Objects of Belief - (Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture) by Joshua Easterling & Fiona Somerset (Hardcover)

About the Book

The eight studies presented here on late medieval religious objects provide new insight into miracle stories, spiritual writings, religious drama, and medieval English poetry.

Book Synopsis

Objects in late medieval Europe were a means for lay people and clergy to negotiate their access to powers beyond the everyday, in folk practice as well as religious observance. As has been noted by scholars, this period is marked by a profusion of objects granted special importance, imaginary as well as material. These objects prompt reconsideration of cultural and intellectual frameworks, for example of superstition, reform, and heresy, that never quite successfully contain them. Essays in this volume center attention on these things themselves, from puppets to rosaries, as indeed do the written accounts through which they are often mediated. With a focus on England, contributors re-evaluate our understanding of works and authors including Geoffrey Chaucer, Walter Hilton, Nicholas Love, Julian of Norwich, miracles of the Virgin, Edward Hall's Chronicle, the Wycliffite Glossed Gospels, and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament.

From the Back Cover

These eight essays on how religious objects were imagined and used provide fresh insight into the role of materiality in medieval religious culture. They demonstrate how believers granted extraordinary significance not only to objects sanctified by ritual or awe-inspiring in their rarity, but mundane everyday things, as well as concepts beyond sensory experience. From rosaries to embroidered knots, from the Eucharist to ritual puppets, from John Colop's common-profit book to the leather 'skin' worn by Christ-actors in the cycle plays, the objects examined here cross or unmake conventional boundaries between religion and superstition, medieval and early modern, Catholic and Protestant.

The volume is indebted to the rapid growth in attention to objects across a range of fields in recent years, much of it future-oriented and situated amid the difficulties of our own present. Yet these essays share the conviction of much historical and cultural research on objects that there is no access to the stuff of our world except through the lens of human imagining. Rather than seeking a perspective outside human culture, they investigate the ways in which persons and communities become entangled with the objects that matter to them.

Contributors 'follow the things themselves' to develop new readings of major works and authors such as Nicholas Love, Julian of Norwich, Walter Hilton, Geoffrey Chaucer, the Cloud-author, and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, as well as less well-known works including miracles of the Virgin and Wycliffite writings.

About the Author

Fiona Somerset is Professor of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies and Social and Critical Inquiry at the University of Connecticut
Joshua S. Easterling is Associate Professor of English at Murray State University, Kentucky