ABSTRACT
Historians of material culture rightly care not just about artefacts but about their personal and collective uses, both routine and unique, and about ‘the ways in which matter interrelates with the meanings humans ascribe to things’ (Rublack 2013, 43). They ask, for example, whether print techniques ‘helped to reorder the thought of all readers’, or the spread of reading brought ‘an emergence of fresh qualities of mindedness’ (Eisenstein 1979, 105; Hart 2011, 125-126). Could early modern clothing come to constitute the wearer, or was it at most a form of disguise for an ‘internal identity [that] was permanent and essential’ (Jones and Stallybrass 2000; Vincent 2003, 162)? In domains such as religion and natural philosophy, were the changing and contested forms of embodied practice and material apparatus mere external products of or supports for the participants’ real, inner beliefs, or did they in some way restructure religious or philosophical experience itself? These questions all implicate cognitive history. They cannot be addressed effectively without some views – whether explicit or tacit – on the mind and its history. What is it to have experience, or beliefs? When and in what ways can thought be reordered and restructured? How are mindedness and identity constructed, and how do they change? And, in particular, what are the relations between minds and media, artefacts, and institutions?
