The “things”

The project adopts an ecumenical attitude toward the types of objects and monuments included. In the pages of the catalog, little-known archaeological finds, such as a handful of carbonated chestnuts from northern Italy or an inscribed gold ring from 9th-c. Pliska, Bulgaria, rub shoulders with renowned monuments, including the Arian baptistery in Ravenna and the Book of Kells. Architectural structures and landscape interventions, such as Constantinople's 5th-c. land walls and the 100-mile-long earthwork known as Offa's Dyke, cross paths with visually complex images, both figural and non-figural (e.g., the Madaba Mosaic Map, a carved monumental cross from England, and the 11th-c. hippodrome fresco from the church of St. Sophia in Kiev). Objects of elite production and display – including the ivory diptych of Stilicho and a silver gilt plate depicting a lion-hunting Sasanian king – share company with quotidian tools and possessions: a bone comb from northern Italy, an ard (or “scratch plow”) from northern Germany, a terracotta lamp from 8th-c. Jerash.

The project also displaces traditional hierarchies in the way it organizes and allocates space to its material. Eschewing medium-based, geographic, or thematic groupings, the book presents the featured objects in roughly chronological order. Each, moreover, is afforded approximately the same amount of real estate (measured in terms of page count, bibliography length, and number of illustrations). In this way, in terms of both form and structure, the catalog of “things” at the heart of the book situates the humble and the rarefied, the permanent and the ephemeral, the public and the intimate on an equal footing. Moreover, most entries place the individual artifacts and monuments within a larger class or corpus of objects, revealing how representative, or how unique, they are and in what respects. This facilitates extrapolation and invites readers to see other, non-included objects with fresh eyes.

The significance of this wide-ranging selection – both the types of objects included and those conspicuously minimized or left out – is twofold. On the one hand, it does important work to reorient what counts (or should count) as a central object of study, thereby decentering the sorts of works produced for elite individuals and institutions that still dominate art and architectural histories of the period, as well as museum presentations of the age. On the other hand, the collection crosses numerous traditional categories into which we still regularly partition the cultural products of the ancient and medieval world – religious and secular, Eastern and Western, distinctive and representative, historical and aesthetic – thereby contributing to the reassessment of the boundaries between and the heuristic value of the categories themselves.

In its capacious view of the types of objects that merit inclusion, Fifty Early Medieval Things parallels the inspired project launched in 2010 by Neil MacGregor, then director of the British Museum, in collaboration with BBC Radio 4: A History of the World in 100 Objects.Footnote ¹ Originally aired as a sequence of 15-minute radio spots (subsequently available as podcasts and published together in an illustrated volume), each episode featured a single object from the British Museum's collection as a window into a broader historical and cultural phenomenon.Footnote ² The British Museum project has proven an attractive model for telling both universal and more circumscribed histories, and it has stimulated numerous spin-offs.Footnote ³ As such, the book under review participates in a significant trend toward the broader incorporation of material culture within the scope of both pedagogy and public history.

Approaches

Where the present project stands out from most others that adopt a similar format, however, is in its close attention to the critical framework within and against which it situates analysis of the individual things. The book's introduction places the project in relationship to historical and recent approaches to material studies, though it does so in two not entirely compatible ways. For one, the essay seeks to contextualize the objects by presenting a very rapid historical overview of the period, synthesizing some seven centuries of institutional and cultural history in less than four pages. This is obviously an impossible task. While some amount of “background” is perhaps better than nothing, the necessarily schematic historical sketch seems rather out of step with the rest of the introductory essay, on approaches to the study of things. This latter, more substantive portion of the introduction accomplishes a number of goals. It presents an accessible orientation to and history of the so-called material turn and to key threads of material culture theory. It makes clear where the authors see some scholarship as having strayed too far in its dematerializing of things (e.g., “For our part … we tend to side with the skeptics about the utility of imagining ‘agential objects’ and ‘vibrant matter’,” 12). And it offers a justification for applying material-cultural approaches to objects produced under the economic, political, religious, and social conditions of the post-classical period in particular.

Indeed, the authors make a compelling case for the critical lessons to be learned specifically from Late Antique and Early Medieval things by casting the potential irony of studying the material culture of a world that increasingly valued the immaterial as a real strength. Confronting Ian Hodder's work on entanglement, the authors productively point to the light that post-classical material culture sheds on disentanglement, the scaling down of material production and consumption.Footnote ⁴ Doing so also aligns with modern social-political priorities that strive for more equitable and inclusive historical narratives. As the authors write, “encouraging is the thought that when societies disentangle, the majority of the low end of the pyramid can come out on top, or anyway enjoy conditions as good as anyone else, and arguably a lot better than those of their more entangled ancestors” (17).

The question then becomes how successful the individual entries are at delivering on the promise of the introductory essay. On this score, much depends on the readers’ efforts to put the object entries into dialogue with the methodological and theoretical issues raised in the book's introduction, since the text of the entries themselves rarely does so explicitly. That said, many entries engage directly with processes of making, including discussion of source materials, their trade and transport, and technologies of production. These are central issues to material culture approaches and can be brought to bear on the broader, synthetic questions of “disentanglement.” At the same time, a significant number of the individual object entries center on questions and debates that receive little or no airtime in the introduction, including issues of iconography (e.g., religiously ambiguous imagery), visuality (as opposed to materiality), and patronage. This can lead to a bit of a disconnect between the book's introduction and some of its object discussions. The most successful and productive entries – of which there are many – demonstrate ways in which the featured thing opens up questions and generates scholarly debate. The fact that the significant majority of the 50 entries engage with meaty interpretative and analytical issues rather than present the objects as illustrations of iconographical or historical trends is perhaps the most important lesson they impart.

Narrative vs. assemblage

At the same time, the individual entries stand largely independent of one another, and it is fair to consider what is lost when object studies are stripped of connective tissue. The entries avoid explicit thematic through-lines that could have been drawn from the collected objects, such as gift exchange, rulership, devotional practices, identity construction, or manipulation of landscape. Similarly, as the authors acknowledge, organizing the objects chronologically at the moment of their production hampers cross-temporal connections and diachronic examination of changes in user engagement across the objects’ long life cycles (22). In the absence of introductory text to frame the book's separate century-by-century sections and of cross-references between the object essays, the project takes the overall shape of a self-consciously juxtaposed assemblage of discrete objects. Still, much is also gained by avoiding thematic groupings, geographic clusters, or medium-based histories. The picture that emerges is not a single, grand narrative that accounts for and integrates the various artifacts and monuments surveyed. Rather, each object becomes a microcosm, with the potential to illuminate whole worlds and types of relationships between objects, landscapes, and people. In this vastly expanded field of inquiry, any material “thing” is seen to be at once an economic, political, social, and cultural object. And this multifariousness and multivocality is precisely the point.

It also presents practical implications for readers and for classroom use. The format – more akin to a (virtual) exhibition than to a traditional printed volume – transforms the possibilities for engaging with the contents. Since the entries for the cataloged things can be read in non-linear order, the volume facilitates a “dipping-in” approach, one heightened all the more for users accessing it in e-book format. This invitation to selectivity and shuffling makes the book flexibly adaptable to the syllabuses of a wide range of different courses in history, archaeology, art history, and religion. However, it does mean that as a book it lacks the tight coherence and structure of an overarching narrative. While there are significant upsides to the absence of a narrative armature, it also means that to make the connections – to draw inferences between and across the objects, images, sites, and times surveyed in the text – demands more of the reader, or of instructors who might use the book in their classes.

In brief, this book is an important and welcome sign of the times. It contributes to pressing reassessments of what is valuable to study from the past, foregrounding inquiry of material culture along geographically, socially, ethnically, religiously, and methodologically diverse lines. In addition to expanding the corpus of study-worthy objects, the project advances the cause of critical interrogation of material evidence, bringing it closer to that which has been more broadly enjoyed by textual sources. It demonstrates that material sources are not necessarily (or even usually) straightforward, but rather complicated and question-raising – and therefore intrinsically interesting. While the book assumes no prior knowledge, and its engaging prose and format of bite-sized object entries welcomes non-specialist readers, it would be a mistake to consider it “merely” a textbook, for specialists too will profit from engaging with the volume's critical framework of materiality and disentanglement.