ABSTRACT
This is a book about the things people owned and the way they used them. It explores how they were made, how they were acquired, how they were used and what people thought about them. Knowing about people’s possessions is crucial to understanding their experience of daily life, the way they saw themselves in relation to their peers and their responses to and interactions with the social, cultural and economic structures and processes which made up the societies in which they lived. However, despite the fact that material objects formed a central part of the everyday experiences of individuals and communities in the medieval and early modern periods, it is only relatively recently that scholars across the range of humanities disciplines have foregrounded material evidence for the study of past cultures. As a result, this is the first volume to offer multi-disciplinary analysis of a variety of material goods in pre-modern societies.1 Everyday Objects asks provocative questions of the source material for things and the academic structures and methodologies which seek to frame and interpret it: what forms does this research into premodern material culture take and what does this turn towards materiality mean for our understanding of pre-modern cultural history?
