Medieval Things: Materiality, Historicism, and the Premodern Object

Abstract How do we read the premodern representation of objects? This essay surveys recent approaches to medieval literature and culture that focus attention on ‘objecthood’ and the debates that it inspired in the premodern period. This work eschews the exclusive focus on ‘subjectivity’ that was the hallmark of late twentieth‐century poststructuralist accounts of medieval literature in Britain. Subjects do not disappear in these readings, however; they are instead shown to be dialogically produced, always in conversation with things. In offering a genealogy of what has come to be known as ‘thing theory,’ this survey interrogates a number of related (but not necessarily compatible) strains of materialism, including those influenced by Marxism, phenomenology, sociology, and New Historicism. Neither a return to old positivist historical models seeking ‘the thing itself’ nor a retreat from the significant questions posed by poststructuralist theory, these object‐oriented studies all seek ways of approaching narrated things that do not render them merely ‘mirrors’ of human desires or just signs pointing us toward the ‘inner lives’ of literary personas. Instead, this work takes seriously the idea that premodern objects were endowed with an autonomy and agency that was largely misrecognized in the wake of Enlightenment empiricism. Taking Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as a point of departure, this essay argues that where and how the line between human and nonhuman, subject and object, society and nature gets drawn is always an ideological process. The work surveyed here attempts to make available some of the manifold cultural pressures that influenced this permeable boundary across the Middle Ages.