural effects’ from human‘mechanical deception’. Such marvels provide a cultural space for thinkingabout how technology and the human interact as well as the definitionalparameters of what actually constitutes a living thing. For Lightsey, manmadewonders had the power to ‘reorganize the relationship of person to thing’,since these wonders



coalesced from an assemblage of narratives or networked patterns of knowing,and were capable of reconfiguring social relations outside the contingenciesimagined by their users: channeling desire, redistributing power, destabilizingexpectations. (24–5)8

Medieval subject-object relations are perhaps nowhere more evident thanin the daily interactions that took place in the household, and numerousare the studies of the everyday things that were consumed, produced andexchanged there (see, for instance, the work of C. M. Woolgar and KateMertes). Vance Smith directs our attention to the ways in which thefeudal household created subjects through the dual operations of ancestralclaims of land and by the conspicuous surplus-value of objects ‘that appearto have been taken out of the marketplace’ (49). In romance narratives,the superabundance of things – whether everyday objects such as badgesof retinue and livery or marvelous items of Saracen workmanship – isoften reckoned against human lives – whether those slain by monsters ortaken from enemies. In the chivalric economy, human death and accumu-lated wealth are two forms of excessive surplus which make possible theexchangeability of people for things.

The romance genre frequently exploits the symbolism of householdgoods. Lisa Cooper describes how furniture (chairs, tables, beds) not onlycome to preoccupy the characters in the Queste del Saint Graal but alsohow encounters with household stuff threatens the narrative integrity ofthe text as a whole. Not merely utilitarian props, Arthurian furniture takeson a metaphysical significance (especially when viewed through the phe-nomenological lens of Merleau-Ponty). The spiritual transcendence of theknightly quest is always in danger of being hamstrung by its materialsubstrate; for instance, the famous Siege Perilleux (which only Galahadcan occupy at the Round Table) becomes a character in its own right,central to an eschatological history of the Grail that precedes the knightswho will try to sit in it. These furnishings also point us towards ametatextual revelation as well: the surplus-laden, tortuously detaileddescriptions of individual household items (such as the Bed of Solomon)self-consciously draw our attention to the problems attendant on repre-senting materiality in language at all. For Elizabeth Scala, a woven clothdepicting famous literary lovers in the Middle English Breton lay Emaréis central to understanding the relations among the actual lovers in thetale. The production and display of this cloth serves as a metacommentaryon the circulation of the material book containing the romance itself. Inforegrounding the shared aesthetics of textile and text, Scala’s argumentoffers the cloth as an emblem of the values of a typical ‘newly literate’medieval reader for the household miscellany, British Library MS CottonCaligula A.ii, in which it is found. The representation of everyday householdgoods in medieval poetry can also speak to us about the cultural relationsthat structure society. Kathy Lavezzo reads Griselda’s patience in Chaucer’sClerk’s Tale in the context of everyday practices and expectations about



medieval death and burial. Griselda’s desire for a coffin that she cannotafford can be read as an instance of Chaucer’s sympathy with the plightof the peasant, figured in the lower class’s relation to material goods overand against the extravagant consumption culture of the elites.

Evidence of the magic worked by household stuff is found not only inliterary narratives, but in extant letters documenting the flow of goodsand people in and around actual gentry households such as that of theStonors and the Pastons. The letters Margaret Paston writes to her husbandnot only enumerate the goods (foods stuffs, cloth, candlesticks) necessaryfor the successful functioning of the household, but as Kellie Robertsonargues, rhetorically displays the body of the ‘good’ housewife going abouther absent husband’s business. Margaret’s self-representation of her productionand consumption in the household functions as a type of embodimentthat serves to ‘renegotiat[e] the line between the material and the immaterial– the private and the public – aspects of female gentry labor’ (152). Inthese ways, the equipment of the medieval household, whether representedin romance or everyday epistles, exceeds the linguistic and ontologicalbounds of ‘dead stuff ’, fashioning subjects even as they are ostensiblymanipulated by them.

Medieval clothing and sumptuary legislation – the ‘worn world’ describedby Jones and Stallybrass – is the aspect of household material culture thathas received the most significant attention from textile and costume his-torians, economic historians, archeologists, and literary critics. Jill Mann’sbrilliant Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (1973) traces individual objectsas well as the ‘array’ associated with each of Chaucer’s pilgrims in sermonliterature and other estates documents. Similarly, the sumptuary overtonesof the pilgrims’ clothing has been painstakingly researched in a series ofbooks and articles by Laura Hodges. Medieval sumptuary laws (issued byboth civil and ecclesiastical authorities) attempted to regulate both whatpeople wore and what they ate – two preeminent markers of status intraditional societies. Fears about dressing above one’s social class can beheard in the anxious language of legislators as well as in the censoriousdictums issued from pulpits; however, attempts to legislate on people’sbacks proved difficult in practice. The essays collected in Clothing Culture,1350–1650, edited by Catherine Richardson, and Medieval Fabrications:Dress, Textiles, Cloth Work, and Other Cultural Imaginings, edited by E. JaneBurns, both consider clothing as textile, as aesthetic marker in paintingand poetry, as gendered status marker, and as a sign of religious devotion.9

Sumptuary culture offers another lens for viewing the porous boundarybetween subjects and objects in the medieval period. Claire Sponslerdiscusses late medieval clothing regulation in the context of embodiedsubjects whose identities are shaped by shifting patterns of commodityproduction and consumption. While sumptuary legislation attempted todiscipline medieval bodies by proscribing what they could wear or consume,its enumeration of categories opened up a space for fashionable resistance



through noncompliance and cross-dressing. Consumption here is seen notas passive but rather, following Michel de Certeau, as an ‘act of antidisciplinein which subjects can . . . appropriate and reshape the subject positionshanded to them by the producers of power’ (xiv). In Chaucer’s Clerk’sTale, Griselda’s clothing witnesses how objects can ‘fashion’ the subject ina sumptuary world. Andrea Denny-Brown moves us from the literal andfigurative translations of Griselda to focus on ‘the riches, gems, clothes,and rags that materialize the changing world and changing perceptionsaround her’ (79). The long-suffering Griselda’s disavowal of clothingenacts a form of cultural resistance, a resistance that not only underminesthe interest in array exhibited by her husband Walter and his ficklesubjects but also ultimately undermines the avowedly antimaterialist stanceof Chaucer’s Clerk.

The case of sacred things poses special problems for those attemptingto map how subjectivities and objectivities mutually constitute one another.In examining the multiplicity of meanings associated with both theeucharistic wafer and the rituals surrounding it, critics like Miri Rubinhave argued that the sacrament, ‘a piece of Christ’s very body’ (297),shaped the self-understanding of clerics, mystics, heretics, and the laity.The contested doctrine of the ‘real presence’ – the idea that the breadactually became Christ at the moment of the wafer’s elevation by a priest– attempted to explain how the immaterial, mystical body of Christ (withwhich the recipient was supposed to join in communion) related to thematerial reality of this body in the bread (the concrete avenue for thisunion). While the eucharist was a shared experience among Christians,the transformation of bread into body worked widely divergent transfor-mations on individual identities.10 Like the eucharist, relics were anotherexample of problematically embodied things; as such, they are perhaps themost written about of all medieval and early modern objects that troublethe clarity of the division between human and non-human. Patrick Gearyexplores their status as commodities, acknowledging that, ‘like slaves, relicsbelong to that category, unusual in Western society, of objects that areboth personas and things’ (169). Analyzing how medieval commoditiescirculated (through gift, sale, exchange, or theft) allows Geary to showthat the relic ‘market’ worked according to similar laws. Unlike othercommodities, however, a relic arriving in a new community had toundergo a public ritual of authentication and assimilation – known as‘translation’ – before it could assume its privileged status in its new home.The value of the most sought-after relics – bodies or parts of bodies – didnot lie ‘in the bones themselves as alienable objects, but rather in therelationships they could create as subjects’ (183), relationships that forgednetworks among donors, patrons, merchants, worshippers, and (occasionally)thieves.

Like the materiality of the eucharist and relics, the status of the devo-tional images found in churches or private homes proved a source of



considerable debate in medieval society. In the parish church, a profusionof saintly images adorned objects such as paintings, altarpieces, portablepanels, fonts, and statues (not to mention the wood and stone carvingswoven into the fabric of the building itself ). Sarah Stanbury describes theproliferation of these objects in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Britain,and their major role in late medieval ‘affective piety’, religious practicesthat emphasized radical empathy with Christ’s sufferings usually throughvisual means. Her argument persuasively demonstrates how subject andobject, human and inhuman, were brought together by looking at andempathizing with devotional objects:

The spectral lives of images in the popular imagination suggests that the imagescrossed the line between matter and spirit or the living and the dead. In thelanguage of affective piety, object and exemplar often seem to fuse uncannily,as desires to see, touch, know the suffering Christ are articulated in relation toa body that often seems very like Passion scenes carved above the rood screenor on alabaster panels in a parish’s side chapels. (7)

This potential for fusion rendered images disturbingly hybrid, a hybriditythat, by the end of the fourteenth century, had aroused virulent Wycliffiteattacks on devotional icons. Stanbury outlines what she calls the ‘visioncontest’ waged in late medieval England in ecclesiastical and universitycommunities as well as its effects on the writings of Chaucer, Capgrave,Nicholas Love, and Margery Kempe among others. Drawing on Marx,Pietz, and more recent theorists of the fetish as well as medieval treatiseson vision and optics, Stanbury argues that the medieval debate over devo-tional images provides an early example of the controversial nature ofthings that blur the line between the human and the nonhuman. In theincarnational economy, ‘inanimate objects could easily threaten to morphinto supersensuous things’ (30), thereby confusing the usually separatesystems of earthly and spiritual valuation.

While the scholarship on medieval and early modern things surveyedhere engages with an enormous variety of objects across several centuries,all of it recognizes that the nature of represented ‘things’ presented verydifferent problems for the premodern era than it does for us now; someof this work (particularly that of Stanbury and Yates) illuminates thesignificant and sometimes unruly premodern debates that broke out overwhat constituted a ‘thing’ as opposed to a ‘person’, demonstrating that thesedistinctions are, in turn, related to broader networks of discrimination thatgo well beyond the self-fashioning debate. All of this work demonstratesthat efforts to come to grips with ‘what a thing actually is’ in relation tothe human began well before the seventeenth century and manifestedthemselves in a diverse number of textual arenas: parliamentary legisla-tion, sermons, scholastic theories of natural philosophy and cognition,verse satire, romances, religious treatises, and even everyday householdcorrespondence.



The Merchant’s Hat

In the introduction to Things that Talk, Lorraine Daston encourages us tolisten to the stories told by inanimate objects, since, as the etymologysuggests, objects often interpose themselves in our way whether we heedthem or not (‘object’ from the classical Latin ‘obiectum’, a thing thrownbefore). To refuse to listen to them is to condemn them merely to echohuman desires and needs. So what can the objects associated with theMerchant in Chaucer’s General Prologue tell us? Critical discussion of theMerchant’s portrait usually turns on the extent to which his clothing (hishat, his motley coat, and his boots) sheds light on his mercantile practices.Some critics have argued that these garments are the fitting corollary ofhis sober nature and discrete business practices. Others have argued thatthe sumptuous nature of these items not only belies his status as a lowerto middling merchant, but potentially camouflages a debt-ridden roguewho talks a good and ‘sober’ game.11 In these arguments, the Merchant’shat is marshaled as evidence either of a prosperous tradesman sporting adignified and wholly appropriate fashion or a smarmy social climber guiltyof sartorial misdemeanors.

When attention turns to what Igor Kopytoff has called the ‘socialbiography’ of the hat itself, critics have usefully mined estates literature,sermons, sumptuary legislation, as well as the contents of medieval willsand inventories for what they can tell us both about the ‘real’ and the‘ideal’ career paths of such beaver hats. Jill Mann notes that the descriptionof the hat does not have a close analogue in the estates tradition, but thatit generally conforms to medieval expectations of the professional stereotypeof a merchant who regularly travels abroad (103). Muriel Bowden suggeststhat the hat is the single ‘individual’ aspect of the Merchant’s otherwisestereotypical character and appearance, a marker of the international tradein which the Merchant’s financial ‘chevyssaunce’ necessarily involved him(150). Laura Hodges argues that the beaver hat would have also beenassociated with civic pageants and state occasions where they were regu-larly worn by merchants, knights, mayors, and kings. She meticulouslytraces the increasing price of beaver hats owned by prosperous merchantsand nobles as well as the representation of these hats in a variety ofmanuscript illuminations, paintings, and statuary, concluding that theseclothing articles were ‘neither as expensive nor as flagrant a sign of wealthas critics have supposed’ (86). While noting that the contents of theMerchant’s balance books remain unavailable, his outward appearancesuggests a ‘judicious prosperous acumen without flaunting his wealth inan unseemly way’ (99). In this way, sumptuary analysis of the hat has beenused by Chaucerian critics to support a reading of the Merchant that findshim to be sober and serious rather than extravagant and debt-ridden.

While these examinations of the hat’s historical context cumulativelyprovide much fascinating and significant information for the history of



medieval consumption and commodities, they leave unexamined thephenomenological problem of how medieval hats potentially shaped theeveryday lives of their wearers. What is most striking about the Merchant’sportrait is that it adamantly disavows any knowledge of his individualconsciousness, denying us any firm insight into these ostensibly presentyet hidden depths. And the objects associated with the Merchant appearto provide us with no expedient epistemological clues. In one of Chaucer’smost well-known grammatical ambiguities, the narrator asserts of theMerchant:

Ther wiste [knew] no wight [man] that he was in dette,So estatly [dignified] was he of his governaunceWith his bargaynes and with his chevyssaunce [borrowing]. (ll. 280–2)

Since ‘that’ is best read as ‘whether or not’ (as opposed to its moredefinite, causal sense in Modern English), the audience cannot be sureif the Merchant is debt-free due to his discrete and diligent businessdealings or whether he merely appears that way. The unknowability ofthe Merchant’s interior life is heightened by the fact that the narratorconcludes his portrait by explicitly denying any knowledge of theMerchant’s name.

If the Merchant’s hat does not lead the reader to a moral or allegoricaltruth about the Merchant, what narrative use does it serve? By pointingus to the irreducibility of things in themselves, Chaucer has lead us notto a representative cul-de-sac but rather to an acknowledgement of thingsas events whose signified is their own interiority, an inwardness that makespossible an agency independent of the human. To think about what theinteriority and agency of a medieval hat might look like, it is useful toremember that things, according to Heidegger, are assemblies. Heideggerintends ‘assembly’ to denote its earliest etymological sense of ‘judicialassembly’ (in Old High German and Old Icelandic), the power of anentity to gather both things and people to itself. Beaver hats are gatheringsin that they always imply wearers, expenditures, and occasions (whetherof state or the more quotidian kind). The beaver hat also gathers to itselfmany other tradable commodities including the wool, felt, hides, finishedand unfinished cloth, lumber, metals, wine, food stuffs, and other goodsthat were the concern of late fourteenth-century merchants and whichmade the production and importation of the hat from Flanders possiblein the first place. Hats not only have to be put on but they have to bedoffed – before state power, before one’s betters, upon entering a church– and thus involve the wearer in a network of hierarchical social relationsthat are not only made possible by but also demand the materiality of thething itself. Indeed, that ubiquitous but vague entity known as ‘socialrelations’ is not constituted by the ‘social’ at all but by the materialthings that make the social visible: crowns, beaver hats, liveries, badges,heraldic insignia, along with the rest of the medieval status markers. The



technical emergence and life cycle of a beaver hat is brought aboutthrough a gathering of many concerns that would have been just aspresent to some members of Chaucer’s original audience as would itssumptuary resonances.12

In criticizing human attempts to ventriloquize things – our desire tolisten to things only when they speak to us in a coherently ‘human’ voice– the critic Miguel Tamen declares that ‘there are no interpretable objectsor intentional objects, only . . . groups of people for whom certain objectscount as interpretable and who, accordingly, deal with certain objects inrecognizable ways’ (3). While it is humans who decide which objects tolisten to, it is the objects themselves which determine how humans dealwith them. Tamen calls these groups of humans so organized ‘societies offriends’. To analyze the objects in the General Prologue from this meth-odological viewpoint would involve mapping the ‘societies of friends’generated by these objects. We would not expect the Merchant’s hat solelyto illuminate the inner life of its wearer but to make apparent a contin-uum of hat-like comrades that would include the Yeoman’s green hood,the Prioress’s wimple, the Summoner’s enormous garland, the Pardoner’sinvisible hood neatly packed away in his pouch, and the Wife of Bath’smultiple head coverings (fine linen coverchiefs, wimple, and a hat ‘asbrood as is a bokeler or a targe [shield]’).

The Flemish beaver hat could lead us outwards to a whole taxonomyof late medieval headgear rather than inwards to the single psyche of anostensibly individual pilgrim persona. It can show us how hats (and head-cloths and garlands) weigh both literally and metaphorically on theirwearers. By thinking about things-in-use and objects-as-actors, we can askother kinds of questions rather than just ‘what does X object tell us aboutY pilgrim?’ Instead, we can ask about the particular kinds of thoughts thatcertain hats may instill in their wearers, the kinds of object networks thatthese things gather to themselves and maintain, and the myriad ways thatobjects shape human perceptions and knowledges rather than beingmerely shaped by them.

Acknowledgments

This essay has benefitted from the kind attentions of Larry Scanlon andthe helpful insights of the two anonymous readers for Literature Compass.I also gratefully acknowledge the help of several people with whom Ihave had an on-going conversation about the nature of ‘things’ for severalyears now: James F. Knapp, Daniel Selcer, and Michael Witmore. Mythanks to Elizabeth Scala for organizing a panel on ‘Chaucerian Objects’at the 2007 Modern Language Association Meeting in Chicago, whichmade possible a happy interchange on this topic with Lisa Cooper,Shannon Gayk, Patricia Ingham, Kathy Lavezzo, and Sarah Stanburyamong others.



Short Biography

Kellie Robertson is an Associate Professor of English at the University ofWisconsin, Madison. Her research interests include medieval and earlymodern poetry and drama; the history of the book; legal and labor studies;and the history of the English language. She has published articles onmedieval authorship, Chaucer, Geoffrey of Monmouth, postcolonial theory,and Milton. Her book The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the ‘Work’ of theText in Medieval Britain, 1350–1500 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) exploresthe literary and political consequences of one of the most fundamentalshifts in late medieval English society: the first national labor regulationfollowing the 1348 plague. Bridging the medieval and early modern periods,the book argues that this legislation radically impacted the way that writerspresented their own literary labor in the wake of new concerns aboutwhat it meant to ‘labor truly’. She is also the co-editor (with MichaelUebel) of The Middle Ages at Work: Practicing Labor in Late Medieval England(Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Her current research explores the intercon-nection between medieval poetry and Aristotelian natural philosophy. Shereceived a B.A. in English and French from the University of Virginia anda Ph.D. in English from Yale University.

Notes

* Correspondence address: Department of English, University of Wisconsin, 7187 Helen C.White Hall, 600 N. Park Street, Madison, WI 53706. Email: [email protected] All citations from Chaucer are taken from Larry D. Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer,3rd ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).2 The most succinct statement of this argument is found in Leicester 9–10. See also Patterson.3 The critical argument over whether or not Chaucer intends the Merchant’s clothing to besatirical is well summarized by Hodges, Chaucer and Costume 75–7. While Hodges rightfully notesthat ‘whether he was, or was not in debt, whether his financial dealings were, or were not legal, orhonorable is not the issue’ (80); yet she goes on to conclude that his costume reflects ‘discretion’and ‘conservative respectability’, effectively suggesting that his moral state is actually the issue.4 While the present discussion surveys materialist accounts of thinghood, some recent criticalwork has taken as its point of departure psychoanalytic (specifically Lacanian) ideas of theObject in relation to the Real. Examples include Fradenburg; Edmondson; Griffin. Additionally,there has been critical interest in the idea of the gift in medieval culture following the work ofMarcel Mauss. The materiality of the gift as thing is dealt with to varying degrees in thefollowing: Galloway; Cowell; Kay; Mullally, ‘Cross-Gendered Gift’; ‘Hrethel’s Heirloom’;Groebner; Algazi, Groebner, and Jussen.5 For a discussion of the limits of New Historical treatments of things and commodities, seealso Bruster, ‘The New Materialism in Early Modern Studies’, Ch. 8 in Shakespeare and theQuestion of Culture 191–205; Turner.6 See Harman, Tool-Being; Guerrilla Metaphysics. Harman explains the significance of Heidegger’s insightsinto things as well as the tragedy that he did not fully pursue the implications of these insights.7 The most interesting of these essays for those interested in premodern things would most likelybe Debora Shuger’s analysis of mirrors in relation to Renaissance autobiographical writing, ‘The“I” of the Beholder: Renaissance Mirrors and the Reflexive Mind’. Despite the fact thatmirrors became common to households by the seventeenth century, the infrequency withwhich these objects appear in literary and philosophical works suggests ‘the unimportance ofreflexive self-consciousness’ (37).



8 Other significant work on medieval automata includes Camille 242–58; Sullivan. For a sug-gestive view of later automata, see Riskin. For compelling discussions of ‘toy theory’ moregenerally, see Tiffany; Brown, ‘How to Do Things with Things’. Similar to mechanical autom-ata, animals and monsters were another place where the border between the human andnonhuman was continually negotiated in the medieval period. The line between reasoning manand unreasoning creature (whether beast or monster) is explored by Jeffrey Cohen and DorothyYamamoto among others.9 Aside from household artifacts, clothing has received the most attention from medievalscholars interested in material culture. Other considerations include Scott; Owen-Crocker;Koslin and Snyder; Newton. The ways in which clothing shaped aristocratic identity have beentraced by Hotchkiss; Burns, Courtly Love Undressed; Crane.10 Rubin’s work on the eucharist challenges the work of previous historians like CarolineWalker Bynum’s view that female mystics’ experiences with the sacrament were broadly similar.For a view of eucharistic practices in the Renaissance, see Greenblatt.11 The critical argument is summarized in the explantory notes to the Merchant’s portrait inthe Riverside Chaucer 809, as well as in Hodges, Chaucer and Costume 75–80.12 The geographically specific economic concerns present in the beaver hat have been conciselydrawn by David Wallace. See his chapter ‘In Flandres’, in Premodern Places, which traces thefamily and administrative contexts which would have made Flanders familiar to Chaucer.

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medieval things: materiality, historicism, and the premodern object

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