ABSTRACT
At a moment in early modern studies when a declared interest in material culture-objects, things, bodies, places-has become synonymous ·with a claim to theoretical currency, methodological innovation, or even, at its most dramatic, to the promise of disciplinary reinvention, we would do well to remind ourselves of the flourishing interest in the physical substance of everyday life that characterized early modern England and to revisit the very similar intellectual claims that such an interest sponsored. Here, too, research methods that had long enjoyed decades, if not centuries, of respectability and institutional support suddenly began to appear quaint, na'ive, or unreliable when compared to the rigor and acumen of the new procedures favored by more forwardlooking contemporaries: I am referring, of course, to the antiquarian interest in artifacts, documents, and physical remains, an interest that characterized a small but increasingly significant circle of English thinkers and their European counterparts and would eventually replace the categories of Aristotelian natural philosophy and finally lead to the scientific methods of modern empiricism. John Leland, ·william Lambarde, William Camden, Archbishop Matthew Parker, John Stow: each is a figure and a shadowy precedent for our own current fascination with the "matter" of culture and our increasingly reflexive "methodological fetishism," as several critics have recently described it.2
