OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

E M OT I O N S I N H I S TO RY

General Editors
ut e frevert t h o m a s d i xo n
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Feeling Things
Objects and Emotions through History

Edited by
S te p h a nie D ow nes
S a l ly H o l l oway
and
S a r a h R a nd l es

1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Oxford University Press 2018
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2018
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017947627
ISBN 978–0–19–880264–8
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Acknowledgements
Like many good things, Feeling Things has been some time in the making.
The editors express their thanks first and foremost to the contributors them-
selves, without whom this book could not exist: we are as grateful for their endur-
ance as we are for their expertise. Special thanks to Professor Susan Broomhall,
who has been there from the start and offered invaluable editorial advice in the
earliest stages of the project, and to Dr Helen Hickey and Violet Hamence-Davies,
for their willingness to help at its end. Professor Thomas Dixon and Professor
Ute Frevert lent their support early on. To Thomas, especially, we owe a debt of
­gratitude: he agreed that this book was worth writing before it had been written,
and has been both its champion and our adviser in seeing it into print. We also wish
to thank Robert Faber at OUP, for his interest and encouragement, and Cathryn
Steele, for seamlessly picking up where Robert left off. Professor Joanne Begiato
was another supporter of this work; we are so pleased that her Afterword has
become a part of it. Thanks also to Dr Sasha Handley, Dr Jenny Spinks, and many
other colleagues in both Australia and the UK, whose conversations with us about
objects and emotions have all had a part to play in shaping this volume.
The project began as a symposium of the same name, held at the University of
Melbourne on 14 March 2013. Our thanks to the original participants in that day,
both local and international, many of whose work appears in these pages, and to Jessie
Scott, whose efforts ensured the event’s success. Both this symposium and the book
that it became were made possible through the generous funding of the Australian
Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, 1100–1800
(CE110001011). Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the members and
associates of the Centre, past and present, and especially, to Professor Charles Zika and
Professor Stephanie Trigg, for their continued collegiality and support.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Contents
List of Figures ix
List of Contributors xi

Introduction 1
Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles
1. A Feeling for Things, Past and Present 8
Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles

I . P OT E N T T H I N G S
2. Matter Matters 27
Elina Gertsman
3. Signs of Emotion: Pilgrimage Tokens from the Cathedral
of Notre-Dame of Chartres 43
Sarah Randles
4. Capturing Christ’s Tears: La Sainte Larme in Medieval
and Early Modern France 58
Helen M. Hickey
5. Holding the Sole: Shoes, Emotions, and the Supernatural 72
Hilary Davidson

II. BINDING THINGS

6. Get a Grip? The Tactile Object of Handlyng Synne 97
Lara Farina
7. Emotional Debris in Early Modern Letters 114
Diana G. Barnes
8. Emotional Attachments: Iron Hands, their Makers,
and their Wearers, 1450–1600 133
John Gagné
9. Materializing Maternal Emotions: Birth, Celebration,
and Renunciation in England, c.1688–1830 154
Sally Holloway
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

viii Contents

I I I . M OV I N G T H I N G S
10. Dirk Hartog’s Sea Chest: An Affective Archaeology of
VOC Objects in Australia 175
Susan Broomhall
11. Romancing the Stone: (E)motion and the Affective History
of the Stone of Scone 192
Alicia Marchant
12. Lord Mansfield’s Voices: In the Archive, Hearing Things 209
Carolyn Steedman

I V. A F T E RWO R D
13. Moving Objects: Emotional Transformation, Tangibility,
and Time Travel 229
Joanne Begiato

Select Bibliography 243

Index 249
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

List of Figures
2.1. Reliquary of Mary Magdalene, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
Tuscany, Italy 28
2.2. The Skull Reliquary of St Mary Magdalene, Crypte de la Basilique
Sainte Marie Madeleine, Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, France 32
2.3. Giovanni da Milano, Feast in the House of Simon the Pharisee
(south wall, detail), Rinuccini Chapel, Santa Croce, Florence, 1365, fresco 34
2.4. ‘Dentes’ (Teeth) from Omne Bonum, London, 1360–75 39
2.5. Detail of a miniature of the martyrdom of St Apollonia, from
the Dunois Hours, France (Paris), c.1440–c.145040
2.6. Monstrance with a relic of Saint Sebastian, 1484, Germany,
Lower Saxony, Brunswick 41
3.1. Pilgrim badge of St Lubin, Chartres Cathedral, fourteenth century, France 44
5.1. Pair of women’s high-heeled shoes, c.1690–c.171077
5.2. Pair of women’s red morocco leather shoes, 1770–89 80
5.3. Sixteenth-century Venetian chopines 82
5.4. Embroidered red silk velvet slippers, c.1650s83
5.5. Pair of women’s kid leather slippers, English c.1795–181085
5.6. St Brigid Reliquary, National Museum of Archaeology, Dublin 86
5.7. Deliberately concealed leather child’s shoe, 1650–1720 89
6.1. Pirminius, the founder of Hornbach Abbey, gives the sacramentary
to St Peter 107
7.1. Beata Pope, Countess of Downe, to Lady Frances North, 1679 120
7.2. Beata Pope, Countess of Downe, to Lady Frances North, 1679, verso 121
7.3. Maria van Rensselaer, to Jan van Wely and Jan Baptist van Rensselaer,
[November 1675?], page 3 131
8.1. Gunners in the Imperial Armoury, Innsbruck 141
8.2. The iron hand fashioned by the clockmaker Ulrich Wagner for the
artillery master Ulrich Wyss in 1476 in Fribourg, Switzerland 144
8.3. The mechanical hand devised by the petit Lorrain, in
a hand-coloured illustration 145
8.4. Jan Wellensz de Cock (1490–1527), Camp Followers, c.1500 (?) 150
8.5. Urs Graf, Armless Woman with Wooden Leg, 1514 152
9.1. Pink ribbon with ‘Sarah the Daughter of Margit Kelbe Wittney
Oxford sheere Dec ye 26 1757’ written in ink, left as a token
with foundling no. 6,846 155
9.2. Embroidered fuchsia ribbon left as a token with Philip Hollond,
foundling no. 8,338, on 1 May 1758 162
9.3. Ivory cotton pincushion, Britain, 1784 163
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

x List of Figures
9.4. Blue and pink bird printed on white calico, left with an infant boy
who was one day old on 20 July 1759, foundling no. 13,476 164
9.5. Polychrome butterfly print left as a token with foundling no. 9,018
on 23 June 1758, when he was three days old, son of William and
Saron Turnear [sic] of Saint Mary, Whitechapel 165
9.6. Monochrome acorn print left as a token with Thomas Jones Jr,
foundling no. 9,324, on 22 July 1758, when he was seven days old 165
9.7. Red textile heart on a cross left as a token with an unknown infant 169
9.8. Half of a white heart left as a token with foundling no. 12,685,
Sarah Thomas, when she was two days old on 7 May 1759 169
9.9. Sampler left with Thomas Harris as a token when he was
fourteen days old, 6 December 1759, foundling no. 14,695 170
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

List of Contributors
Diana G. Barnes is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Queensland who
has been involved with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the
History of Emotions from its inception, as a Research Associate and an Associate
Investigator. Her book Epistolary Community in Print, 1580–1664 was published with
Ashgate in 2013. In the history of emotions she has published on Brilliana Harley and
Puritan emotional ideals for marriage, Andrew Marvell’s Stoic response to civil war, and
epistolary love in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor. She is currently completing a
chapter on bellicose passions in Margaret Cavendish’s Playes (1662) and researching early
modern neo-Stoicism in literature.
Joanne Begiato (Bailey) is Professor of History and Head of History, Philosophy & Culture
at Oxford Brookes University. She specializes in the history of masculinities, family, and
marriage. Her publications include Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in
England 1660–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Parenting in England 1760–1830:
Emotions, Identity, and Generation (Oxford University Press, 2012), and Sex and the Church
in the Long Eighteenth Century: Religion, Enlightenment and Sexual Revolution with Professor
William Gibson (I. B. Tauris, 2017). She is currently working on a monograph called
Materialising Manliness in Britain c.1760–1901: Bodies, Emotions, and Objects.
Susan Broomhall is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Western
Australia and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow attached to the Australian
Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. She is the editor of
several studies of emotions, including Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities in
Britain, 1650–1850 (Routledge, 2015) and Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction
(Routledge, 2017) and is a general editor of the six-volume A Cultural History of the
Emotions (Bloomsbury) with Jane W. Davidson and Andrew Lynch. Her latest monograph,
Gender, Emotions and the Dutch East India Company, is forthcoming with Amsterdam
University Press in 2017. She is currently working on a new study, entitled The Power of
Emotions: Catherine de Medici.
Hilary Davidson is an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney and is completing a
PhD at La Trobe, Melbourne. She was curator of fashion and decorative arts at the Museum
of London, and has lectured and taught extensively in dress history. After training as a
shoemaker, she wrote her MA History of Textiles and Dress thesis on the historical and
cultural uses of red shoes (University of Southampton, 2004), and has published on shoes
in Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (eds.), Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers (Berg,
2006) and Shoes: Pleasure and Pain, V&A exhibition catalogue (2015), amongst others.
Hilary is currently finishing a book on dress in the British Regency world (forthcoming with
Yale University Press in 2018).
Stephanie Downes is a Postdoctoral Research Rellow at the University of Melbourne. She
was the Harvard University Bloomfield Fellow in 2014. A graduate of the University of
Sydney, in 2010–11 she was a British Academy Visiting Scholar at Queen Mary, University
of London, and a Mayers Fellow at the Huntington Library, San Marino. She has published
on Anglo-French manuscript and literary cultures, including on bilingualism and emotional
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

xii List of Contributors

expression in fifteenth-century literature, and on the history of emotions and Middle
English. With Andrew Lynch and Katrina O’Loughlin, she is the editor of the volume
Emotions and War: Medieval to Romantic Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and with
Stephanie Trigg, a special issue of the journal postmedieval, ‘Facing Up to the History of
Emotions’. Her monograph Reading Christine de Pizan in England, 1399–1929 is
forthcoming with Boydell & Brewer. Her current research project exploring the
representation of human facial expression in late medieval textual culture is funded by the
Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.
Lara Farina is an Associate Professor of English at West Virginia University and an editor
of the quarterly journal, postmedieval. She is the author of Erotic Discourse and Early English
Religious Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and articles on medieval and modern reading
practices, queer theory, tactility, and ‘disabled’ sensation. She has co-edited, with Holly
Dugan, a special issue of postmedieval on ‘The Intimate Senses’ and has articles forthcoming
on medieval and modern perceptions of the sensitive powers of plants. Also forthcoming is
an online collection, The Middle Shore, which will be published in 2017 by Electric Press
(<http://electric.press/titles.html>).
John Gagné is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Sydney, and
was a 2016–17 Fellow of Villa I Tatti. His recent publications include essays on the origins
of European casualty-counting in warfare (in Renaissance Quarterly), and on illustrated
manuscripts that positioned Italian women as tokens of French conquest around 1500 (in
I Tatti Studies). He is currently writing a book titled Milan Undone: Transcultural War in the
Early Sixteenth Century, a history of contested sovereignty and state-breaking in the High
Renaissance. He is also at work on a new project on the pre-modern history of paper and
document destruction.
Elina Gertsman is Professor of Medieval Art at Case Western Reserve University. She is the
author of The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance (Brepols, 2010)
and Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna (Penn State University Press,
2015), and editor of several books, including Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives,
Histories, Contexts (Routledge, 2008) and Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History
(Routledge, 2011). Most recently, with Stephen Fliegel, she published a catalogue that
accompanies the focus exhibition they co-curated at the Cleveland Museum of Art, ‘Myth
and Mystique: Cleveland’s Gothic Table Fountain’ (2016). Her current projects include a
monograph on emptiness in late medieval art and a book co-authored with Barbara
Rosenwein, The Middle Ages in 50 Objects.
Helen M. Hickey is a researcher with the Australian Centre of Excellence for the History
of Emotions at the University of Melbourne. She has published on medieval poetics,
medieval law, and early modern medicine. Her recent edited collection, with Helen Dell, is
Singing Death: Reflections on Music and Mortality (Ashgate/Routledge, 2017). Her current
research encompasses relics and ophthalmological miracles in medieval Europe. She is a
member of the International Health Humanities Network.
Sally Holloway is Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow in History and History of Art at
Oxford Brookes University. She completed her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of
London in 2013, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her monograph
Romantic Love in Georgian England is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2018.
Recent articles include ‘“You know I am all on fire”: Writing the Adulterous Affair in
England, c.1740–1830’, Historical Research 89 (2016): 317–39, and with Alice Dolan, a
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

List of Contributors xiii

special issue of the journal Textile on ‘Emotional Textiles’. Sally is an Affiliated Research
Scholar at the Centre for the History of the Emotions, Queen Mary, University of London.
In 2016 she was an Early Career International Visiting Research Fellow at the Australian
Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.
Alicia Marchant is a University Associate in History at the University of Tasmania and an
Associate Investigator with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the
History of Emotions. Since completion of her PhD in Medieval and Early Modern History
at the University of Western Australia in 2012, Alicia has published in a variety of research
areas, including the history of emotions, heritage, materiality, narrative, and dark tourism.
She is the author of The Revolt of Owain Glyndŵr in Medieval English Chronicles (York
Medieval Press: Boydell and Brewer, 2014), and the forthcoming edited collection Historicising
Heritage and Emotions: The Affective Histories of Blood, Stone and Land (Routledge, 2017).
Sarah Randles is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Historical and Philosophical
Studies at the University of Melbourne and an Adjunct Researcher in the School of
Humanities at the University of Tasmania. She completed her PhD on the Tristan legend in
medieval embroidery at the Australian National University and was formerly a Postdoctoral
Fellow in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions,
which has also funded her current Project to Publication fellowship. She has published
on medieval and later textiles, supernatural beliefs and their attendant practices, and
medievalism in Australia. Her current research project explores the relationship between
materiality and the emotions of pilgrimage and sacred place, focusing on the relics and
other aspects of material culture in Chartres Cathedral.
Carolyn Steedman is Emeritus Professor in History at the University of Warwick and a
Fellow of the British Academy. Her most recent book, An Everyday Life of the English
Working Class was published with Cambridge University Press in 2013. She is the author of
Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Manchester University Press, 2001). Her next book,
Poetry for Historians, is about the meaning and practice of writing history in the modern
world. It will be published by Manchester University Press in early 2018.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Introduction
Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles

This book is about the ways in which humans have been bound affectively to the
material world in and over time; how they have made, commissioned, and used
objects to facilitate their emotional lives; how they felt about their things; and the
ways certain things from the past continue to make people feel today. The temporal
and geographical focus of Feeling Things is pre-modern Europe, a period before
mass production, with a heightened focus on the metaphysical, when limited
­literacy often prioritized material modes of communication. What happens when
we consider objects from European history as material manifestations of emotion
in the past? As the subject of materiality gains interest in historical inquiry, the
time is ripe to explore how the fields of the history of emotions and material
­culture can be brought into dialogue. Starting with the Middle Ages, the essays in
Feeling Things try to move away from the dominance of text in the study of past
emotions, drawing upon studies of material culture to explore ways of thinking
about the history of Europe and European cross-cultural encounters through a
variety of material sources.
The essays collected here unite an international group of historians, art histor-
ians, curators, and literary scholars working on textual, visual, and, above all,
material sources. The ‘things’ analysed range from religious relics and devotional
objects to shoes and articles of clothing, and from books and letters to prosthetic
limbs. Many of the objects discussed are still extant and may be seen on display
in ­international collections from the Rijksmuseum to the Metropolitan Museum
of Art; others have remained in place, while their contexts—and the world around
them—have changed. The people who created, employed, and responded to these
things occupy a broad social and cultural sphere, including pilgrims and soldiers,
the poor mothers of foundlings, and royalty, indigenous peoples, and colonizers.
The objects themselves have a diversity of origins in European cultures from the
twelfth to the eighteenth centuries. It is our aim, in attending to this wide variety
of objects, people, and places, to focus our attention primarily on objects produced
in Europe in the medieval and early modern periods, or those which—like the
­relics of saints—came to Europe during this period and were used and understood
in Western contexts. The third section of the book moves beyond these geographical
boundaries, taking into account the emotional resonance of objects in colonial
engagements; but this is as far, geographically and temporally, as the essays ­collected
here extend. Throughout the West during the eighteenth century, philosophical and
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

2 Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles

social debate ensued over the idea of people as ‘things’: legal possessions which could
be bought and sold in the slave trade. For a variety of social, political, and techno-
logical reasons, nineteenth-century Europe had a very different understanding of the
relationship of people—and humanity itself—to materiality from that of pre-modern
Europe. We are concerned, rather, with the period before these rapidly evolving
shifts in European history and the mutual relationship of people and things.
One reason for our collective insistence on a practical definition of ‘thing’ as ‘an
object in the material world’ is that we wish to emphasize, above all, its materiality,
in both production and function. The ‘feeling’ part of our title is a reference both
to the tactility of the object—its shape, form, substance, and size—and to the
reciprocal ways in which contact with an object conditions feelings in human sub-
jects. That objects shape emotions, and emotions shape objects, is as true of the
pre-modern era as of the present, but the specific attitudes and emotions associated
with objects—both in general and in the case of particular items—have changed
over time, in response to a range of political, cultural, social, environmental, and
technological factors. By making European objects from the Middle Ages to the
eighteenth century the focus of our book, we aim to highlight how objects are
intrinsic to studies of transhistorical emotional change, and the ways in which they
provoke whole new sets of emotions when they are encountered in the present,
whether behind glass, or in the ground; abandoned and retrieved, or carefully
­preserved; assessed, described, and catalogued; ascribed meaning and monetary
worth; or considered essentially valueless ephemera.
The ‘things’ described in this book include both the everyday and the extraordin-
ary; artefacts considered magical, or supernaturally powerful in their time. They
bear historical witness to the affective relationships of people to the material world,
and to other people and ideas. Investigation of the emotional investment of people
in such things lies at the heart of this book’s project and drives its central argument:
that closer attention to the affective importance of material culture in the past
enhances our understanding of the history of emotions, and, at the same time, that
considering emotions enhances our understanding of historical material culture.
The essays collected here utilize three dominant approaches in their consideration
of the importance of objects in writing the history of emotions. They investigate,
firstly, what we can learn about the emotions of the makers and the initial and
subsequent users of these things, both from the objects themselves and from the
documentary histories which surround them. In doing so, there is an understanding
that these emotional responses can be both voluntary and involuntary, anticipated
and unintended. Secondly, they pay attention to spatial and temporal contexts, and
how these can enrich our understanding of the relationships between individuals
and groups and items as these contexts change. Finally, several of our contributors
acknowledge the emotional responses of the present-day observer, including the
researcher, and how their own affective reactions to the objects, such as empathy
and compassion, as well as love or revulsion, might be used in their work.
As a field of research, the history of emotions has provided a conceptual
vocabulary and a framework from which to draw in the present task. Many of
the essays here use the linguistic tools and strategies for emotions research offered
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Introduction 3

by Thomas Dixon, Ute Frevert, William M. Reddy, Barbara H. Rosenwein, and

Peter Stearns, amongst others. Some of our contributors draw on interdisciplinary
methods for studying material culture, such as those proposed by anthropologist
Daniel Miller, political theorist Jane Bennett, archaeologist Sarah Tarlow, and his-
torian Lorraine Daston.1 This range of approaches reflects the diversity of the field,
and the varied backgrounds of the scholars who attempt to understand pre-modern
objects today. We feel that a one-size-fits-all approach to a history of emotions
through objects would, on the contrary, fail to engage adequately with the com-
plexity of the objects themselves and of the people who made and used them. It is
hoped that these essays, which focus on a variety of material examples and employ
a range of methodologies, will, in turn, help a wide number of scholars interested
in placing their work within what is a rapidly growing area of research inquiry.2
Feeling Things reveals the potential for collaboration and multistrand method-
ologies in the future of the field.
The most unifying feature of this collection—the European late medieval and
early modern temporal and geographical frame—distinguishes it from works that
concentrate on the role of emotions in contemporary and near-contemporary
Western material cultures. This frame provides both a focus for and a critical
­distance from which to view the objects and emotions of a particular past, while
providing a multipronged approach which has the potential to be applied to other
times and places. The authors of the essays in Gerhard Jaritz’s collection Emotions
and Material Culture (2003), from which this book takes many of its cues, were
largely medieval historians.3 In featuring a number of essays focusing on the medi-
eval period here, we do homage to the pioneering work of these scholars. We seek
to acknowledge, too, the depth that medievalist historians have brought to the
history of emotions in general. Historians of the Middle Ages are well equipped to
develop the joint study of emotions and material culture. Comfortable with the
materiality of their period, their approach to the field is deeply invested in studies
of production and consumption, and of the ways in which objects were involved
in ritual and religious practices.
By focusing on the period from the twelfth to the eighteenth century, Feeling
Things eschews the tendency to separate artificially the medieval and early modern

1 Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009) and The Comfort of Things (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2008); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2011); Sarah Tarlow, ‘Emotion in Archaeology’, Current Anthropology 41.5 (2000):
713–46 and ‘The Archaeology of Emotion and Affect’, Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012):
169–85; Lorraine Daston, ed., Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York:
Zone, 2004).
2 At the time of writing, online forums include the History of Emotions blog at Queen Mary,
University of London, <https://emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac.uk/tag/emotional-objects/>; Histories
of Emotion from Medieval Europe to Contemporary Australia, <https://historiesofemotion.com>;
Emotional Objects: Touching Emotions in History, <https://emotionalobjects.wordpress.com>; Things
We Keep, <http://www.thingswekeep.org>; Materialized Identities, <https://www.materializedidentities.
com>; and the conferences on ‘Object Emotions’ at Yale, University of California Berkeley, and the
University of Cambridge in 2013–16. Accessed 15 May 2017.
3 Gerhard Jaritz, ed., Emotions and Material Culture (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie
der Wissenschaften, 2003).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

4 Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles

periods, treating each in isolation. The Industrial Revolution forms the end point of
our analysis. We take the series of historical moments preceding this technological
upheaval, beginning in the Western Middle Ages, to be a transitional period in terms
of changing attitudes of European people towards handmade objects. While
change was by no means uniform or linear, during the eighteenth century hand-
crafted objects were increasingly recast as both more and less valuable, sentimen-
tally and economically. The relationships between the makers and users of the
object changed when items were no longer made by hand, or by known artisans,
and the goods themselves became both less durable and cheaper, altering their
physical and emotional valences.4 Amanda Vickery has noted how the changing
balance of production and consumption in the eighteenth-century home caused a
‘moral panic around the decline of homespun virtue and the rise of frenetic
shopping’.5 As production in the second half of the century became increasingly
mechanized, uniform products were churned out by new mechanical devices
­powered by water or steam. The move to factory production from the 1770s
­represents a transitional moment in our relationship with ‘things’. This shift marks
a key point in the onset of modernity, and forms an end point for our volume.
Attending to pre-modern objects, we argue, is crucial in widening our historical
understanding of modern materialism from the Industrial Revolution to today,
and the ways in which objects have both shaped and been shaped by ‘immaterial’
forces. The chapters in Feeling Things illuminate a broad range of emotions, which
themselves materialize in human interactions with objects that were made by hand.
The emotions addressed can be harnessed to produce, affirm, or express individual
relationships, whether in religious devotion and practice or in the construction of
personal, communal, and—increasingly, throughout the historical period covered
by this book—national identities. They range from desire, disgust, dread, fear,
grief, guilt, hatred, pride, and shame to hope and love. The essays also consider the
ways that such emotions become inscribed in and ascribed to particular items, pro-
ducing ‘emotional objects’ of significance and agency. The idea of ‘inscription’ is
one which may seem to undermine the importance of the pre-modern object’s
materiality, deferring to the centrality of text in understanding past emotions, but
such objects are often literally inscribed with words, and these words and phrases,
too, must be considered a part of the objects’ materiality. (A good example is the
book, which exists as an object in both semiotic and physical states.) In many
instances the emotional interactions between humans and things have become
embodied in the material state of the objects themselves. The ways that items are
used to express emotions leave physical traces, not only in the circumstances in
which they are kept, or discarded, but in the patterns of wear, the rubbed surfaces,
the traces of tears, the attempts to distort or destroy, so that objects bear the scars

4 On changing attitudes to production, see Mark Overton, Jane Whittle, Darron Dean, and
Andrew Hann, Production and Consumption in English Households, 1600–1750 (London and
New York: Routledge, 2004), and Kate Smith, Material Goods, Moving Hands: Perceiving Production
in England, 1700–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014).
5 Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (London: Yale University
Press, 2009), 13.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Introduction 5

of their emotional pasts. Such marks are perhaps less easy to interpret than those
of literal inscriptions, but nonetheless offer potent clues to the emotional states
and practices of the people who used these objects through time.
This book is divided into three main sections, roughly equating to the three
dominant approaches to emotions and objects taken by the chapters within them:
‘Potent Things’, ‘Binding Things’, and ‘Moving Things’. These sections are not
intended to reinforce practices of the classification and categorization—the ‘tagging’
and archiving—of things from the past. Rather, our section titles are intended to
mobilize the reader’s thinking about objects in different directions. Chapters in
Part I, ‘Potent Things’, show the ways that objects can embody supernatural or
metaphysical powers and be employed to elicit emotions to religious, political, and
social effect. Part II, ‘Binding Things’, explores the roles of specific items in inter-
personal relations, to commemorate and symbolize the affective bonds between
parents and children, family and friends; but also as expressions of the self. Part III,
‘Moving Things’, considers the ways historical objects distort and collapse time
and space as they move through it and are encountered by different emotional
communities and cultures. This section also addresses the historical object behind
glass, removed from its original time and space, but which both imposes and
­represents radically new types of emotional meaning in its twenty-first century
­context. All of the objects discussed in these essays, however, possess potency; all
are representative of the social and emotional ties that bind an individual to a
­particular place and time; and all are subject to motion, historical, temporal,
­physical, ‘moving’ in new ways as they are moved. Our title, Feeling Things, focuses
on sensory perceptions and the nexus between objects and the human body,
extending it and enveloping it, or absorbing its tears. It is an attempt to cover all
these ideas, and to indicate the primary aim of the collection in facilitating our
thinking in all of these directions at once.
Our first chapter, ‘A Feeling for Things: Past and Present’, provides an overview
of the state of the field. It brings together major intellectual works in several discip-
lines, relating especially to the history of emotions and material culture studies,
but also to other anthropological, social, and historical research that either has
influenced or has the potential to influence how we ‘do’ emotions history using
material sources. The chapter provides a wider critical frame for the essays that
­follow, outlining various methodologies and their implications for emotions research
in the humanities, especially in literary and historical studies.
In Part I, ‘Potent Things’, it is clear that ‘matter matters’, as Elina Gertsman
begins her reflection on the role of medieval relics in ‘activat[ing] all manner of
sensual encounters’. Through her examination of a series of material sources and
substances, from relics, reliquaries, and artworks to crystal, copper, and teeth,
Gertsman tracks the significance of various materials in relation to the emotions in
devotional practices during the Middle Ages. Drawing on Object-Oriented
Ontology, Gertsman shows how the function of the object is connected, some-
times intimately, to its materiality, and in turn to the human body—even as the
human body itself acts on the object. In Sarah Randles’ discussion of pilgrim
tokens, which might be worn on clothing against the body, and kept or discarded in
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

6 Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles

powerfully ritual ways, we find layers of human ‘touch’ used to access supernatural
powers in these objects, and to mitigate and produce a range of human emotions
and emotional experiences in the context of physical and spiritual journeys.
Human tears, whether viewed as material substance or somatic emotional
response, complicate what we mean by materiality, especially as it relates to the
expression and experience of emotion in both the Middle Ages and early modernity.
As signs of emotion, tears, like drops of blood, are powerful yet unstable expres-
sions. The ‘Holy Tear’ of Christ, an object gendered feminine in its original
­linguistic setting (La Sainte Larme), is, as Helen M. Hickey notes, ‘an exemplary
case’, proving that objects and emotions must be examined critically across ­cultural,
temporal, and linguistic settings. The transhistorical narrative at the centre of
Hilary Davidson’s exploration of shoes as agents of emotional and supernatural
power crosses centuries, as well as a wide number of religious, cultural, and folk
practices. Shoes, she demonstrates, made, worn, hidden, or displayed, bearing the
print of the human body itself, are ‘potent carriers of emotionality’ through history
and culture.
In Part II, ‘Binding Things’, the first two essays look to literary texts to help
them historicize the emotions attached to material things, especially books and
documents. Lara Farina’s discussion of both literary and material texts as ‘feeling
objects’ unpacks somatic, embodied experiences of reading, at the same time as it
encourages further reflection on how materiality influences that experience. In the
Middle Ages, when pages were made of stretched, scraped, and dried animal skin,
the practice of individual reading was literally skin on skin. For Diana G. Barnes,
a tear-stained letter is examined as material evidence of an emotional past, in which
the textual object is mediated through text; the metaphor of tears as ink has its own
long literary history, representing the process of textual creation itself as deeply,
sincerely felt. Early modern letters themselves, Barnes goes on to show, while the
motives of individual writers may be regarded with suspicion, offer extraordinary
records of emotionality in fragmented material forms.
John Gagné’s study of iron hands in Renaissance Europe also considers binding
in both a metaphorical and a literal way. Through studying the refashioning of the
body in male communities of soldiers and artisans, Gagné recreates the false limb
as both a physical and emotional object, ‘activating and materializing affective
bonds between men who shared time, work, and knowledge together’. Moving
from fraternal to maternal emotions, Sally Holloway’s chapter presents a mother’s
touch as a key means of imbuing items with emotional value, as women ‘carefully
inked, pinned, and embroidered’ objects by hand. The chapter rediscovers a
­‘distinctive symbolic vocabulary of maternal feeling’ during rituals of birth and
renunciation in eighteenth-century England, communicated through motifs such
as acorns, butterflies, crowns, and hearts.
The essays in Part III, ‘Moving Things’, further illuminate how the emotional
meanings of pre-modern objects change as they move across social, geographical,
and chronological boundaries. Susan Broomhall traces a precious cache of artefacts
belonging to the Dutch East India Company from the seventeenth century to the
present, demonstrating how ‘objects and people not only operate in relation to
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Introduction 7

each other, but also in particular spaces and in specific historical contexts’. Alicia
Marchant provides a longitudinal case study in the Stone of Scone, used in the
inauguration of Scottish monarchs. The Stone’s dramatic journey from its
­manmade seat through the environment from which it was appropriated and its
eventual return to Edinburgh in 1996 drew, according to one local media outlet,
‘an embarrassing silence from watching crowds’. How to interpret such silence is
one of the challenges, but also one of the crucial aims, of object-centred study.
‘Stone’, Marchant writes, ‘is an ideal witness to history’: the Stone speaks of its
experiences in its very materiality—hewn and chipped by human hands and tools;
weathered through human action—and in its very movements from one ‘seat’ of
power to another.
Can things from the past speak in the present? The final chapter in this section,
by Carolyn Steedman, interrogates notions of materiality by considering the
­emotional impact of the human voice in both written and archival forms. Like
museums, archives are presented as ‘places for feeling things, or at least, places in
which many historians feel things’. Steedman describes how she ‘hears’ the voices
of things both in the archive and outside it: these ‘whispers’, as she puts it, come not
from the people of the past, but from the documents, notebooks, letters, and diaries
themselves, as they are transferred by the researcher from one medium to another:
from the archive to the notebook and, eventually, to the computer screen.
The historical project of this collection reaches back through pre-modern
materiality, looking not only at philosophical discourses on objects expounded by
medieval and early modern authors, but focusing in on some of the very objects on
which their reflections may have been based. This is an approach which allows
materiality to feature at the centre of the research investigation, as essential to
investigation of the emotions that surround them. Our aim in taking the long
­historical view is to show both continuity and change in the attitudes of people to
objects over time, as well as the changing place of objects in the emotional lives of
individuals and groups. A few of the objects studied here are explored diachronic-
ally, in different geographical locations and temporal moments; others are context-
ualized within the moment that made them. The essays here agree unanimously on
the need to historicize both emotions and objects, even if each essay does so
uniquely, and with a different goal in mind. The essays towards the end of the
­collection reflect in the greatest depth on the place of the pre-modern thing in the
modern world and bring the question of the historian’s own emotions most clearly
into the frame. This is the emotional experience, described by many historians and
curators, which occurs around objects in archives and galleries; the frisson of
­‘feeling’, touching, or holding the past, or of catching sight of one’s own reflection
in the glass.
The volume closes with an afterword by Joanne Begiato, drawing together the
diverse approaches taken in these chapters to consider the possible future trajector-
ies of emotions and objects in a fast-moving field.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

1
A Feeling for Things, Past and Present
Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles

From antiquity to the present, philosophers have identified the key difference
between animate subjects and inanimate objects as an ability to feel, in mind, in
body, and in soul (‘anima’). Throughout Western history, it has been believed that
it is in differentiating ourselves from ‘trees, herbes, & such thing, that lif han, but
felyng non’ that we may better understand our being.1 Such differentiation suggests
that inanimate things are categorically, even innately, separate from people and to
a certain extent, animals, defined precisely by what they lack, essentially: feeling(s),
sensorial and/or emotional. This long-held view is changing in modern times.
Science and philosophy emphasize the ways in which the body itself is no more
than a collection of material substances, while some proponents of Object-Oriented
Ontology and alien phenomenology suggest not only that inanimate and non-human
objects, too, can exert agency in their immediate environment and on history but
that they may also experience as well as produce emotional effects.2 Recent research
in both the history of emotions and the study of material culture during the
Middle Ages and early modernity—the time period in which the present chapter
is ­primarily interested—has emphasized the relationship of people to things, things
to people, and people to other people, via things. Placing material culture at the
centre of human emotional experience in the past offers new ways of exploring
how objects have produced, regulated, symbolized, and represented human emo-
tions through history, and how modern historians, curators, and custodians might
access them today. While the emotions attached to objects change over time, his-
torians of emotions in all fields might think productively about the implications of
material culture in their research, and how a history of feeling which is engaged
with the material world unlocks new ways of conceiving of how emotions are
manifest, and the sources in which they are found.
The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the emerging fields of ­emotions
and material culture in medieval and early modern Europe as they have taken
shape over the last three decades. In the pages that follow, we introduce some of

1 A stanzaic life of Christ compiled from Higden’s Polychromicon and the Legenda aurea, edited from
ms. Harley 3909, ed. F. A. Foster, EETS 166 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926; repr. 1987).
2 See Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology‚ or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 2012); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Geophilia’, in Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 19–66.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

A Feeling for Things, Past and Present 9

the most influential and potentially useful theories for historians of emotions and
materiality, stemming from diverse disciplines including anthropology, archaeology,
psychology, and art and design history. Pinpointing the key works that have helped
shape this new field, we offer here an introductory, interdisciplinary framework for
studying the material culture of emotions in pre-modern European history.
Emotions, Ute Frevert has written, ‘connect human beings to one another, but
also to nature and to objects. Yet, unlike the latter connection to the world of
nature and objects, emotions among humans are founded on reciprocity.’3 For his-
torians of the emotions, the relationship between people and things has generally
not been understood as two-way. People may feel for or because of objects, but
objects tend not to ‘feel’ back. Placing objects at the centre of the emotional experi-
ence allows researchers to approach this relationship from a different perspective.
Objects become mediators in emotional transactions between humans, rather than
wholly independent agents, as in Object-Oriented Ontology, or equal agents, as in
Actor Network Theory. Individuals or groups both give and take emotional experi-
ences from things in the material world.
One of the main points emphasized in the recent ‘material turn’ in historical
scholarship is the importance of reciprocity in the object–subject relationship.
At its simplest, this is the equation that people make things, and things make
­people; the two are ‘entangled’.4 Bill Brown, in his often quoted introduction to a
special issue of Critical Inquiry on the subject of ‘Things’, suggests that ‘thing’ is
not a name for an inanimate or inert object, but goes some way towards describing
the object–subject relationship.5 A conception of the co-constitutive nature of
emotions and things is essential in addressing the subject of feeling through mater-
ial forms. The literal and metaphorical concept of ‘making’—that is, the produc-
tion and creation of emotion through the production and creation of the object—is
one which historians may find useful. Even in the case of things that are not liter-
ally ‘made’, but occur naturally, becoming objects through human intervention,
emotion may be intimately linked to substance. Such objects may be collected,
curated, or remade into things that matter to people and which impact in turn on
the ways in which they live their lives and/or ascribe them meaning.
The semantic vagueness of the word ‘thing’, which is one reason for its enthusi-
astic uptake among thing theorists, is also part of what makes it a good match for
emotions. ‘Thing’ is often used to describe what is otherwise indescribable: love,
death, or an everyday object for which one has forgotten the word (a ‘thing’; that
‘thingy’). The Australian colloquialism ‘to get thingy’ means to become emotional
or upset (‘Don’t get thingy with me!’). In Samuel Johnson’s landmark Dictionary of
the English Language (1755–6), ‘Thing’ is a ‘general word’ meaning ‘not a person’.6

3 Ute Frevert, ‘Defining Emotions: Concepts and Debates over Three Centuries’, in Emotional
Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700–2000, ed. Ute Frevert et al. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014), 1–31; 5.
4 See Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things
(Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
5 Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2001): 1–22; 9.
6 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, vol. II (London, 1755–6), 889.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

10 Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles

The ‘things’ in this volume are, for the most part, certain or specific things, but the
emotions they arouse and which become attached to them are often uncertain or
shifting, part of a spectrum of experiences irreducible to words alone. Attending
much more closely to material culture may provide historians of the emotions with
a way of anchoring an often elusive subject, tethering it to the physical world, and the
realm of sensorial and sensual experience. Attending to the semantics of ‘feeling’
goes some way towards helping researchers conceptualize the relationship of objects
to emotions though language: feelings are embodied, experienced physically as a
participant in the material world. The ‘feel’ of a thing is what matters here.
Objects are a major source for emotions history. They are like texts, in that they
offer us access to an emotional vocabulary, but unlike texts, in that they need not
suggest specific words. The history of emotions has itself developed as a critical
field which relies heavily on texts. The analysis of written sources, whether docu-
mentary or literary, has underpinned all major studies of emotions to date, in any
historical period.7 William M. Reddy and Barbara H. Rosenwein in particular
have emphasized the verbal nature of emotions, finding them primarily in ‘emotion
words’ (Rosenwein) or ‘emotives’ (Reddy) in their respective documentary sources.8
Rosenwein in particular has championed the study of emotions in medieval his-
tory among Anglophones, showing how the critical attitudes and vocabularies used
to describe medieval thought and behaviour throughout the nineteenth and
­twentieth centuries have had a lasting impact on contemporary approaches.9 Much
of the work for medievalists has been to rehabilitate medieval emotions from
assumptions that they were childlike, naïve, artificial, or conventional. For Reddy,
emotions may only be found in their expression or translation into words. An
‘emotive’, he suggests, is a ‘description’ of feeling which may have the ability to
effect both social and cultural change on varying levels. Emotives—like J. L.
Austin’s performatives—‘do things’ to the world.10 Reddy’s most recent work also
looks to the Middle Ages, exploring verbal and literary expressions of an emerging
‘true love’ (fin’amors) in opposition to desire in twelfth-century France, in a project
focused explicitly on emotion as linguistic utterance.11
Reddy and Rosenwein’s approaches have tended to follow those of psychological
and anthropological researchers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centur-
ies which emphasized emotions as socially and culturally embedded in language.

7 See, for example, Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a
Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); William M. Reddy,
The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001); and Peter Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style
(New York and London: New York University Press, 1994).
8 Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Thinking Historically about Emotions’, History Compass 8.8 (2010):
828–42.
9 Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, American Historical Review
107.3 (2002): 821–45.
10 Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 105. Cf. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd
­edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).
11 William M. Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia &
Japan, 900–1200 CE (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

A Feeling for Things, Past and Present 11

The consequent under-theorization of material culture in emotions history has

limited our understanding of emotionality. Material culture itself may be product-
ively understood as a ‘form’ of emotional expression, capable of embodying the
emotions of individuals and groups. Those seeking to understand the material
dimensions of emotions—or emotional dimensions of material culture—must cast
their net wider to embrace a range of interdisciplinary approaches, some of which
may also be geared towards studying the place and meaning of objects in the mod-
ern world. The interpretation of material culture as a source for emotions in history
therefore requires its own semiotics and a concomitant set of skills, including the
ability to triangulate between material, textual, and visual sources. Such an approach
allows us to explore how objects may be both expressions and sources of emotion
in people, as well as mediums for the communication of emotional states.
Until recently, theories about materiality have rarely included the emotions in
explicit or sustained ways, although several approaches have emphasized the rela-
tional qualities of things and their potential for agency—the ability to do some-
thing, to effect change. The anthropologist Alfred Gell ascribed agency to items he
called ‘art objects’, a term he used to mean a far broader range of items than is
usually encompassed by Western ideas of art, not limited to objects with aesthetic
appeal, but including, potentially, ‘anything whatsoever’.12 Such objects could elicit
responses, including emotions. Gell’s theory allowed for the power of human emo-
tional attachment to objects (he gives an example of the little girl who is more
attached to her doll than to her brother), and for objects which exerted supernat-
ural agency, an important consideration for an understanding of religious objects
of the pre-modern period. Gell saw art objects as ‘do[ing] duty as persons’, locating
their agency as ultimately human (or supernatural), an extension of the agency of
their makers and users. Crucially, however, Gell considered agency to be attributed
to objects, determined by their cultural settings, rather than inherent to them.13
Following Gell, we suggest that historians should refuse definitions of objects
as inert, accepting (within certain limits) the ontological perspective that objects
have a capacity to ‘act’ on people’s feelings. Things may change or alter affective
states, consciously and unconsciously, permanently or temporarily, literally (like drugs
or pollution) or metaphorically (like a wedding ring). We are convinced that the
most productive line for historians of the emotions is to appreciate objects as actors
which do not emote; which produce and transmit feeling, but do not, themselves,
feel. In attending to the mutual constitution of subjects and objects in Thing
Theory, Brown prioritizes the object, in order to reflect more deeply on how ‘inani-
mate objects constitute human subjects’, and ‘how they move them’.14 To this, we
would add a new question, drawing out the implications of ‘movement’ in a way
that may seem to contradict Thing Theory’s subjectification of the object: how do
people make objects in the expectation of being moved, and of moving others?
Human intent underpins the making of many of the objects discussed in this

12 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: A New Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998), 6–7.
13 Gell, Art and Agency, 16–18.    14 Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, 7.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

12 Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles

c­ ollection; people motivated by fear as much as love; politics as much as religion.

Human agency is as important as the agency of objects, even if some objects work
to produce feeling independently of their makers, and may continue to produce
emotions beyond the contexts in and for which they are made.
As Brown observes, ‘[w]e begin to confront the thingness of objects when they
stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls . . .’.15 When objects
fail to do what they were ‘made’ to do, emotions—usually negative—tend to
­follow. But Brown’s example only takes the usefulness of objects into account, and
does not consider that the use and purpose of objects might change radically over
time and across geographical and cultural space. Studies interested in the relation-
ship of objects and emotions have similarly often focused only on emotional inter-
action with objects doing what they were made to do, without consideration of
how the materiality of the object—its size, shape, material construction, sensory
qualities, and the way that it interacts with the human body—impact on its emo-
tional properties. By outlining a few of these approaches in history and related
disciplines, this chapter considers the ways in which they might fruitfully be taken
up by historians of the emotions in the development of the field. The collection
intervenes directly in that development by showing the variety of ways in which
objects from the past—often passed over in favour of textual evidence—may be
interpreted as ‘sources’ of emotion in pre-modern history.
Objects from the pre-modern period are, in many ways, unfamiliar to the mod-
ern reader or observer; they are quintessentially different from modern objects in a
range of ways. They are made, for the most part, individually, often from materials
no longer commonly used, in forms that strike the post-modern viewer as strange,
for purposes that may no longer be clear. As a result, the ordinary has become
extraordinary, and the interpretation of these items and their emotional contexts
becomes challenging for the historian, a difficulty further compounded when pre-
modern objects are displaced through time and space, and removed from their
original cultural contexts. The question of the survival of sources is also crucial to
material histories of the emotions. It is often difficult to access the emotions roused
by pre-modern objects, since many no longer exist. We must be open to the fact
that the history of emotional objects, as with literary and documentary sources,
may be skewed by the circumstances of survival. A dysfunctional or broken object
may be discarded, while functional objects may have been used until they have
been worn out of existence. The objects that survive are often objects of desire, of
aesthetic or monetary value, although objects made from costly materials may con-
versely have been more vulnerable to theft or reworking, or they may be the result
of accidental preservation, having been ‘lost’ and rediscovered in an archaeological
context, or preserved as religious or historical relics. The traces of other objects may
only be preserved in documentary, literary, or visual sources. The idea of the lost
object is one which can itself have powerful emotional impact.

15 Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, 4.

 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

A Feeling for Things, Past and Present 13

Emotional objects, however, have different kinds of value, beyond the aesthetic or
economic, religious, or historical. The philosopher Guy Fletcher provides a taxonomy
for the ways in which objects can acquire sentimental value. In Fletcher’s view:
something is sentimentally valuable if and only if the thing is valuable for its own sake
in virtue of a subset of its relational properties, where the properties include any or all
of having belonged to, having been given to or by, or having been used by, people or
animals, within a relationship of family, friendship, or romantic love, or having been
used or acquired during a significant experience.
Fletcher admits, however, that this taxonomy is not comprehensive, ‘not least
because it leaves unanswered the important question of why it is that the relational
properties sometimes generate sentimental value and other times do not’.16
Fletcher’s definition of sentimental objects is useful, but limited. It only considers
particular categories of objects with which humans have emotional relationships,
and the range of emotional relationships is constrained to those which are essen-
tially positive. Nonetheless, his concept of value in this context is an important
one, which we would extend to a broader idea of emotional value. This idea encom-
passes both positive and negative emotional relationships with objects, while
­critically allowing for changes in those relationships over time and across cultures.
An object which does not materially change may undergo drastic changes to its
emotional value in response to shifting emotional contexts. The emotional value
of the wedding ring might change sharply from positive to negative after a divorce,
for example, as might the statues of saints after the Reformation. For Fletcher,
then, the emotional value of an object, is, therefore, relational, dependent on
­cultural context.
Such contexts include the belief systems of the communities that made and
used things. The emotional agency of religious and magical objects in the Middle
Ages needs to be situated within the belief that the power of God could imbue
material objects, allowing them to exert not only their own agency, but to channel
that of God and the saints, an account largely rejected by the Reformation. Both
the veneration of ‘holy matter’ in medieval Catholicism and Protestant iconoclasm
display emotional responses to the same set of objects. Brown describes the ‘force’
or ‘magic’ through which certain objects ‘become values, fetishes, idols and totems’
in the present.17 The drive behind this process is as much emotional as it is ‘magical’,
a term which may help us think more deeply about the powers of certain objects
in relation to ritual and religious practice. In his summary description of how
material culture may be used in the study of emotions in religion, John Kieschnick
has written about objects as ‘triggers for emotion’ in various religious settings,
and more generally about material culture as a ‘useful’ point of entry for thinking
about even larger historical fields, related to politics, ideology, and warfare.18

16 Guy Fletcher, ‘Sentimental Value’, Journal of Value Inquiry 43.1 (2009): 55–65; 56.
17 Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, 7.
18 John Kieschnick, ‘Material Culture’, in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion, ed.
John Corrigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 223–38; 230.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

14 Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles

Caroline Walker Bynum’s work on late medieval religious materiality explores the
complexities of Christian belief about sacred objects and substances and their use
in ritual both within and outside authorized religious practice, in order to produce
and regulate emotions.19
In ‘The Truth of Material Culture’, the art historian Jules David Prown describes
artefacts (objects made or appropriated by humans) as ‘events’ in history. They do
not ‘just happen’, Prown writes, but have causes, coming into being in a particular
configuration of circumstance, driven by human need and desire. Worrying about
the limits of historical interpretation, Prown suggests that one way of getting at
‘the feel, the affective totality’ of life in the past is to consider artefacts as ‘fictions’
which have the potential to ‘recreate the experience of deeply felt moments
and move us profoundly’.20 Prown was writing in 2001, post-September 11, in a
moment of rapidly growing critical and theoretical interest in American emotional
and cultural life. His ideas about reading historical narratives in objects, however,
derived from much earlier work by the anthropologist James Fernandez, who
argued for the usefulness of metaphor in understanding culture, what he called
‘an-trope-ology’. Structural metaphors, according to Fernandez, emphasize the
‘shape of experience’ in the material world, while textual metaphors are attempts
to convey the ‘feelings of experience’.21 Prown and Fernandez’s consideration of all
objects as ‘artefacts’—a term which later came to be replaced with ‘things’—offers
interesting avenues for historians of the emotions, who are already attuned to the
analysis of textual metaphors as a methodology for emotions research. The crucial
point for Prown is that while the object is textual, it is not itself a text: ‘Objects,’
Prown concludes, ‘are evidence, and material culture enables us to interpret the
culture that produced them in subjective, affective ways unachievable through
written records alone.’22 When we pay attention to the materiality of a thing and
its place in the world, it becomes a ‘privileged path [. . .] of access’ to the past, as
Figuratively speaking, we put ourselves inside the bodies of the individuals who made
or used these objects; we see with their eyes and touch with their hands. To identify
with people from the past or from other places empathetically through the senses is
clearly a different way of engaging [with] them than abstractly through the reading of
written words. Instead of our minds making intellectual contact with their minds, our
senses make affective contact with their sensory experience.23
By emphasizing the sensory nature of emotional interaction with the material
world, Prown’s theory provides a framework within which objects may be seen as
a way of making emotions tangible.

19 Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe
(New York: Zone, 2011).
20 Jules David Prown, ‘The Truth of Material Culture’, in American Artifacts: Essays in Material
Culture, ed. Jules David Prown and Kenneth Haltman (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University
Press, 2000), 1–19; 6.
21 James Fernandez, ‘The Mission of Metaphor in Expressive Culture (with comments and reply)’,
Current Anthropology 15.2 (1974): 119–45; 120.
22 Prown, ‘The Truth of Material Culture’, 11.
23 Prown, ‘The Truth of Material Culture’, 17.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

A Feeling for Things, Past and Present 15

With growing emphasis on the value of interpreting objects in intellectual,

social, and cultural inquiry across a range of disciplines during the late twentieth
century, anthropologists at UCL first established the Journal of Material Culture in
1996.24 Daniel Miller has since attempted to theorize materiality, firstly through a
‘vulgar theory of mere things as artefacts’, and secondly by endeavouring to ‘tran-
scend the dualism of subjects and objects’ through philosophical theories.25 In his
response essay, Christopher Pinney urged a closer interrogation of how the process
of objectification takes place in time. He argued that as well as interpreting objects
in terms of society and culture, we must read them in terms of ‘history’ and
‘contemporaneity’.26 Miller further developed this discussion of space and tempor-
ality in The Comfort of Things (2008), in which he recreated the material worlds of
thirty individuals living on a single London street:
These things are not a random collection. They have been gradually accumulated as an
expression of that person or household. Surely if we can learn to listen to these things
we have access to an authentic other voice. Yes, also contrived, but in a different way
from that of language.27
The items assembled by each person were seen to ‘store and possess, take in and
breathe out the emotions with which they have been associated’; Miller expressed
the need to ‘listen’ to objects as a way of understanding them.28 Thus ‘things’ can
provide alternative narratives to texts if scholars are willing to find ways to interpret
their language.
Archaeologists, for whom the documentary evidence contextualizing the rela-
tionship of people to things is often absent, have been forced to look for other
points of entry into the recovery of emotion, and have consequently led the way in
the field of materiality and emotion. Objects themselves provide clues to their own
emotional value, in material traces revealing patterns of wear or damage, or in their
careful preservation, as well as their placement, movement, concealment, or dis-
play. In 2010 Oliver Harris and Tim Flohr Sørensen proposed a new quadripartite
framework to further the study of emotions in the absence of text or ethnography,
considering ‘emotion’ (the embodied act of being moved), ‘affective fields’ (­networks
between people, places, and things), ‘attunement’ (awareness of others’ emotions),
and ‘atmosphere’ (the emotional experience engendered by being in a particular place
and situation).29 The conceptual vocabulary proposed by Harris and Sørensen,

24 On the development of anthropological approaches to material culture, see Paul Basu, ‘Material
Culture: Ancestries and Trajectories in Material Culture Studies’, in The Handbook of Sociocultural
Anthropology, ed. James G. Carrier and Deborah B. Gewertz (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 370–92.
25 Daniel Miller, ‘Materiality: An Introduction’, in Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2005), 1–50; 3. He continues: ‘There exists therefore in philosophy a “solu-
tion” to the problem of materiality, which consists of the dissolution of our “common-sense” dualism
in which objects and subjects are viewed as separate and in relationship to each other.’
26 Christopher Pinney, ‘Things Happen: Or, From Which Moment Does that Object Come?’, in
Materiality, ed. Miller, 256–72.
27 Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 2.
28 Miller, The Comfort of Things, 38.
29 Oliver J. T. Harris and Tim Flohr Sørensen, ‘Rethinking Emotion and Material Culture’,
Archaeological Dialogues 17.2 (2010): 145–63.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

16 Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles

which understands affect as ‘quintessentially archaeological’, aims to show how

emotions themselves are embedded in ‘human relationships, and rooted in deep
histories of material production and transformation’.30 However, such new meth-
odologies remain limited in thinking about, theorizing, and accurately historicizing
the emotional valence of objects which have changing resonance over extended
periods of time.
In the field of psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-
Halton’s The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (1981) has examined
how things mediate human experience, through their ability to ‘embody goals,
make skills manifest, and shape the identities of their users’.31 Objects define our
sense of self by shaping our status; rare or expensive objects act as status symbols,
and cement our position in social hierarchies. They situate us temporally by
‘­providing foci of involvement in the present, mementos and souvenirs of the past,
and signposts to future goals’, and locate us within networks of relationships.
In essence, they help to determine how we think about ourselves, and others.32
Sherry Turkle concurs in Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (2007), relating
these dialogues more directly to emotions. She argues that objects are inseparable
‘companions to our emotional lives’, providing ‘provocations to thought’. In this
two-way exchange, we ‘think with the objects we love’ and thus ‘love the objects we
think with’.33
Design historians have explored the relationship between objects and human
memory. Material Memories: Design and Evocation (1999) edited by Marius Kwint,
Christopher Breward, and Jeremy Aynsley explores how material culture functions
in the everyday, arguing that objects serve memory in three key ways: by furnishing
recollection of the past, stimulating ‘remembering’ of past events, and forming
records which are ‘beyond individual experience’. Like the dialectical relationship
between feelings and things, memory and objects are co-constitutive, and the
‘silence’ of such objects is seen to ‘defy all attempts to represent them in language’.34
Memory likewise plays an important part in Fletcher’s taxonomies of sentimental
value, based on human relationships, and also the ability of the emotional object
to evoke and stand in for an absent person or place. While the emotional value of
objects can operate independently of their aesthetic value, it is also evident that
people can form emotional relationships with objects on the basis of their aesthetic
appeal, as objects of desire (or for that matter, disgust). In this sense, things func-
tion not as symbols of emotions, but direct objects of them.

30 Adam T. Smith, ‘Those Obscure Objects of Desire’, Archaeological Dialogues 17.2 (2010):
172–6; 172.
31 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic
Symbols and the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 1.
32 Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things, 20–54.
33 Sherry Turkle, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 5.
34 Marius Kwint et al., ‘Introduction: The Physical Past’, in Material Memories: Design and
Evocation, ed. Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward, and Jeremy Aynsley (Oxford and New York:
Berg, 1999), 1–16.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

A Feeling for Things, Past and Present 17

An ‘object-centred’ approach to material culture is most commonly adopted by

curators and museum professionals.35 Several recent exhibitions, including
‘Tangible Things’ at Harvard University in 2011, and ‘Treasured Possessions’ at the
Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in 2015, have aimed to draw out the emo-
tional values attached to owned objects. These were the result of collaborations
between curators, students, and academics, in which participants started ‘with a
specific artwork, artefact, or specimen’.36 In ‘Tangible Things’, three items in
­particular were interpreted as ‘portals to constellations of powerful human senti-
ment’: a portable chalkboard used to communicate with spirits, a plaster cast of the
clasped hands of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and a divination basket
from Angola. Each object was seen to unlock ‘intangible emotions and ideas’, and
‘open doors to human feelings, emotions, and states of being that would otherwise
disappear with their owners’.37
Scholars working in the museum and archive have long understood the affective
dimensions of archival and curatorial work, where proximity to historic artefacts
generates particular feelings in the researcher. Intellectual exploration of the
­emotional aspects of preserving and researching pre-modern objects, however,
remains relatively recent. Susan Stewart was one of the first to recognize the
­emotional function of museums in guarding designated ‘precious things’ behind
glass and velvet ropes. The privilege of touching an object ‘means to be moved by
it . . . we are changed and so is the object’.38 Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive
and Cultural History (2001) opens with a meditation on Derrida’s Mal d’archive
(‘Archive Fever’) and on the arkhe as the place ‘where things begin’.39 For Derrida,
the psychoanalytic power of the archive is the source of all academic inquiry, which
is driven simply by a desire for its existence: ‘to have it’ and to hold it, as much as
to enter into it.40 In the archive, carefully catalogued objects and manuscripts can
be rediscovered, touched, sorted, and transcribed by researchers: most significantly,
they are experienced in their materiality, a process which carries with it a particular
­emotional charge.
Modernity’s own persistent ‘desire for the past’ has engaged medievalists in their
research at least since the late twentieth century.41 Caroline Walker Bynum’s Holy

35 This term was used by Bernard L. Herman in The Stolen House (Charlottesville, VA: University
of Virginia Press, 1992).
36 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Ivan Gaskell, Sara J. Schechner, and Sarah Anne Carter, Tangible Things:
Making History through Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Victoria Avery, Melissa
Calaresu, and Mary Laven, eds., Treasured Possessions from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment
(Cambridge: Philip Wilson, 2015).
37 Ulrich et al., Tangible Things, 164–72.
38 Susan Stewart, ‘Prologue: From the Museum of Touch’, in Material Memories, ed. Kwint et al.,
17–36.
39 Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2001), 1.
40 Steedman, Dust, 2.
41 Nicholas Watson, ‘Desire for the Past’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 59–97; Carolyn
Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) and How Soon is
Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC and London: Duke
University Press, 2012).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

18 Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles

Feast, Holy Fast (1988) rapidly influenced more work on the psychology of
­individuals in the past via affective ways of reading medieval texts and objects.42
Exploration of the affective potential of discovery and contact with objects took
place concurrently in archaeology. Sarah Tarlow’s Bereavement and Commemoration
(1999) explored her own emotional reaction to human remains and the graves in
which they are found, outlining how these feelings instinctively informed her
inquiry into early modern burial practices.43 Historian Emily Robinson’s ‘Touching
the Void: Affective History and the Impossible’ (2010) acknowledges the genera-
tive force of ‘the physical experience of holding a piece of the past’, by exploring
the role of touching and feeling in the pursuit of intellectual knowledge about past
lives.44 Embracing the paradox that history is always ultimately unreachable,
Robinson argues that historians must nonetheless grapple with such abstractions
in order to make better use of the sources available to them, and to come to terms
productively with ‘the materiality of the archive itself ’.45
Such work has paved the way for research in the history of emotions to explore
and systematize the role of feeling in historical study. In The History of Emotions:
An Introduction (trans. 2015), Jan Plamper acknowledges historians as ‘emotional
beings’, pushing back against traditional perceptions of history as objective, dispas-
sionate commentary on people, places, and events.46 Reflection on the emotions
experienced in the archive, from boredom to excitement, Plamper contends,
‘would do historians no harm’, and may even assist the breaking down of Classical
boundaries between the writing of history and the experience of emotion.47 The
preservation and presentation of surviving objects by curators and archivists is also
crucial in this endeavour. The ‘specialist skills’ they can draw upon are ‘singularly
valuable for the study of emotional objects’.48 Through their own experiences of
the many objects in their care, as well as their observation and anticipation of the
reactions of the general public, curators have unique insights to offer historians of
the emotions. Their experiences will go some way towards helping us to theorize
how the emotions attached to objects change over long periods, and understand
what may be gleaned from thinking about the feelings roused by an object made
and used ‘then’ in the ‘now’. Today, the object may have been catalogued and
labelled, placed behind glass, and be effectively untouchable; but it is still able to
touch the human subject on an emotional level. This encounter may take place in
the museum or gallery as well as in the archive (where touch is usually explicit),

42 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval
Women (London: University of California Press, 1988).
43 Sarah Tarlow, Bereavement and Commemoration: An Archaeology of Mortality (Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 1999), 30–5.
44 Emily Robinson, ‘Touching the Void: Affective History and the Impossible’, Rethinking History:
The Journal of Theory and Practice 14.4 (2010): 503–20; 503.
45 Robinson, ‘Touching the Void’, 506.
46 Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction, trans. Keith Tribe (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015), 290.
47 Plamper, The History of Emotions, 293.
48 Alice Dolan and Sally Holloway, ‘Emotional Textiles: An Introduction’, Textile 14.2 (2016):
152–9.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

A Feeling for Things, Past and Present 19

and is an example of the reciprocal touch of history and the historical object
alluded to at the beginning of this chapter; our own desire to touch the past
matched by its ability to ‘touch’ us back.
In the last decade, an increasing number of scholarly collections on medieval
and early modern material culture have touched upon the emotional resonance of
objects.49 In her introduction to a special issue of Exemplaria on pre-modern
things, Patricia Ingham touches on the ‘unsayability’ of emotions in general, show-
ing how objects complicate the study of history at the same time as they enrich it.
The pre-modern thing is, on the one hand, a present link to the absent past—it
may offer tangible evidence of physical and/or emotional attachment (‘feelings’)—
but it is slippery in conveying those attachments.50 Margreta de Grazia, Maureen
Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture
(1996), argue more straightforwardly for the centrality of objects to early modern
English life, endeavouring to ‘break open’ the ‘long and monotonous history of the
sovereignty of the subject’.51 Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt, in Renaissance
Culture and the Everyday (1999), focus especially on the role of clothing and fashion
in conditioning affective response, while Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson’s
Everyday Objects (2010) goes some way towards retrieving the thing itself from
­pre-modernity, asking what the material turn means for contemporary engagements
with and understandings of pre-modern cultural history.52
Hamling and Richardson’s collection is one of the most useful for historians.
Rather than modelling a singular or unified approach to the historical interpretation
of objects, it suggests two alternative ways of reading its contents: as belonging to
one of nine categories or ‘types’ of objects; or thematically, in sections which engage
with ‘wider questions of materiality as a category much larger than the object
itself ’.53 The thematic organization is intended to reveal the relationship of these
‘larger’ categories to materiality itself, while the last of these parts is titled, ‘Emotion/
Attitudes towards Objects’—so placed perhaps because it signals a ‘new’ departure in
the field (although the authors do not say as such), or perhaps more likely, because
it seems to take the historian into more uncertain terrain, inviting consideration of
the human/object interaction on a psychological rather than a physical level. To
the extent that the material and emotional ‘turns’ have overlapped, this reflects the
tendency to focus closely on either emotions or materiality, but a reluctance to

49 See, for example, Karen Harvey, ed., History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching
Alternative Sources (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009); Paula Findlen, ed., Early Modern Things: Objects and
their Histories, 1500–1800 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013); Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, eds.,
Writing Material Culture History (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015); and Hannah Greig, Jane
Hamlett, and Leonie Hannan, eds., Gender and Material Culture in Britain since 1600 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
50 Patricia Clare Ingham, ‘Introductory Note: Pre-modern Things’, Exemplaria 22.2 (2010): 97–8.
51 Margreta de Grazia et al., ‘Introduction’, in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed.
Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 1–16; 4.
52 Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt, eds., Renaissance Culture and the Everyday (Philadelphia,
PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson, eds., Everyday
Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and its Meanings (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).
53 Hamling and Richardson, Everyday Objects, 9.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

20 Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles

consider them together. Individual and collective attitudes to objects in the three
chapters in this section are clear, but they deal much more fleetingly with the ques-
tion of emotion, reading objects more conventionally through contemporary con-
structions of religious and social identity (‘attitudes’). Lena Cowen Orlin’s essay on
wills as sources for understanding the ‘textual life of things’ goes some way towards
a history of the emotions as read through individual possessions, and the relation-
ships established and represented through them, but she challenges the sentimen-
talization of pre-modern items as a legacy of the Victorian era. Orlin argues that
even if individuals sentimentalized their own objects, the convention of the period
demanded a separation of sentiment from practical use in the writing of the will.54
‘Emotion’ emerges more convincingly as a problem than a solution, and the ques-
tion of how historians of pre-modern periods in Western European history are to
approach the everyday object as a source is left hanging.
The overwhelming emphasis of these existing collections is on the pre-modern
object as ‘everyday’. There are few items in royal use here, objects with political,
religious, or symbolic power, or objects with a real sense of monetary worth, with
the limited exception of Gilchrist’s focus on religious inscriptions on ordinary
medieval objects. Instead, twentieth- and early twenty-first century historians,
inspired perhaps by the Annales school of history, have gravitated towards the
­useful, functional, and practical, often positioning the subject–object relationship
in the world of work. That work is itself often gendered, evident in its tools, from
pots and hoes to spindles and spurs, often revealing our own modern assumptions
about gender and industry. What is interesting about these attitudes is that many
of them seem to take the Industrial Revolution as a counterpoint, emphasizing the
specialness of the ‘everyday’ object before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
as opposed to its assumed mundaneness afterwards.
Medieval objects, Kellie Robertson has suggested, make the social visible.55 To
this we would add that they also make it touchable and/or collectable: the pilgrim
badges, clothes, and books that fill the pages of this volume are markers of status,
identity, and gender, as well as embodying memories of the rituals, ceremonies,
and pageants for which they were produced or in which they were used. Equally,
they are markers of emotional affiliation, to a group or a people, a family, or
another individual. They create, to use Rosenwein’s term, emotional communities
around them. In the objects in this collection, emotions and emotional relation-
ships materialize in the objects that facilitated them. Does this make the object
itself no more than a representation of something or someone else, in the same way
that a photograph or a painting represents its subject? A painting may be rubbed,
touched, or kissed, practices that were common in relation to religious artworks of
the Middle Ages. Certain (art) objects could become what Walker Bynum calls
‘holy matter’, taking on the power or ‘virtus’ of God, and therefore the ability to
effect change in both the spiritual and physical worlds.56

54 Lena Cowen Orlin, ‘Empty Vessels’, in Everyday Objects, ed. Hamling and Richardson, 299–308.
55 Kellie Robertson, ‘Medieval Things: Materiality, Historicism, and the Premodern Object’,
Literature Compass 5.6 (2008): 1060–80; 1074.
56 Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality, 17.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

A Feeling for Things, Past and Present 21

But emotions research in the humanities is a rapidly increasing field, and two
very recent scholarly works engage with material sources and emotions in contrast-
ing ways. Anna Moran and Sorcha O’Brien’s Love Objects: Emotion, Design and
Material Culture (2014) considers the centrality of objects in negotiating ‘different
types of love, to create biographies, represent identities, embody emotions or nego-
tiate relationships’.57 The collection begins with love itself, interrogating ‘the rela-
tion of love as an emotion to the cultural framework within which it is expressed’.58
Conversely, a special issue of Textile on ‘Emotional Textiles’, edited by Alice Dolan
and Sally Holloway, begins with textile objects, from infant caps and shoes to
shrouds, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The articles showcase
the range of approaches that can be adopted to access the emotional properties of
things, whether tracing the changing meanings of a single linen sheet, a collection
of burial garments excavated by archaeologists, or christening robes preserved in
museum collections without accompanying textual evidence.59
To date, Gerhard Jaritz’s edited volume Emotions and Material Culture (2003)
remains the only targeted investigation of a wide range of objects and emotions
for the pre-modern period.60 In her introduction to the volume, Rosenwein writes
that ‘[t]he dual challenge for our enterprise is to put the many objects of material
culture together with the many emotions that are expressed, shaped, and disregarded
by the community that prizes or demeans those goods’.61 Already, Rosenwein’s
concern for emotional communities is clear, as is her concern for the emotional
vocabularies that might be attached to them, or used to describe them. Combined
studies of objects and emotions remind us that naming individual emotions is not
always desirable; nor is it the only approach to understanding emotions, and how
(or why) they might be historicized. The essays in Jaritz’s collection mostly focus
on the documentary and visual records in which objects are depicted as sources for
historical emotions, rather than on the extant objects themselves. Documentary
sources, however, often offer only an illusion of transparency and insight into
­emotions experienced, while techniques still need to be developed for using non-
documentary sources in conjunction with text to broaden the range of inferences
we can make about past emotional lives. It is true that in the absence or scarcity of
documentary text, it is more difficult to single out or identify particular emotions
associated with items of material culture, and to do so requires different practical
methodologies. Paying attention to objects and spaces, however, helps to free his-
torians from the tyranny of text, opening up new ways of thinking about the range
of human experiences attached to ‘feeling’, ‘atmosphere’, or ‘mood’. Rosenwein

57 Anna Moran and Sorcha O’Brien, ‘Editors’ Foreword’, in Love Objects: Emotion: Design and
Material Culture (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), xiv.
58 Victor Margolin, ‘Introduction: How Do I Love Thee? Objects of Endearment in Contemporary
Culture’, in Love Objects, ed. Moran and O’Brien, 1–6; 6.
59 Dolan and Holloway, ‘Emotional Textiles’.
60 Gerhard Jaritz, ed., Emotions and Material Culture (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichen Akademie
der Wissenschaften, 2003). While this collection was pioneering, the balance of its focus was emotions
rather than materiality, and it predates the significant work defining the history of emotions as a field.
61 Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Emotions and Material Culture: A “Site Under Construction” ’, in
Emotions and Material Culture, ed. Jaritz, 165–72; 171.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

22 Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles

and other contributors to Jaritz’s volume, like many historians of the emotions,
retain a suspicion of the objects themselves as sources, so that textual evidence has
remained, over the past fourteen years, the privileged methodological approach to
emotions history. Rosenwein’s idea of the ‘emotional community’ is useful for
thinking about the contexts of objects, but still tends to displace focus from the
objects themselves. In many cases, the objects in Jaritz’s collection speak to a still
tighter circle of emotions and people than ‘community’ allows. The history of
emotions is poised to explore the joint past of people and things in still greater
detail, with an even stronger emphasis on the material world, and the emotional
and sensorial lives of people in the world, pre-modern or modern; the way subjects
construct and have constructed objects, and the ways objects construct and have
constructed people.
Objects from the past possess an emotional charge that attaches to groups, indi-
viduals, and particular moments in, as well as across or through, time. Descartes’s
famous declaration that it is ‘the subject that makes history’ is at odds with recent
ontological and phenomenological thinking about the role of materiality in both
the present and the past. The tagline of the Australian Research Council’s Centre
for the History of Emotions, ‘emotions make history’, riffs on Descartes’s observa-
tion to suggest how, in thinking about emotion, the emphasis is already displaced,
away from the Enlightenment individual, with his or her passions and personal
feelings, to the forces that shaped their world. Emotions attach to, are amplified
and transmitted by people and things in the pre-modern era, and inasmuch as
emotions may respond to objects, objects may result from those emotional
responses, allowing for a continuing cycle between the material and the emotional.
By looking first at non-human things, then at feelings and people, and by holding
all three in suspension, we hope to show that pre-modern emotions must be con-
ceived in terms of the material, sensorial world. Cultural theorist Monique Scheer
relates the ‘practice’ of emotion to Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, situating emotions as
bodily performance, and granting that they too have materiality.62 Accepting the
concept that emotions are something people do is a useful approach for historians
to take, and one espoused by the essays that follow, which collectively show how
objects are often the things people do emotions with.
Cultural studies theorist Jo Labanyi has asked whether it is ‘only possible to
study things in terms of what people do with them’, or if it might be still more
productive to study simultaneously what things do to people.63 The history of
emotions has been influenced by trends in neuroscientific and psychological
research, even if it has sought to define itself specifically in terms of its difference
from both their methods and findings. It has been more directly shaped by
anthropological and ritual studies, by phenomenology, as well as by theories of
practice. Objects are crucial sources in each of these disciplines, and recent research

62 Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a
History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51.2 (2012):
193–220.
63 Jo Labanyi, ‘Doing Things: Emotion, Affect, and Materiality’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies
11.3–4 (2010): 223–44.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

A Feeling for Things, Past and Present 23

shows that both are vital to our understanding of the role of emotions in history.
Such research culminates in the present moment, with its acute awareness of the
wide range of ways in which emotion—itself a nebulous, sometimes even an
unsayable ‘thing’—may be productively linked with histories of material culture
and human technology, whether pre- or post-modern. Anchoring both objects and
emotions in their materiality gives us something to hold on to in the development
of this interdisciplinary field of inquiry, offering, at the very least, an opportunity
for ‘feeling’ a way forwards.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Pa rt I
P ot e n t T h i n g s
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

2
Matter Matters
Elina Gertsman

It has long been taken for granted that medieval relics activated all manner of
sensual encounters. When Hugh, the bishop of Lincoln and an eager collector
of relics, came to the Abbey of Fécamp, he was allowed to see and touch a relic—the
arm bone, to be precise—of St Mary Magdalene. When he put it to his lips to
kiss it, he undoubtedly inhaled its odour; when he chomped down on the bone
and bit off two pieces, he added a gustatory experience to the visual, the haptic, and
the olfactory. The auditory background for this somewhat unseemly event was sup-
plied by the clamouring Norman monks who witnessed Hugh’s act and recognized
their magnanimous gesture as a grave mistake.1
This act, however, both as it is described in Hugh’s Vita and as gleaned from
the vast array of medieval sources on relic veneration, stands witness to a series
of emotional encounters as well. Hugh’s visit to the Magdalene’s relics suggests
anticipation and curiosity, while his act betrays an aggressive determination, a
longing to possess, and therefore either greed or awe or both: before resorting to
the indecorous mastication, he first tried to break off a finger with his hands. The
monks of Fécamp, understandably, were outraged, comparing Hugh’s act to that
of a common dog. Their confrontation with Hugh hints at an entire smorgas-
bord of emotions: they were agitated, indignant, infuriated, puzzled, distressed,
astonished, bewildered, and clearly troubled, perhaps humiliated. St Hugh, his
devotional fervour gratified, offered an answer that was cool and condescending,
indicating not a trace of guilt or shame, just self-satisfaction: he did nothing
wrong, he said, for every day during the Mass, he touched with his teeth and
fingers a much more important relic, the Body of Christ under the Eucharistic
species. ‘Why’, he asked, ‘should I not venture to treat in the same way the bones
of the saints?’ Perhaps if the Norman ecclesiastics had known that the head of
St Hugh would be stolen and thrown away in a field in 1346, they would have
been similarly satisfied.
This was the twelfth century; throughout the next hundred years the Magdalene’s
relics multiplied. Susan Haskins drolly suggests that ‘Mary Magdalene had, it
seems, left behind at least five corpses, in addition to many whole arms and smaller

1 Adam of Eynsham, Life of St Hugh of Lincoln, ed. Decima L. Douie and Dom Hugh Fraser, vol. II
(London: OSB, 1962), 169–70.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

28 Elina Gertsman

Fig. 2.1. Reliquary of Mary Magdalene, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Tuscany, Italy.
Gilded copper, gilded silver, rock crystal, verre églomisé. Dimensions: Overall: 22 × 9⅜ ×
715�16 in. (55.9 × 23.8 × 20.2 cm); Roundel: 3⅜ in. (8.6 cm); Rock crystal vessel: 4 5�16 × 2 3�16 ×
15�8 in. (10.9 × 5.5 × 4.1 cm).

pieces that could not be accounted for.’2 The focus of this essay is a late medieval
Tuscan reliquary now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which allegedly holds
the Magdalene’s tooth (Fig. 2.1).3 The reliquary is visually stunning. The tooth sits on
an iron pin inside an egg-shaped crystal, clearly reused, judging by an incongruous
ridge that runs across the middle. It is topped by a small silver plaque inscribed, in
niello, ‘d[e].s[anta].m[a]ri[a]e.madalene’.4 The crystal is held by delicate gilt
leaves and framed by elegant microarchitecture. A pair of two-storeyed arcaded
towers encloses four figures, two angels and two saints in Franciscan garb, the latter

2 Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1993), 99.
3 On the reliquary, see Margaret English Frazer, ‘Medieval Church Treasuries’, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art Bulletin [MMAB] 43.3 (1985–6): 51, 54, fig. 61; The Way to Heaven: Relic Veneration
in the Middle Ages, exhibition catalogue, ed. Henk van Os (Amsterdam: Nieuwe Kerk, 2000), 152–5;
Stefano Carboni et al., ‘Ars Vitraria: Glass in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’, MMAB 59.1 (2001):
36; and Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe, exhibition catalogue,
ed. Martina Bagnoli, Holger A. Klein, C. Griffith Mann, and James Robinson (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2010), #110, 196–7.
4 Niello is a black amalgam of silver, copper, sulphur, and lead, used to fill in engraved lines on
a metal surface.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Matter Matters 29

usually identified as Saint Francis and Saint Bernardino. Above the crystal, propped
on a graceful base, is a verre églomisé—reverse-glass painting—medallion. It, too,
holds relics, accompanied by cedulae, or inscriptions that identify the contents.
The medallion confirms the connection of the reliquary to the Franciscan order:
flanking the central Crucifixion are half-length images of Saint Francis and Saint
Clare, he pictured opposite Saint John, she opposite the Virgin. Above and below
the Crucifixion are half-length images of Saints Peter and Paul. On the other side
of the medallion, a scene of the Nativity is depicted. The verre églomisé disc, which
dates from the fourteenth century, is further topped by a cross.
While this relic—along with its container—does not have such a storied history
as that of the arm in Fécamp, it taps into the same network of feelings. This chapter
will explore the possible access points of this network in order to suggest what
types of medieval emotional communities cohered around such a reliquary and its
contents.5 In attending to specific visual aspects of the object—its translucent
crystal that simultaneously reveals and obfuscates the enclosed tooth, its fragile
microarchitecture that allows one to glimpse the figures hidden within, the affective
imagery on its verre églomisé disc that indicates the use of the reliquary by a Franciscan
community—I will discuss the reliquary and its contents as the loci of emotional
responses, both pictured and elicited, suggested and guided.
Rather than rehearse a rich history of scholarship on pilgrimage and relic vener-
ation, I want to consider the reliquary not just as something wrought by human
hands, but as something that works itself upon the beholder: in other words, not
just as a recipient of human agency but as an agent in human experience itself.
Such a reciprocal relationship between the material lives of objects and emotional
lives of viewers has been worried in many different methodologies, from Object-
Oriented Ontology—which, to borrow from Ian Bogost, ‘puts things at the center
of the study [of existence]’—to Thing Theory.6 The latter in particular is concerned
with the ambiguity of thing-ness: ‘beyond the grid of intelligibility’, as Bill Brown
writes, and ‘outside the order of objects’.7 This ambiguity inheres in the very ques-
tions about agentic materiality: how do objects structure, prod, and develop our
emotional lives? What happens when non-feeling things convey and form feeling?
Art historians have recently turned to Alfred Gell’s posthumously published Art
and Agency, which foregrounds objects as active social agents, not inert things that
passively await aesthetic, or even semiotic, scrutiny.8 But many of us, it seems to
me, have been doing this all along, and the current material turn in art history is
not so much a turn but rather a stepping out of the aesthetic closet of those of us
inclined towards an anti-essentialist view of stuff and of its very stuff-ness. What
interests me here is the agentic power of the relic–reliquary ensemble—power both

5 See Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2006) for the development of this concept.
6 Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology‚ or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2012); see also Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-
Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), on a sociology of associations, ‘a type of
connection between things that are not themselves social’, 5.
7 Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 1–16; 5.
8 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

30 Elina Gertsman

inherent and attributed—to exert emotional pressures and incite emotional encoun-
ters: what Jane Bennett calls ‘an energetic vitality inside . . . things’—in her example, a
dead rat, a stick of wood, a plastic glove, and a bottle cap; in my example, a yellowed
tooth, painted glass, gilded metal, and a piece of crystal.9 These things—these
ostensibly lifeless things—through a rich associative network become active actors
in the theatre of their beholders’ affective existence: they unsettle, ignite, disturb.
This is not only a medieval phenomenon. In describing his depression, a long-time
patient of Stanford psychiatrist Karl Deisseroth said recently, referring to an object
he saw on the doctor’s desk: ‘that piece of paper. It bothers me in some unimagin-
able fashion.’10 How might an old tooth encased in crystal bother its viewers?

Em ot i o n s a n d t h e M a g d a l e n e

It is, perhaps, an understatement to say that Mary Magdalene’s body—a beautiful

body in which pleasure and penitence so irresistibly combined—proved to be
bothersome in the extreme, and that the flesh of few saints has provoked as
many sensual and emotional encounters as that of the Magdalene. Her corporeal
presence was made vivid throughout the late medieval devotional network that
extended from theological literature to her numerous relics that triggered, as we
have seen already, passionate responses.11 Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, for
example, stresses the saint’s demonstrative nature by providing an extraordinary
narrative about the governor of the province where Mary Magdalene landed with
her entourage of holy men and women after their exile from Judaea. In particular,
the Dominican friar dwells on the Magdalene’s bouts of anger during the saint’s
apparitions to the governor and his wife, provoked by their refusal to feed and
shelter her companions.12 First, the Magdalene comes to the woman and threatens
her with the wrath of God; she subsequently appears to them both ‘shaking with
anger, her face afire as if the whole house were burning’ [‘fremens et irata vultu
igneo, ac si tota domus arderet’].13 Her anger is articulated through insults: she
calls the governor a ‘tyrant’, a ‘limb of your father Satan’, and ‘enemy of the cross
of Christ’ [‘tyranne’, ‘membrum patris tuae Satanae’, ‘crucis Christi inimice’], and

9 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010), 5.
10 John Colapinto, ‘Lighting the Brain’, New Yorker, 18 May 2015, 82.
11 On Mary Magdalene’s cult, see Victor Saxer, Le Culte de Marie Madeleine en Occident: des origines
à la fin du Moyen Âge, 2 vols. (Paris: Clavreuil, 1959) and Le Dossier vézelien de Marie Madeleine: inven-
tion et translation des reliques en 1265–1267: contribution à l’histoire du culte de la sainte à Vézelay à
l’apogée du Moyen Âge (Brussels: Société des bollandistes, 1975).
12 On medieval concepts of anger, see Barbara Rosenwein, ed., Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an
Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). The burning quality of the
Magdalene’s anger likely has to do with the humoral theory that equated anger/wrath with an abundance
of heat.
13 Here and further original text from Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea: vulgo historia Lombardica
dicta ad optimorum librorum fidem, ed. Johann Georg Theodor Grässe (Leipzig: Librariae Arnoldianae,
1850), quotes from 409–13. For English translation, see The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints,
trans. William Granger Ryan, intro. Eamon Duffy (Oxford and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2012), 374–83, quotes from 377–9.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Matter Matters 31

refers to his spouse as a ‘viper of a wife’ [‘cum vipera conjuge tua’]. Her two future
converts also overflow with emotion: the governor ‘shakes in fear’ [‘pavere non
desino’], and both he and his wife are described as being ‘in distress’ [‘de causa
suspiranti’]. After the Magdalene acquiesces to their pleas and succeeds in asking
Christ to grant the pair a son, a truly fantastic story ensues, as the suspicious husband
desires to go to Rome and seek out Peter in order to confirm the Magdalene’s
stories about Christ, while the pregnant wife heatedly refuses to let him go alone
[‘Absit; te enim recedente recedam, te veniente veniam, te quiescente quiescam’].
Inasmuch as this narrative is meant to define the figure of the Magdalene in the
Golden Legend, it is striking for the astonishing array of emotions it recounts and is
meant to evoke. As it begins in the throes of passionate interactions, so it ends with
them. On board a ship, the woman goes into labour and dies while giving birth to
her child; the governor—now called a pilgrim—is aggrieved, the sailors are mad,
the infant is distressed. At this juncture Jacobus himself lapses into something of a
wailing lamentation: ‘Ah, what a pity! The infant is born, he lives, and has become
his mother’s killer! He may as well die since there is no one to give him nourishment
to keep him alive!’ [‘Proh dolor! Et natus est infans vivus et matricida effectus, mori
eum convenit, cum non sit, qui vitae tribuat alimentum’]. Unaccountably, the man
persuades the sailors to let him leave the woman and the child on a rocky shore,
where he completes a furious rant against the Magdalene and proceeds to Rome;
there, he meets Peter, who takes him to Jerusalem. On his way back, the pilgrim
stops at the very same shore where he abandoned his dead wife and the infant only
to find his offspring alive and happy, his wife’s breast flowing with milk, and his
wife indeed not really dead but just awakening from an enchanted kind of sleep
that allowed her, in spirit, to journey to Jerusalem along with her husband. The
two return to their native Marseilles, appropriately, in tears [‘cum lacrimis’].
Emotions run high.
As its moniker implies, Jacobus’ compendium was a European bestseller: it was
as good as gold. Originally written as a preaching aid, the Golden Legend surpassed
in popularity all of its rival collections. Nearly a thousand manuscript copies are
extant in Latin, and about five hundred manuscripts survive that translate the
entirety or at least some part of the text into a host of European vernaculars. With
the advent of printing, the popularity of the Legenda Aurea trumped that of the
Bible, with at least sixty-nine vernacular editions and eighty-seven Latin editions
printed before 1500.14 The Magdalene, in general, was dear to the Dominican
order. The profusion of her relics led to contentions over authenticity, which gen-
erated discreditable—and rather emotional—gossip, as when the Dominicans of
Saint-Maximin Abbey in Provence, who claimed to possess the body of the
Magdalene, circulated a story about the shrine in Lausanne, which ostensibly
owned a piece of this body. It is a story of demonic possession, always a good
read. A man came to the Lausanne shrine, claimed the Provençal Dominicans, to

14 Specifically, for the editions produced in the 1400s, see Robert-Francis Seybolt, ‘Fifteenth-Century
Editions of the Legenda aurea’, Speculum 21.3 (1946): 327–38; briefly discussed in Duffy, ‘Introduction’,
in The Golden Legend, xii, who points to Alain Boureau’s entry ‘Golden Legend’, in Encyclopedia of the
Middle Ages, ed. André Vauchez (Paris: Cerf, 2000), 620–1 for further bibliography.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

32 Elina Gertsman

be rid of the demon that possessed him, a feat to be accomplished by the sacristan
with the help of Mary Magdalene’s relic. But the minute the friar began the pro-
cess, the devil loudly announced that the exorcism will be useless: ‘I tell you, you
are lying, because that is not the body or relic of Mary Magdalene, so I am not
leaving this man of yours!’15 The story was intended to accomplish at least two
things: to divert the pilgrimage from Lausanne to Provence by disputing the effi-
cacy of a rival relic, and to humiliate the monks of Vézelay who maintained
that they had the real body of the Magdalene—and who originally gave a piece of
this body to the monastery in Lausanne. As an aside, it is worth mentioning that
while Bishop Hugh’s attempt to gnaw off a piece of Mary’s hand was not a theft
per se—saints were pars pro toto, whole in each fragment; their grace, to borrow
from Theodoret, the fifth-century bishop of Cyrrhus, was undivided even when
their bodies were—Saint-Maximin’s Dominicans attempted a true robbery: a
robbery of legitimacy, which would result in a loss of status and in a steady flow of

Fig. 2.2. The Skull Reliquary of St Mary Magdalene, Crypte de la Basilique Sainte
Marie Madeleine, Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, France. Photo: courtesy of Paroisse
Saint-Maximin.

15 See Jacqueline Sclafer, ‘Iohannes Gobo Senior O.P. Liber miraculorum B. Mariae Magdalenae’,
Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 63.84 (1993): 114–206; 201–3, translated and discussed in
Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later
Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 330.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Matter Matters 33

income for their rivals.16 Perhaps because her body was a hotly contested site, the
Magdalene’s relics were put ostentatiously on display. These days, the basilica of
Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume keeps her skull in a transparent vitrine affixed
to a golden statue with a removable face (Fig. 2.2). In the Sanctuary of Mary
Magdalene, a chapel built inside a grotto at Sainte-Baume, her bones are encased
in rock crystal.

Em ot i o n s a n d D e vot i o n

Dominicans may have squabbled over the saint’s body in a highly expressive
manner, but in their love of the penitent sinner they were arguably surpassed by
the Franciscans, who also collected the Magdalene’s relics, and who glorified Mary,
along with her emotional excesses, in both text and image. At San Francesco in
Assisi, the Magdalene has her own chapel, with the narrative of her life painted
by Giotto and workshop; at the Guidalotti-Rinuccini Chapel, in the Florentine
Santa Croce, a Magdalene cycle is included alongside scenes of the Virgin Mary’s
childhood (Fig. 2.3).17 Saint Francis, who himself was seen as the second Magdalene,
enjoined hermits to follow the Magdalene’s example; both saints had the same
­liturgy used for their feasts.18 In particular, Franciscan texts stress the emotive nature
of the Magdalene’s conversion. Already in the thirteenth century, Jacopone da Todi
wrote in praise of the saint: ‘And I, said Magdalen / Threw myself at his feet, / Where
I made a great gain, / Where I purged my sins. / Nail me to his feet / And never let
me rise again.’19 The famous devotional guidebook for a Poor Clare, Meditations

16 See Patrick J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1990); Scott B. Montgomery, St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand
Virgins of Cologne: Relics, Reliquaries and the Visual Culture of Group Sanctity in Late Medieval
Europe (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 59; Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Why All the Fuss about the
Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective’, Critical Inquiry 22.1 (1995): 1–33, and The Resurrection of
the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
17 On the Assisi chapel and the image of the Magdalene in that context, see Nurith Kenaan-Kedar,
‘Emotion, Beauty and Franciscan Piety: A New Reading of the Magdalene Chapel in the Lower
Church of Assisi’, Studi Medievali 26 (1985): 699–710; Lorraine Schwartz, ‘Patronage and
Iconography in the Magdalen Chapel at Assisi’, Burlington Magazine 133 (1991): 32–6; Giovanni
Previtali, ‘Le cappelle di S. Nicola et di S. Maria Maddalena nella chiesa inferiore di San Francesco’,
in Giotto e i giotteschi in Assisi (Rome: Canesi, 1969); and Gianfranco Malafarina, La basilica di San
Francesco ad Assisi (Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 2005), esp. 74–81; on the Guidalotti-Rinuccini
chapel, see Michelle A. Erhardt, ‘The Magdalene as Mirror’, in Mary Magdalene: Iconographic Studies
from the Middle Ages to the Baroque, ed. Michelle Erhardt and Amy Morris (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 23–6.
Other essays in this volume discuss iconographic traditions that pertain to the Magdalene; for a
sustained study of medieval images, see Viviana Vannucci, Maria Maddalena: storia e iconografia nel
Medioevo dal III al XIV secolo (Rome: Gangemi, 2012).
18 See Opuscoli di S. Francesco quoted in Beryl D. De Selincourt, Homes of the First Franciscans in
Umbria, the Borders of Tuscany and the Northern Marches (London: Dent, 1905), 175–6; Katherine
L. Jansen, ‘Mary Magdalen and the Mendicants: The Preaching of Penance in the Late Middle Ages’,
Journal of Medieval History 21 (1995): 1–25. On the Magdalene as she appears in medieval drama,
see Theresa Coletti, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late
Medieval England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
19 Fra Jacopone di Todi, ‘Il compianto della Vergine’ from La prima lauda del Libro 1, cited and
discussed in Antoine Frédéric Ozanam, I poeti francescani in Italia nel secolo decimoterzo, trans. Pietro
Fanfani (Prato: Tipografia F. Alberghetti e C, 1854), 151–4.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

34 Elina Gertsman

Fig. 2.3. Giovanni da Milano, Feast in the House of Simon the Pharisee (south wall, detail),
Rinuccini Chapel, Santa Croce, Florence, 1365, fresco.

on the Life of Christ, which stages Christ’s life in dramatic terms, turns the Magdalene
into one of its main protagonists, describing the torrent of tears provoked by the
penitent woman’s shame and regret:
I have offended your Majesty in many and important ways. I have sinned against your
every law and have multiplied my sins above the number of sands in the sea. But I, the
wicked sinner, come for your mercy; I am grieved and afflicted; I beg for your pardon,
prepared to make amends for my sins and never to depart from obedience to you.20

In a fourteenth-century illustrated manuscript of the Meditations, the Magdalene lies

prostrate at Christ’s feet, rubbing them vigorously with her long hair; her demeanour
is markedly different from that of the other five figures in the image. In order
to imitate the saint, the manuscript seems to imply, one has to give in to the act
completely, along with all the contradictory passions ignited in and experienced by
the body and the soul.

20 Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century (Paris,
Bibliothèque Nationale, MS ital. 115), ed. and trans. Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1961), 171–2.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Matter Matters 35

The emotional saint and her emotional followers thus provided excellent models
for affective devotion.21 Yet, perhaps because the Magdalene is present rather
than represented in the Metropolitan reliquary, the emotional community of her
worshippers here is offered a rather different model of proper imitative behaviour,
one that privileges restraint. Two Franciscan saints and two angels stand composed
in their elegant towers, the serene attendants of Mary Magdalene’s body within the
walls of golden Jerusalem. The Crucifixion scene on the medallion similarly exalts
self-possession. The crucified Christ turns away from the demonstrative Saint John
and lowers his head towards the unruffled Virgin Mary, who kneels down in prayer.
The blood that sprays liberally from Christ’s side wound—and appears to be the
focus of the Virgin’s devotions—seems aimed at her alone. Saint Clare, watching
from the margins of the disk, is focused on the Virgin; but the gaze of Saint Francis,
watching the scene from the opposite side, misses Saint John and alights on
Christ. Both Francis and Clare, whose own vitae are fraught with highly emotional
moments, appear exceedingly tranquil on the medallion. The emotional paradigm
is figured through the lines of sight: the Virgin and John experience the moment
of the Crucifixion first-hand, witnessed by Francis and Clare, who are in turn
witnessed by the beholders. The Virgin is Clare’s model, and Christ is Francis’s, and
both Clare and Francis serve as intermediaries who direct devotional vectors between
the biblical past and the viewers’ present. The affective chain of associations allows
beholders to re-experience the Crucifixion both through their own faculties of
seeing and through the eyes of the saints who model the proper behaviour for
the devout.
The role of sight was of particular importance in the construction of Mary’s
legend: it is the cornerstone of Christ’s post-mortem appearance to the saint. When
Mary spies him in the garden and recognizes him, she is allowed to see but ordered
not to touch: the optical trumps the haptic.22 In untangling the implications of
this prohibition, Saint Augustine concludes that Christ’s admonition was not to be
taken literally but rather as a directive for a proper mode of belief: ‘do not touch
earth and so lose heaven; do not cleave to the man and so lose belief in God’.23 The

21 See Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia,
PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) on affective devotion, and especially chapter 3 on its
relationship with Franciscan order.
22 For the iconography of this theme, see essays in Barbara Baert et al., eds., ‘Noli me tangere’: Mary
Magdalene: One Person, Many Images, exhibition catalogue (Leuven: Maurits Sabbe Library, Faculty
of Theology, 2006). On the role of sight and touch in the imagery of ‘Noli me tangere’, see Lisa M.
Rafanelli, ‘Michelangelo’s Noli Me Tangere for Vittoria Colonna, and the Changing Status of Women
in Renaissance Italy’, in Mary Magdalene: Iconographic Studies, ed. Erhardt and Morris, 223–48. On
medieval concepts of sight and its haptic qualities, see especially David Lindberg, Theories of Vision
from Al‐kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976) and Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and
Embodiment in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); for a case study that explores
the way that haptic qualities of sight can be considered in the study of late medieval art, see Elina
Gertsman, ‘Multiple Impressions: Christ in the Winepress and the Semiotics of the Printed Image’,
Art History 36.2 (2013): 310–37.
23 Augustine, Sermo CCXLIV In diebus Paschalibus XV, PL 38, col. 1150: ‘Noli tangendo terram,
coelum perdere; noli remanendo in homine, in Deum non credere’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

36 Elina Gertsman

interplay of sight and touch is foregrounded in the medallion images in a way

that appears prescriptive: John and Christ do not see each other but their cloaks
overlap; the Virgin and Christ are set at a certain remove from one another but are
connected by sight.
The emphasis on seeing as an instrument and vehicle of devotion is a typical one
for the Franciscan milieu.24 Among later medieval theorists of sight, Franciscans—
including Roger Bacon, John Peckham, John Duns Scott, and William Ockham—are
prominent.25 Franciscans were fond of using transparent glass, which was produced
with great success in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.26 The reverse-glass
painting technique of verre églomisé also signalled humility—it was like, and yet
unlike, the expensive enamel it sought to imitate, and so appropriate for objects
produced by the mendicant order. In addition, the glass allowed for the clear dis-
play of subsidiary relics within the medallion. The receptive transparency of the
verre églomisé is, however, complicated by the crystal mounted directly below.
Crystal was symbolic of spiritual purity; after all, Revelation 22:1 likened the ‘pure
river of water of life . . . proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb’ to
the purity of crystal. And yet the clarity of the crystal is deceptive and muddied:
the hollowed-out chamber distorts and enlarges the relic, while the rest of the
mineral’s surface is reflective and refractive. In its simultaneous revelatory and
obfuscating quality, crystal serves as an apt metaphor for the uncertain and flawed
ways that the memory of the saint is awakened in the beholder through the complex
set of mnemonic associations.

Em ot i o n s a n d M at e r i a l

Glass and crystal were not the only substances to inflect the affective experience of
their beholder. The rest of the reliquary’s rich set of materials taps into a complex
emotional web where nostalgia, fear, longing, desire, vulnerability, and pain inter-
twine. Gilded copper, for example, evoked a distinct sense of loss, as the material
was strongly associated with the Golden Gate of Jerusalem. This was the gate at
which the Virgin was conceived immaculately, through the kiss of her parents,

24 Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy: Narrative Painting, Franciscan
Ideologies, and the Levant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), discusses Franciscan inter-
est in images and so in seeing; see David L. Jeffrey, ‘Franciscan Spirituality and the Growth of
Vernacular Culture’, in By Things Seen: Reference and Recognition in Medieval Thought (Ottawa:
University of Ottawa Press, 1979), 143–60; 150–1 on sensory experiences.
25 On Bacon’s theories of vision, see David Lindberg, ed., Roger Bacon and the Origins of Perspectiva
in the Middle Ages: A Critical Edition and English Translation of Bacon’s Perspectiva (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1996) and Theories of Vision, esp. 122–33; on Peckham, see David Lindberg, ‘Lines of Influence
in Thirteenth-Century Optics: Bacon, Witelo, and Pecham’, Speculum 46.1 (1971): 66–83; on Scott
and Ockham, Katherine Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology, and
the Foundations of Semantics, 1250–1345 (Leiden: Brill, 1988), esp. 55.
26 On the technique, see Dillian Gordon’s work, especially ‘The Mass Production of Franciscan
Piety: Another Look at Some Umbrian verres églomisés’, Apollo 140.394 (1994): 33–42 and ‘A Sienese
Verre Églomisé and Its Setting’, Burlington Magazine 123.936 (1981): 132, 148–51, 153.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Matter Matters 37

Anna and Joachim; this was the gate through which Christ triumphantly entered
the city.27 This was also the entrance used by the Emperor Heraclius upon his
return from Persia with the wood of the True Cross: the legend mentioned by
Hrabanus Maurus and repeated by Honorius Augustodunensis some three centur-
ies later.28 In 1106, the Russian orthodox abbot Daniel arrived in Jerusalem and
described the gate as made with ‘wonderful cunning, plated with gilded copper:
inside it has skilful paintings on copper and outside it is strongly plated with
iron’.29 In 1165, John of Würzburg characterized the gate’s survival through the
centuries of military conflicts as a result of ‘Divine protection’, and described it as
being locked throughout the year, opening only on Palm Sunday and on the feast
of the exaltation of the Cross.30 And yet, by the time the reliquary was made,
Jerusalem had returned to Muslim control; the gates now led to a mosque, abutted
a cemetery, and so were not to be approached by Christians. Jerusalem dissolved
into a nostalgic dream of unattainable desire. The Magdalene arrived in Gaul from
the Holy Land that was hostile to Christians in her day, and her reliquary indexed
the material of the sacred gates from the Holy Land that was, once again, hostile
to and inaccessible for the devout of the fifteenth century.
Silver was seen as a material of particular sacred purity; Psalm 12:6 compares the
immaculateness of God’s words to ‘silver refined in a furnace’. As Herbert Kessler
argues, ‘silver’s allegorical function derived . . . from its own unique characteristics’
because ‘unlike gold, which is found in nuggets or small grains, silver ore must be
fired for its white color, shine, and purity’.31 Indeed, medieval thinkers, including
Gregory the Great and the Venerable Bede, often discussed silver and gold in tandem
with one another. For Bede, the silver and the gold of the temple apply, respect-
ively, to ‘the clarity of eloquence’ and ‘the brilliance of wisdom’.32 Gregory the
Great compared God’s divine nature to gold and human nature to silver, mixed so
as to render God’s humanity ‘more glorious by His Godhead’ and moderate his
divinity ‘by His Manhood’ much as in the mixture of silver and gold ‘silver indeed
is rendered more brilliant, but the brightness of the gold is softened down’. He

27 Golden Legend, 538.

28 Hrabanus Maurus, Homiliae LXX in PL, CX, 133–4; Honorius Augustodunensis in PL CLXXII,
1004–6, discussed in Denys Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, vol. III: The City
of Jerusalem: A Corpus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 103–8, no. 293, ‘The Golden
Gate (Bab ar-Rahma, Bab at-Tauba)’, which also addresses the confusion between the Beautiful Gate
of the Temple and the Golden Gate of Jerusalem. For additional discussion of and sources on the
gates, see John Wilkinson, Joyce Hill, and William Francis Ryan, eds., Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 1099–1185
(London: Hakluyt Society, 1988).
29 The Life and Journey of Daniel, Abbot of the Russian Land, trans. F. W. Ryan, chapter XVIII, in
Jerusalem Pilgrimage, ed. Wilkinson et al., 120–71; 133.
30 Translated and cited in Pringle, Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, 104; see Pringle,
106 for other sources that record the opening of gates. Muslim sources describe the gate in a similar
way: in 1347, a Syrian scholar, al-Umari, identified its material as yellow copper; see A. S. Marmadji,
ed. and trans., Textes géographiques arabes sur la Palestine (Paris: Gabalda, 1951), 237.
31 Herbert L. Kessler, ‘The Eloquence of Silver: More on the Allegorization of Matter’, in L’Allegorie
dans l’art du Moyen Âge: Formes et fonctions—Héritages, créations, mutations, ed. Cristian Heck, Les
Études du RILMA, 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 49–65; 55.
32 Saint Bede the Venerable, On the Temple, ed. and trans. Seán Connolly, intro. Jennifer O’Reilly
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995), 117.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

38 Elina Gertsman

continues: ‘For since human nature shone forth with so many miracles by the virtue
of the Godhead, the silver was improved by the gold; and because God could be
recognized through the flesh, and because He endured therein so many adversities,
the gold was, as it were, tempered by the silver.’33 The gilded silver on the Magdalene’s
reliquary, then, was not merely a practical choice: the metal of temperance,
although not mixed with, was ennobled by, gold, and it also restrained its bril-
liance, providing a potent physical and allegorical frame for the most important
component of the reliquary, the saint’s tooth.
A tooth is a semiotically fraught object: it stands as a particularly vivid synec-
doche for the entirety of the human body because of the inevitable way it indexes
pain. Toothache appears to have been a common affliction throughout the Middle
Ages, often caused by dietary problems: teeth were worn out by coarse grains, and
scurvy resulted in dental loss. Pain was often ineffectively treated by barbers
or itinerant tooth-drawers who would either use no anaesthetic or would pour
acid down the tooth to dull the pain (and destroy the nerve endings as collateral
damage).34 Infections were common, as were fractured jaws. It is no wonder that
non-invasive remedies—which included magic spells, prayer, herbal remedies, and
pilgrimage—were often prescribed for toothaches; their efficacy is more than
questionable. A list of instruments that Guy de Chauliac advises proper dentists
to have—which include a variety of probes, rasps, scrapers, toothed tenacula, and
tooth trephines—suggests a rather terrifying process.35 No less terrifying is the
image accompanying the ‘Dentes’ entry in the encyclopaedia Omne Bonum,
which features a fearsome extraction with large forceps and a tremendous neck-
lace studded with teeth, presumably the dentist’s trophies, enlarged for legibility
and didactic purposes (Fig. 2.4).36 If nothing else, it suggests that dentistry was
perceived as somewhat akin to torture. And, indeed, the knocking out of teeth
was practised as a form of persecution, as is amply witnessed by the case of one
Capitano del Popolo in Perugia who tortured a man by burning his feet, cutting
off his penis, and removing his teeth.37 Such torture also played a role in hagio-
graphic imagination: the martyrdom of Saint Apollonia, who lost her teeth at
the beginning of her ordeal, was commonly visualized in violent and sometimes
bloody images (Fig. 2.5).
The tooth relic, in other words, would evoke the vast landscape of familiar pain
located in a visible and immediately knowable part of the body—and would therefore
probably provoke a more visceral response than, for example, a metatarsal bone

33 S. Gregorii Magni, Moralia in Job, ed. Marcus Adriaen, CCSL 143, pt. 2 (Turnhout: Brepols,
1985), book 28, 5, pp. 1397–8, trans. in Kessler, ‘The Eloquence of Silver’, 54.
34 On medieval dentistry, see T. Anderson, ‘Dental Treatment in Medieval England’, British Dental
Journal 197 (2004): 419–25.
35 Guy de Chauliac, Inventarium sive Chirurgia magna, ed. Michael R. McVaugh, vol. I (Leiden:
Brill, 1997), book 6, doctrine 2, chapter 2, part 5, p. 357.
36 Lucy Freeman Sandler, Omne bonum: A Fourteenth-Century Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge.
British Library MSS Royal 6 E VI–6 E VII, vol. I (London: Harvey Miller, 1996), 95–6.
37 ‘Cronaca perugina inedita di Pietro Angelo di Giovanni’, ed. O. Scalvanti, in Bolletino della
Deputazione di storia patria per l’Umbria 4 (1898), 105.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Matter Matters 39

Fig. 2.4. ‘Dentes’ (Teeth) from Omne Bonum, London, 1360–75. British Library, Royal 6
E VI, fol. 503v.

(alleged to have been Saint Sebastian’s) enclosed in a contemporaneous crystal and

silver reliquary (Fig. 2.6). Aside from recalling St Hugh’s ignominious gustatory
theft, the tooth relic also draws attention to the Magdalene’s mouth. In doing so, it
both recalls the saint’s role as a preacher, the apostolorum apostola, and a missionary
in the then-pagan Gaul, and cues the viewer’s memory to two key narratives from
the saint’s life: the time when she is refused food upon arrival in Marseilles and the
regular sessions in the desert when angels came to her to provide heavenly food.38
As a fragment of a body, the relic thus serves an invitation to reconstruct the whole.
The contrast between the young and beautiful penitent, defined by her desirable
body, and the decaying tooth inserted into crystal would have been implicitly
didactic, a saintly version of the memento mori and a potent reminder of the true
nature of human flesh. In the late Middle Ages, the Magdalene was almost invari-
ably represented as a beautiful young woman, even during her thirty-year-long
exploits in the desert when she wore nothing but her long hair as clothing, and
where she consumed no food or water but only, to quote Jacobus, ‘the good things

38 See Jansen, ‘Maria Magdalena’.

 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

40 Elina Gertsman

Fig. 2.5. Detail of a miniature of the martyrdom of St Apollonia, from the Dunois Hours,
France (Paris), c.1440–c.1450. British Library, Yates Thompson MS 3, fol. 284v.

of heaven’.39 Even at the hour of her death, the inevitable deterioration of her body
was not perceptible: her ‘countenance was so radiant . . . that one would more easily
look straight into the sun than gaze upon her face’.40 But this charismatic body
stands at odds with the gruesomely naked relic. Not sheathed into concealing
metal but rather put on display, the tooth was a powerful reminder of where the
true significance of the Magdalene’s body lay: not in its transient beauty but in
the potency of the spirit that animated it—and that ostensibly continued to animate
its fragments after her corporeal death.41

39 Golden Legend, 380.

40 Golden Legend, 381. Her dead body, in turn, filled the church where she was buried with a sweet
odour.
41 On transparent reliquaries and the role of changing theories of sight in their appearances, see
Martina Bagnoli, ‘The Stuff of Heaven: Material Complexity and Divine Craftsmanship in Medieval
Reliquaries’, in Treasures of Heaven, ed. Bagnoli et al., 137–47; Christof L. Diedrichs, Vom Glauben
zum Sehen: die Sichtbarkeit der Reliquie im Reliquiar: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Sehens (Berlin:
Weissensee, 2001); Elina Gertsman, Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna (University
Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 37–41; on reliquaries and charismatic bodies,
see Cynthia Hahn, Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400–circa 1204
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), and Cynthia Hahn, ‘The Spectacle
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Matter Matters 41

Fig. 2.6. Monstrance with a relic of Saint Sebastian, 1484, Germany, Lower Saxony,
Brunswick. Gilded silver, rock crystal. H: 18½ in.

Animation also inheres in the reliquary, albeit in ways that can only be meta-
phorized.42 ‘Things in themselves lack nothing,’ writes Bruno Latour; they do not
need human presence to be activated.43 And yet, and yet: inasmuch as objects have
their own contingency, they exert their pressure on the beholder, and their agency
can be read through the beholding experiences oriented towards them. This agency
is unremitting, perceptible in part through the affective and mnemonic network
that binds together narratives and pious exercises, things and people. Perhaps
‘never exhausted by [its] semiotics’, to borrow Bennett’s words, the Magdalene
reliquary acts upon its viewers by making its subject (the saint), its function
(a devotional tool), and its materials (glass, metal, mineral) into emotional conduits

of the Charismatic Body: Patrons, Artists, and Body-Part Reliquaries’, in Treasures of Heaven, ed.
Bagnoli et al., 163–72.
42 Bogost discusses such metaphorization in Alien Phenomenology, using as one example a relationship
between a car engine and distilled hydrocarbons; Bogost asks whether and how objects can perceive:
whether the way that the engine explodes hydrocarbons does ‘violence to them’ or, rather, ‘express[es]
ardor, the loving heat of friendship or passion’, 75.
43 Bruno Latour, ‘Interlude IV’, in Irreductions, part 2 of The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan
Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 193.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

42 Elina Gertsman

for its audiences.44 What the audiences themselves perceived in this assemblage is
uncertain—reception is ephemeral; its traces in artefacts are unreliable; meanings
slip. But we can grasp at them by closely attending to stories, images, and things—
silver, copper, crystal, teeth—by which the emotional communities of viewers were
prodded, disturbed, and, to return to the formulation of Deisseroth’s patient, so
certainly bothered.

44 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 5.

 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

3
Signs of Emotion
Pilgrimage Tokens from the Cathedral
of Notre-Dame of Chartres

Sarah Randles

In the collection of the Musée national du Moyen Âge (formerly known as the
Musée de Cluny) in Paris is a fourteenth-century pilgrimage badge, found in the
River Seine, which depicts St Lubin, a sixth-century bishop of Chartres (Fig. 3.1).1
This little badge, like most of its kind, is small enough to hold in the hand, some
4.2 cm in height and 2.6 cm wide. It is made of a tin–lead alloy, today dulled to a
dark grey, but perhaps when new, bright enough to simulate silver. It is a delicate
thing, composed of more space than metal, depicting the saint with his crosier
blessing the supplicants at his feet, framed in a pointed rectangle, the interior of
which still contains fragments of tracery. At the top left and bottom right corners
are rings by which it might be attached to the clothing of a pilgrim, but the other
rings, like the remainder of the tracery, are now broken and have disappeared.
The image of St Lubin, cast in low relief, is crude but lively. It is, typically, not
unique, and other examples of badges with similar iconography, including one
made from the same mould, can be found in the Museum of London and the
Prague Museum of Decorative Arts.2 This object provides an engaging example of
the sort of cheap image sold to pilgrims at hundreds of shrines across medieval
Europe in the Middle Ages.
Pilgrimage tokens were manufactured in their tens, if not hundreds, of t­ housands
from the twelfth century onwards, from lead or tin, or pewter (a mixture of both)
and sold cheaply, usually under licence by the custodians of shrines, to p ­ ilgrims.
They first came to the attention of scholars when large numbers of p ­ ilgrimage
tokens were discovered in Paris during the dredging of the Seine in the nineteenth
century.3 Other large deposits have been found in London and in Nieweland in

1 Musée national du Moyen Âge, Inventory No. 18030; Denis Bruna, Enseignes de pèlerinage et ensei-
gnes profanes (Paris: Musée national du Moyen Âge, Thermes de Cluny, 1996), 170, catalogue no. 250.
2 British Museum, Inventory No. 1913-6-198; Prague Museum of Decorative Arts, Inventory No.
UPM 5683 (1894).
3 These tokens, together with many other small metal items, were first noted by Arthur Forgeais,
and published in multiple volumes. Those which deal with the pilgrimage tokens are A. Forgeais,
Notice sur des plombs historiés trouvés dans la Seine (Paris, 1858) and A. Forgeais, Collection de plombs
historiés trouvés dans la Seine, vol. II, ‘Enseignes de pèlerinage’ (Paris, 1863).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

44 Sarah Randles

Fig. 3.1. Pilgrim badge of St Lubin, Chartres Cathedral, fourteenth century, France. Pewter.
H: 42 mm; L: 26 mm. Collection: Paris, Musée national du Moyen Âge. Source: Peregrinations
Photobank. Photographer: Stewart Henry Rosenberg.

the Netherlands, and in recent decades the use of metal detectors has resulted in
the discovery of hundreds more tokens from multiple sites.4 The medieval practice
of moulding each token with the distinctive iconography of its originating shrine
has allowed the sources of these badges to be identified in most cases, and they
have become of increasing interest to scholars as indications of popular piety,
resulting in a large body of research.5 However, like many other material items

4 See, especially, Brian Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges: Medieval Finds from
Excavations in London (London: Stationery Office, 1998); H. J. E van Beuningen and A. M. Koldeweij,
Heilig en Profaan: 1000 Laatmiddeleeuwse insignes, Rotterdam Papers 8 (Cothen: Stichting
Middeleeuwse Religieuze en Profane Insignes, 1993); H. J. E. van Beuningen, A. M. Koldeweij, and
D. Kicken, Heilig en Profaan: Laatmiddeleeuwse insignes uit openbare en particuliere collecties, Rotterdam
Papers 12 (Cothen: Stichting Middeleeuwse Religieuze en Profane Insignes, 2001); H. J. E. van
Beuningen, A. M. Koldeweij, D. Kicken, and H. van Asperen, Heilig en Profaan: 1300 Laatmiddeleeuwse
insigne suit openbare en particuliere collecties, Rotterdam Papers 13 (Cothen: Stichting Middeleeuwse
Religieuze en Profane Insignes, 2012); and the Kunera database of pilgrim tokens at <http://www.
kunera.nl>, which provides details of more than 15,000 badges.
5 A detailed overview of the scholarship on pilgrimage tokens can be found in Jos Koldeweij,
‘Notes on the Historiography and Iconography of Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges’, in From
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Signs of Emotion 45

associated with popular belief, pilgrimage tokens and their use are only rarely
documented in contemporary texts, and in order to understand them as emotional
objects, it is also necessary to consider their materiality and the circumstances of
their manufacture and preservation, including how they were made, acquired,
used, displayed, kept, or discarded.
The Musée national badge of St Lubin is one of a small number of medieval and
early modern metal pilgrimage tokens originating from the Cathedral of Notre-
Dame of Chartres. These have been, in most cases, identified, described, cata-
logued, and dated, and there has been some discussion about their iconography.6
This chapter will build on this work to consider the tokens’ function as ‘emotional
objects’, and will seek to answer two main, related questions about them—what
emotional value might these objects have held for the people who used them, and
what might a study of them reveal about the emotional lives of medieval
pilgrims?
The Cathedral of Notre-Dame of Chartres was a significant medieval pilgrimage
site, although there is debate about whether it attracted very large numbers of
pilgrims.7 It was famed for its principal relic, believed to be the chemise of the
Virgin Mary, the garment that she wore at the birth and possibly the conception of
Christ, known as the sainte chemise. This relic had been donated to the cathedral
by Charles the Bald in the ninth century, and was credited with many miracles,
including saving the town from the Normans in 911, and itself surviving the
destruction of the cathedral in 1194 in miraculous circumstances. The various
miracles performed by the Virgin of Chartres through the means of the sainte
chemise were recorded, first in a twelfth-century Latin text, and then in a thirteenth-
century French verse translation by Jean Le Marchant.8 The collections highlight
three miraculous properties for which the sainte chemise was venerated: the ability
to assist in conception and grant safe childbirth, to provide an impenetrable barrier

Minor to Major: The Minor Arts in Medieval Art History, ed. Colum Hourihane (University Park, PA:
Index of Christian Art and Penn State University Press, 2012), 194–216.
6 Adolphe Lecocq, ‘Recherches sur les enseignes de pèlerinages et les chemisettes de Notre-Dame-
de-Chartres’, Mémoires de la Société Archéologique d’Eure-et-Loir 6 (1876): 196–242; 222; Michael
Mitchiner, Medieval Pilgrim and Secular Badges (London: Hawkins, 1986), 263; Van Beuningen and
Koldeweij, Heilig en Profaan, 218; Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs, 224–7; Pippin Michelli, ‘A Gordian
Knot: Notes on Chartres Pilgrimage Badges’, Peregrinations 1.2 (2002): 2–4; James Bugslag,
‘Pilgrimage to Chartres: The Visual Evidence’, in Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in
Northern Europe and the British Isles, ed. Sarah Blick and Rita Tekippe (Leiden: Brill, 2004), vol. I,
135–83; 151–3; E. Jane Burns, Sea of Silk: A Textile Geography of Women’s Work in Medieval French
Literature (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 164–5, 177–81.
7 The inquisitor Bernard Gui listed Chartres among the ‘minor’ sites for penitential pilgrimage,
after the four major sites of Rome, St James of Compostela, St Thomas of Canterbury, and the shrine
of the Three Kings at Cologne (Diana Webb, Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in the Medieval West (London:
I. B. Tauris, 2001), 59). Bugslag argues that Chartres probably never received the number of pilgrims
of some other French sites, but that it was important as a site of royal pilgrimage (Bugslag, ‘Pilgrimage
to Chartres’, 170).
8 Antoine Thomas, ‘Les Miracles de Notre-Dame de Chartres, texte latin inédit’, Bibliothèque de
l’École des chartes 42.1 (1881): 505–50; Jean Le Marchant, ‘Miracles de Notre-Dame de Chartres’, in
Mémoires de la Société Archéologique d’Eure-et-Loir 26, ed. Pierre Kuntsmann (Ottowa: Publications de
l’Université d’Ottawa, 1973).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

46 Sarah Randles

to blades in battle, and to protect from fire.9 Although the sainte chemise was
apparently not visible to medieval pilgrims, having been enclosed in a reliquary,
known as the sainte châsse or holy chest since the tenth century, it had a prominent
existence in the medieval imagination as the kind of standard linen undergarment
worn by both men and women through the Middle Ages, and with slight modifi-
cations, into the early modern period. Many of the miracles related in the Livre des
miracles were enacted through the means of ‘replica’ chemises, undergarments
made from linen which had been touched to the sainte châsse in order to be imbued
with its power. The belief in, and popularity of, such ‘chemises of Chartres’ were
such that numerous mentions of them survive in medieval and later inventories.
The potency of the sainte chemise rested on the belief that it had been in contact
with the body of the Virgin Mary herself, and perhaps also with the body of Christ
at the nativity and was therefore imbued with their power. For most saints, relics
were powerful because their materiality denoted the fact that the saint was simul-
taneously in heaven and, in the form of his or her bodily remains, on earth. For the
Virgin and Christ, however, objects which had touched their bodies, known as
contact relics, were particularly important because of the absence of bodily relics.
The Virgin was held to be pre-eminent of all the saints because of her sinless state
and her ability to intercede directly with Christ.10 The replica chemises were also
believed to be imbued with divine power because they had been in physical contact
with the sainte châsse, which enclosed the sainte chemise, which had in turn been in
direct contact with the Virgin’s body, in a process referred to as ‘holy contagion’.11
However, even those pilgrims who could not afford the replica chemises worn
by the elite were able to take away objects from the shrine of Notre-Dame of
Chartres in the form of the pilgrimage tokens or ‘signs’, made for that purpose.
There are several different forms of such pilgrimage token known from Chartres,
including those depicting St Lubin. The Virgin herself and the sainte chemise were
evoked on medieval and later pilgrimage tokens from Chartres, designed to be
bought at the shrine and taken away by the pilgrim, worn upon his or her body or
clothing. Several of these still survive or are known of from modern publications,
though the precise number of surviving examples is difficult to determine.12
The terminology for these objects is significant. In the modern literature on
these objects a number of terms are used more or less interchangeably: tokens,
­souvenirs, and badges, while medieval texts use the Latin ‘signa’, that is, ‘signs’, and

9 The value of the sainte chemise as a protection against fire might be debated, since the relic itself
was saved but the cathedral was destroyed by fire, and, in another miracle, a length of cloth vowed to
the Virgin of Chartres by a woman was miraculously intact while the woman’s house and all her pos-
sessions had been burnt to cinders. Le Marchant, ‘Miracles’, 27, cited in Burns, Sea of Silk, 172.
10 Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs
to the Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 167.
11 Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe
(New York: Zone, 2011), 136–7.
12 It is surprisingly difficult to determine how many known tokens there are featuring Notre-Dame
de Chartres. Pippin Michelli attempted to unravel the ‘Gordian Knot’ in 2002, noting that two
badges, apparently from the same mould in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Chartres, had been conflated
in drawings by Lecocq. Some appear to have been made from the same mould, and are identical except
for their wear, while others have been conflated in the literature. See Michelli, ‘A Gordian Knot’, 1.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Signs of Emotion 47

its ­vernacular cognates.13 At Chartres, the word ‘intersignia’ is used in a text of

1390 to refer to pilgrimage tokens, which were sold, under licence by the Cathedral
Chapter, together with wax images, to pilgrims.14 I have chosen to use the word
‘tokens’, being a modern English equivalent, as an umbrella term, since ‘souvenirs’
carries particular modern connotations for the emotional value of these items, and
‘badges’ suggests those which were designed to be worn on clothing, which does
not apply in all cases. Both the terms ‘sign’ and ‘token’ indicate that the object
acquired by the pilgrim is something that references and represents another object,
either the body of the saint, or in the case of Notre-Dame of Chartres, the sainte
chemise, or the Virgin herself. Some of the tokens from Chartres were later referred
to as chemisettes—‘little chemises’—but it seems likely that this term applied only
to those forms which were made in the shape of a chemise.
Arthur Forgeais published four medieval Chartrain tokens, featuring the Virgin
and sainte chemise, which he illustrated with engravings. Each of these appears to
be in the form of a badge designed to be attached to clothing, as demonstrated by
the stitching rings still present in the corners of most of them. These badges, which
Forgeais sold to the Musée Carnavalet are now only known from his depictions
since the originals were apparently destroyed in a fire in 1871.15 Forgeais a­ pparently
sold two further badges, made from the same mould, but differing in the level
of wear, to the Musée des Beaux Arts at Chartres.16 Two more medieval ­pilgrim
badges with similar iconography have been found in London, one in the Vintry
Coffer Dam in 1990,17 and the other in spoil from an excavation at the Billingsgate
Market car park, close to the Thames in 1986.18 Another badge was found in
Niewlande in the Netherlands, in land which had been inundated by the sea.19
Finally, one more badge of this type was found by a metal detectorist in Belgium
and reported on an Internet site in 2005.20
The Marian pilgrim tokens vary in their design, though several are quite similar
to one another, and at least two have been made from the same mould. They are

13 Esther Cohen, ‘In Haec Signa: Pilgrim Badge Trade in Southern France’, Journal of Medieval
History 2.3 (1976): 193–214.
14 Cited in Lecocq, ‘Recherches sur les enseignes’, 206. This text records a payment made by Hamo
the distaff maker (or seller) for the right to have a stall on the cathedral steps.
15 The recent publication online of a badge very similar to one depicted by Forgeais, and purport-
edly recently displayed in the Musée Carnavalet raises the question of whether they had all indeed
been destroyed. <http://www.cathedrale-chartres.org/fr/enseigne-de-pelerinage-fin-du-xiii-siecle,bonus-
photos-1458.html>, accessed 1 September 2016. The medieval galleries and numismatic collections at
the Musée Carnavalet were closed at the time of my visit in 2014, and I was unable to verify that the
badge was indeed there.
16 These badges, referred to by Michelli as inventory numbers 3417-1 and 3417-2 were not on
display at the Musée des Beaux-Arts at the time of my visit in 2014, and I was told that they were in
the process of being moved to the cathedral. These pilgrimage badges were not published in the
­catalogue for the exhibition of the cathedral treasures in 2002, although a page was devoted to four of
the chemisette tokens.
17 Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs, nos. 239b, 224, 226.
18 Mitchiner, Medieval Pilgrim and Secular Badges, 263; Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs, 226.
19 Van Beuningen and Koldeweij, Heilig en Profaan, 218.
20 <http://www.la-detection.com/dp/message-25110.htm>, accessed 1 September 2016. It has
also been reported at <http://www.cathedrale-chartres.org/fr/enseigne-de-pelerinage-fin-du-xiii-siecle,
bonus-photos-1459.html>, accessed 1 September 2016.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

48 Sarah Randles

all double-sided, a relatively unusual feature for medieval pilgrimage badges, since
they were designed to be affixed to clothing. They include an image of the Virgin,
which Burns suggests represents a miracle-working statue in the cathedral, perhaps
the now lost Notre-Dame Sous Terre,21 but Bugslag thinks is more likely to refer-
ence a silver-gilt statue kept on the high altar.22 On the reverse of most of the
badges the sainte chemise is depicted, together, in some cases, with the sainte châsse
or reliquary, and a local coin, known as the ‘denier chartrain’. This last is a highly
unusual secular subject for a pilgrim’s badge, and one which with further numis-
matic research might allow for a more precise dating of the badges. These badges
have been assigned dates, based on their iconography, from the thirteenth to the
fifteenth centuries.23 Each of these extant badges is made of cheap metal, most
likely an amalgam of tin and lead, although no metallurgical assays have been
­conducted to determine the precise make-up.
A later type of Chartrain token associated with Notre-Dame of Chartres occurs
in the form of a small pendant in the shape of a chemise, known as a chemisette.24
From the sixteenth century these feature simplified iconography, with an image of
Christ on the cross on one side and the Virgin and Child on the other. An archaeo-
logical investigation in 2012 into sixteenth-century basements and latrines in the
Quartier Henri IV at Fontainebleau unearthed an extremely rare gold token of
this kind.25 Later examples feature only the chemise, with a nineteenth-century
­example featuring text which describes how the chemisette has been touched to the
Virgin’s ‘garment’.26 The chemisettes are all designed to be suspended from a loop
in the top, suggesting that these would be worn around the neck as a pendant,
rather than sewn onto clothing. In addition to the badges and chemisettes originat-
ing in Chartres, but found elsewhere, one more medieval badge was found in
Chartres, in the nineteenth century, from the rival Marian shrine of Notre-Dame
de Puy-en-Velay.27
The surviving medieval pilgrimage badges from Chartres are inexpensively
made, but more expensive versions existed, and pilgrimage badges were frequently
made in precious metal for those who could afford them. In 1453, a goldsmith
called Martin Longuet was prosecuted for selling gold, silver, and gilded badges in
the cathedral cloister (where such objects were usually sold at the fairs which
accompanied the major Marian feast days) without an appropriate licence from

21 Burns, Sea of Silk, 170.    22 Bugslag, ‘Pilgrimage to Chartres’, 152–3.

23 Lecocq describes one of these badges as dating from the sixteenth century, but does not make his
reasoning explicit, and the iconography and form of the badge suggest that it is medieval (Lecocq,
‘Recherches sur les enseignes’, 218).
24 Lecocq provides drawings of base-metal ‘chemisettes’, which, like the badges, were also found in
the Seine (Lecocq, ‘Recherches sur les enseignes’, 222).
25 Press release, 24 June 2012, <http://chateau-de-fontainebleau.fr/IMG/pdf/CP_Fouilles_du_
Quartier_Henri_IV-2.pdf>, accessed 1 September 2012.
26 Musée des Beaux-Arts de Chartres, Trésors de la Cathédrale de Chartres, catalogue of exhibition
13 April–27 October 2002, 51. The text reads ‘Cette chemisette bénite à Chartres à touché le précieux
vêtement de la Ste Vierge.’
27 Lecocq, ‘Recherches sur les enseignes’, 238.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Signs of Emotion 49

the Cathedral Chapter.28 Koldeweij has provided ample pictorial and documentary
evidence that the materials from which pilgrimage badges were made were used as
an index for class, with the aristocracy wearing those made of gold.29 Duke Philip
of Burgundy commissioned a gold badge from the shrine of Notre-Dame de
Boulogne for himself, but silver and silver-gilt versions for his knights and squires.30
Louis XI (1423–83) was able to subvert expectations and cause confusion by wear-
ing a simple lead badge in his hat, which badge itself was later revered for its asso-
ciation with the pious king.31 The vast majority of pilgrimage tokens, however,
were very cheap and in many cases quite crudely produced, with multiple badges
cast from the same mould.
Nonetheless, there is considerable evidence that, despite their low monetary
value, the medieval pilgrim badges and later chemisettes could hold significant
­emotional value for the people who acquired and used them. No first-person
account of the emotional experience of pilgrimage to Chartres survives from the
Middle Ages, but the pilgrimage tokens are themselves a source for understanding
the emotional life of the medieval pilgrim. The philosopher Guy Fletcher discusses
the common idea that objects can have ‘sentimental value’. In his definition:
something is sentimentally valuable if and only if the thing is valuable for its own sake
in virtue of a subset of its relational properties, where the properties include any or all
of having belonged to, having been given to or by, or having been used by, people or
animals, within a relationship of family, friendship, or romantic love, or having been
used or acquired during a significant experience.32
Fletcher concedes that this definition is not comprehensive, and in order to apply
it to a consideration of the pilgrim tokens, it needs to be expanded, but it does
provide a useful basis for considering the ways that items can have a value that is
not related to their monetary, aesthetic, or utilitarian values. I would propose the
term ‘emotional value’ rather than ‘sentimental value’ (which, as Fletcher points
out, carries with it the negative connotations of sentimentality), to better represent
the range of positive and negative emotions which adhere to objects.33 The emo-
tional value of an object, therefore, relies on its association. In the case of the
Chartres pilgrimage tokens, this association is twofold. On the one hand, it relies
on memory, satisfying Fletcher’s criterion of having been ‘acquired during a signifi-
cant experience’. For the pilgrims who had purchased their badge from a seller in
the cathedral cloisters, either before or after their visit to the sainte châsse and other
relics or statues within the cathedral, the badge functions as a reminder of the site
of Notre-Dame of Chartres itself, and perhaps of the entire experience of pilgrim-
age. In this sense it is indeed a souvenir, which might be retained for its ability to

28 Lecocq, ‘Recherches sur les enseignes’, 207. Cohen provides evidence that such disputes over
licensing between the shrine custodians and the miraculiers, or makers of pilgrimage tokens, were not
unusual (Cohen, ‘In Haec Signa’, 196).
29 Koldeweij, Notes on the Historiography, 195–201.
30 Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs, 12.    31 Koldeweij, Notes on the Historiography, 195.
32 Guy Fletcher, ‘Sentimental Value’, Journal of Value Inquiry 43 (2009): 55–65; 56.
33 Fletcher, ‘Sentimental Value’, 55–6.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

50 Sarah Randles

allow the pilgrim to focus on his or her experience. If the aim of the pilgrimage was
successful, and the desired cure or other favour had been granted, the positive
emotional value of the token as souvenir might be expected to rise; similarly, if the
desired outcome had not been achieved, the emotional value of the same token
might be lessened.
The emotional value of the Chartres pilgrimage badges did not just rely on
memory, however. The more important association was that of the badge with the
relic of the sainte chemise, and with the Virgin Mary herself. The badge, therefore,
could become an emblem of the Virgin’s power, a symbolic meaning underscored
by the iconography evoking the sainte chemise, its reliquary, and perhaps a statue of
the Virgin herself. However, it is likely that the badges represented more than just
an emblematic association with the Virgin of Chartres. In the same way that the
wealthy could access the miraculous powers of the sainte chemise, by touching their
own linen chemises to the reliquary, the cheap pilgrim tokens could have served
the same function for the less wealthy if they were also placed in contact with the
reliquary. While no documentation of this practice survives from medieval
Chartres, Denis Bruna and Esther Cohen assert that it occurred at other pilgrim-
age sites.34 The nineteenth-century chemisette, mentioned above, suggests that it
was routine by this time for the pendants to be treated in this way, after manufac-
ture and before they were sold to pilgrims. Although the twelfth- and thirteenth-
century Latin and French miracle collections from Chartres do not relate any
miracles performed by the Chartrain badges, there is no doubt that pilgrims would
have believed that badges which had been sacralized by contact with the reliquary
had the potential for such miracles. The Liber Miraculorum (book of miracles)
from Rocamadour, from around 1172, relates how a priest of Chartres was cured
at the point of death when his mother pinned a badge depicting Notre-Dame of
Rocamadour to his clothing,35 indicating that this badge had become ‘holy matter’
capable of transmitting the power of the Virgin to effect a cure (and also that it had
become a material component in the rival claims for the two shrines).
It does not follow that all pilgrimage badges became contact relics in this way,
but it is reasonable to believe that at least some of them did. Since the making and
selling of badges was licensed to lay miraculiers, who sold them in the cathedral
cloisters, it suggests that any contact with the shrine would probably have hap-
pened after the badge was bought. The sacralizing of the badges would have been
subject to access to the reliquary. While images in the stained glass of York Minster
show pilgrims approaching the shrine of St William of York to collect holy oil
themselves, the positioning of the sainte châsse in the cathedral at Chartres on or
near the high altar, which was separated from the body of the church by a jubé after
around 1220–30, and from the sixteenth century by a choir screen, indicated that
access to the reliquary could be tightly controlled, and that the touching of the
badge to the sainte châsse might have been performed by a member of the clergy

34 Denis Bruna, ‘Les Enseignes de pèlerinage et les enseignes profanes au Moyen Âge’, unpublished
PhD thesis (Paris, 1995), 204; Cohen, ‘In Haec Signa’, 195.
35 Burns, Sea of Silk, 225, n. 8.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Signs of Emotion 51

rather than by the pilgrim. Whoever might have undertaken the touching of a
badge to the châsse, by doing so, its fundamental nature was changed, without
altering any of its physical characteristics, in a shift reminiscent of the changing
bread and wine of the Eucharist. As a result, the emotional relationship of the pil-
grim to the badge also changed. From an object which had religious connotations
and which might evoke memory, the pilgrimage token had become ‘holy matter’,
itself an object of devotion and therefore subject to a similar range of ­emotional
responses as might be experienced around the relic itself.36
The pilgrimage token as a sacralized object is one that has, in the terminology
used by Alfred Gell, ‘agency’, that is, the ability to do something; to represent a
‘prototype’, in this case the sainte chemise, or, indirectly, the Virgin herself; to
motivate inferences, responses, or interpretations from its ‘recipients’, or users.37
In the context of medieval Christianity, sacralized pilgrimage tokens are powerful
objects, things which ‘do duty as persons’,38 and with which the pilgrim can enter
into an emotional relationship. They do not, however, act independently, but
rather channel power which comes ultimately from God. The token which has
been sacralized by indirect contact with the saint, or in this case the Virgin herself,
or simply by the will of God, is now an object which functions, like a relic, as a
conduit between the supernatural world and the temporal one. It becomes an
object which not only forms a material part of religious devotion, but also carries
apotropaic or protective power. This power is distinct from and additional to that
inherent in material substance, which might have agency in its own right, as
described by the theory of Object-Oriented Ontology.39 While the materiality of
the pilgrim tokens is important and affects the ways that they can be used, their
ability to become emotional objects and to do emotional work rests on their place
in the broader cosmology of the humans who use them.
The tokens from Chartres would have possessed the same powers credited to the
sainte chemise itself and its copies—the power to put out fires, the ability to aid in
conception and childbirth, and, in the case of the copies, imperviousness to cuts
by sword and spear. The belief in these powers represents, I would argue, less a
protection against external forces as against the fear that surrounds them. Fire was
an unstoppable and destructive force in a medieval town, responsible for the
destruction of the cathedral in Chartres no fewer than five times before the present
cathedral was constructed. Failure to conceive was equally a fear, particularly for
queens and noble women—the women who are documented as receiving copies of
the chemise.40 Death in childbirth was a very real danger for medieval women, and
carried the added dimension in some times and places that women who died

36 Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality, 145–7.

37 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 16.
38 Gell, Art and Agency, 16.
39 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010). Bennett makes explicit that what she calls ‘impersonal affect or material vibrancy’ is not ‘a spir-
itual supplement or “life force” added to the matter said to house it’, at xiii.
40 Bugslag, ‘Pilgrimage to Chartres’, 159–60.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

52 Sarah Randles

before the forty days required for purification could not have a church funeral.41
Similarly, death in battle for men, while to be feared in its own right, also included
the fear of a sudden death without time for confession and absolution.42 By using
an object, with attendant belief in its protective powers, the medieval men and
women who wore the chemises could, in modern terms, displace and alleviate
their fear.
The pilgrimage badges, therefore, become tools for regulating emotion. Monique
Scheer has theorized that emotions are a kind of practice, one that is embodied and
located in the material world, that emotions are something that we do.43 And if
emotions are something that we do, then objects, I would argue, are what we do
them with. They become the props and proxies for our emotional lives and, inas-
much as they are valued for their perceived ability to change the realities of the
natural world, their value is also that they have the power to effect or change emo-
tional states. A striking example of how a Chartrain pilgrimage badge could be
used to such effect is related in the 1683 inventory of the relics. The description of
the sainte châsse, which was destroyed in 1792, includes descriptions of the badges
as well as the chemisettes that had been attached to it as a result of donations,
including a badge which was claimed to have been the gift of Louis XI. The inven-
tory states that he was said to have worn it on his hat, and never to have made a
deliberation of consequence without invoking it and kissing it beforehand.44
Louis’ actions, including invoking, not the Virgin directly, but rather the Virgin as
depicted in the badge, and in kissing the badge, depict him undertaking a ritual for
managing his anxiety around decision-making.
To further understand the ways that pilgrimage tokens could be used as emo-
tional objects it is necessary to consider what might be thought of as their ‘after-
life’, that is, what happened to them after the pilgrim left the shrine. Some of these
uses might be thought of as conventionally devotional, while others border into
fields which might be considered magical.
The first use of the pilgrimage badge was that for which it was intended—to be
worn by the pilgrim. Pilgrimage badges developed as a way of marking the pilgrim
as having special status, entitled to help and protection on his or her journey, and
it is easy to see how this sense of protection could have easily developed into a more
generalized apotropaic function. The Chartres badges, like most continental
badges, had sewing rings to attach them to the pilgrims’ hats. The double-sided

41 Roberta Gilchrist, Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course (Woodbridge: Boydell &
Brewer, 2012), 209.
42 Christopher Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England 1066–1550 (London: Routledge
2005), 71.
43 Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a
History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51.2 (2010):
193–220; 194.
44 Lecocq, ‘Recherches sur les enseignes’, 226. ‘L’on dit que le roi Louis XI la portoit à son chapeau,
et y avoit tant de dévotion, qu’il ne délibéroit aucune affaire de conséquence qu’il ne l’invoquât et ne la
baisât auparavant.’ The description of the elaborate gold enamelled badge studded with pearls and
gemstones, depicting a Virgin crowned by angels, makes it clear that this is not the lead badge that
Louis also wore on his hat. This badge does not appear to depict Notre-Dame of Chartres.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Signs of Emotion 53

nature of the Chartres tokens means that the wearer had a choice about which side
would be displayed. The numerous portraits of nobles from the fifteenth century
displaying gold pilgrimage tokens also indicate that the wearing of pilgrimage
badges could be as much about conspicuous consumption and personal decoration
as about equally conspicuous piety.45 The humility displayed by Louis XI’s pewter
badge was paralleled by the evident pride of the nobles, though this did not mean
that the badges so displayed could not also be a site of genuine piety. Other elite
uses of pilgrimage badges appear to represent more straightforward religious devo-
tion. A clear example of the way pilgrimage badges could be a site of private reli-
gious devotion is the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century practice of sewing or gluing
them into manuscripts, most frequently the books of hours used by the laity,
including the middle classes. In her doctoral thesis, Megan Foster discusses how
this practice changes both the meanings of the badges and of the codices to which
they were attached.46 Badges could also be attached to devotional diptychs,47 rosa-
ries, or church bells or even buried with the dead.48 These uses of pilgrimage badges
indicate that the emotional and devotional value of the pilgrimage token did not
end with the completion of the pilgrimage, but that they continued to be valued
and used in the context of prayer.
Similarly, pilgrimage tokens were donated to shrines in local churches, presum-
ably by returning pilgrims.49 This practice has been read as denoting gratitude for
a safe return, in which case the function of the pilgrimage token has shifted to
become an ex-voto. The inventory of Chartres mentioned above indicates—in
addition to the badge donated by Louis XI—a number of chemisettes made of
­precious metal attached to the sainte châsse. In two instances, these are the offerings
of named donors. A large enamelled gold chemisette was donated by Monsieur
Claude Robert, canon and subdean of the cathedral, and another, also enamelled
gold, by Monsieur Étienne Robert, another cathedral canon.50 While gratitude
may well have been the motivating emotion for the gifts, they are clearly not tokens
brought back from pilgrimage, and the fact that these donors’ names have been
recorded where others have not suggests that the donations may have been made
with the intent of becoming a memorial.

45 Koldeweij, Notes on the Historiography, 195. None of the pilgrimage badges depicted in portraits
has yet been identified as belonging to Chartres.
46 Megan H. Foster, ‘Pilgrimage through the Pages: Pilgrim’s Badges in Late Medieval Devotional
Manuscripts’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Illinois, 2011). Foster identifies some sixty
manuscripts which contained pilgrimage badges. Although in many cases, the badges themselves
are no longer extant, their existence is attested by the impressions they have created in the vellum,
from which it is possible to identify their origin. To date, no badge from Chartres has been found in
this context.
47 Koldeweij, Notes on the Historiography, 214.    48 Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs, 18.
49 Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs, 18.
50 Lecocq, ‘Recherches sur les enseignes’, 225. ‘No 223. Une Chemise de Chartres, d’or, ayant,
du’un côté, une Notre-Dame de Pitié, au pied de la Croix; sur l’autre, une niche remplie d’une Vierge,
le tout émaillé; donnée par M. Claude Robert, chanoine et sous-doyen de l’Eglise . . . No 236. Une
grande Chemise d’or, émaillé; sur l’un des côtés est une Vierge, sur l’autre un Crucifix; donnée par
M. Étienne Robert, chanoine de l’Eglise’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

54 Sarah Randles

Pilgrimage tokens, whether officially sacralized or not, could therefore be

endowed with amuletic or talismanic properties, related to their religious func-
tions, but sometimes applied outside strictly religious frameworks. There can be
a fine line between the application of a pilgrimage token to the body of a sick
­person as part of a ritual of prayer to the relevant saint for a cure and the same
­ritual undertaken in a belief that the token itself has medical or curative properties.
Once taken outside the environs of the church, it is doubtful whether the practical
uses of pilgrimage tokens were always strictly theologically orthodox.51 The
­practical application of pilgrimage tokens suggests that the agency of the objects,
while theoretically that of God, channelled via the relevant saints, was often more
likely to be viewed as emanating from the token itself, albeit framed within a
Christian context. In recent work on burial goods in late medieval Europe, Roberta
Gilchrist has noted the presence of pilgrim badges, amongst other items, in rituals
evidently tolerated, though not officially sanctioned, by the Church.52 So far,
Chartrain p ­ ilgrim badges have not been discovered in graves, but this use of pil-
grimage tokens suggest that such tokens were believed to still have protective
power, ­perhaps ensuring safe passage for the dead on their final pilgrimage, and
perhaps providing a way of managing fears for the soul of the deceased, or assua-
ging grief for the mourners.
The fact that most of the Chartres pilgrim badges, including the chemisettes, as
with other medieval pilgrimage tokens, have been found in or near waterways has
led to much speculation and debate concerning the nature of their disposal.53 No
contemporary documentation of the practice has been found, a circumstance
which the badges have in common with other folk practices. While it might seem
that these badges were discards, perhaps thrown away once the pilgrim had
returned home, the prevalence of such tokens near ports and bridges suggests that
there is an element of ritual in the way they are discarded. Ralph Merrifield, in his
influential book on the archaeology of ritual and magic, drew attention to the vast
numbers of metal objects found in waterways near bridges and fords, dating from
the prehistoric era and through to the early modern period.54 He argues that this
ritual survives in the present practice of throwing coins into fountains and that
such deposits involve the ‘sacrifice’ of an object to take it out of the natural realm
and into the supernatural one, thereby activating its thaumaturgical, or miracle-
working, powers. While the apparent pagan roots of this practice might make it

51 Roberta Gilchrist, ‘Magic for the Dead? The Archaeology of Magic in Later Medieval Burials’,
Medieval Archaeology 52.1 (2008): 119–59; 128.
52 Gilchrist, Medieval Life, 281. It is, however, relatively rare to find pilgrimage tokens in burials,
suggesting that they may have been of more use to the living.
53 Michael Garcia, ‘Medieval Medicine, Magic, and Water’, Peregrinations 1.3 (2005): 1–13;
Jennifer Lee, ‘Medieval Pilgrims’ Badges in Rivers: The Curious History of a Non-Theory’, Journal of
Art Historiography 11 (2014): 1–11. Lee has questioned whether any element of ritual can be dis-
cerned in the large numbers of badges found in the Thames, since they occur in places where rubbish
from the foreshore has been dumped. However, her argument does not account for the prevalence of
pilgrimage badges in other watercourses across Europe, or the broad range of folk and more orthodox
religious practices to which deposition of the badges is related.
54 Ralph Merrifield, The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic (London: Batsford, 1987), 43–5.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Signs of Emotion 55

seem an inappropriate explanation for tokens from Christian shrines, the study of
other folk practices makes it clear that such rituals often survive even while belief
systems around and understandings of them change. While the form of the ritual
was pre-Christian, it is likely that the people who used the badges in this way were
doing so to invoke the blessings or protection of Notre-Dame of Chartres, and not
any pagan deity.
While most of the pilgrim badges from Chartres have been found more or less
intact, there are two which show signs of having been bent. One of the badges
recorded by Forgeais has deep cracks through its body,55 and the recent find from
Belgium discussed above has been broken in straight lines across its corners, sug-
gesting in both cases that the badges have been folded until the metal has broken
across the crease lines. A sizeable minority of the pilgrim badges found across
Europe have been bent in this way, as have many of the other deposits of metal
objects in waterways. The bending of badges probably relates to the practice of
pilgrims bending a coin at the time of making a vow to go on pilgrimage, docu-
mented in various books of miracles compiled towards the canonization of puta-
tive saints, including those of King Henry VI of England, who had a significant cult
following.56 This practice has been interpreted as ‘marking’ the coin so that it can
no longer be used as currency, and thereby dedicating it to be given as an offering
at the shrine. Ben Nilsen notes the collection of ‘broken money’ in the accounts
records of several medieval shrines, such money presumably being that bent at
vowing and then subsequently offered. However, there is a related practice where
sailors or passengers caught in storms would bend coins as they called out to saints,
vowing to go on pilgrimage to the shrine of whichever saint quelled the storm. This
suggests that the act of bending itself is enough to imbue the pilgrimage tokens
with amuletic power or to activate that power. While it has been suggested that the
bent pilgrim badges might signify thanks for the ability to fulfil the earlier vow to
go on pilgrimage, it is just as likely that the act of bending is an attempt to evoke
supernatural assistance for other purposes. In this respect, pilgrim tokens can be
linked to other medieval practices where the deliberate destruction of objects is
intended to place them into another realm.57 Merrifield and others have noted
numerous examples of deliberately bent objects, particularly weapons, among
those deposited in rivers from as far back as the Iron Age, presumably representing
a sacrificial function.58
With the exception of a few documented pilgrimages, usually those undertaken
by the elite, we have little idea about where the pilgrims visiting each shrine came

55 Arthur Forgeais, Collection de plombs historiés trouvés dans la Seine (Paris, 1865), 120.
56 Ronald C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Belief in Medieval England (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), 94–5; Sarah Blick, ‘Bent Coins’, in Encyclopedia of Medieval Pilgrimage,
ed. Larissa J. Taylor et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 47–8.
57 Sarah Randles, ‘Material Magic: The Deliberate Concealment of Footwear and Other Clothing’,
Parergon 30.2 (2013): 109–28.
58 Merrifield, Archaeology of Ritual, 108–15; Owen Davies and Timothy Easton, ‘Cunning Folk
and the Production of Magical Artefacts’, in Physical Evidence for Ritual Acts: Sorcery and Witchcraft in
Christian Britain—A Feeling for Magic, ed. Ronald Hutton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015),
209–31; 215.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

56 Sarah Randles

from. However, the distribution of pilgrim badges in waterways at considerable

distances from the shrines where they originated tells us where they went after
visiting the shrine. If the depositions are representative, it would seem that pil-
grims to Chartres mostly went to Paris afterwards, as might be expected, since the
pilgrimage routes to Chartres all passed through Paris. While it has been suggested
that the badges were deposited as a sign of thanksgiving at the end of a pilgrimage,
it is not clear that depositions necessarily mark the end of the pilgrim’s journey.
It is possible, too, that tokens might be retained for some time after the end of a
pilgrimage and only sacrificed in this way when there was a particular need to call
on the aid of the saint. If the deposition marks a stopping point on the journey,
perhaps the practice represented the pilgrim’s hope for a safe onward journey rather
than gratitude for a safe journey home.
As has been demonstrated here, the pilgrimage tokens from Chartres and
­elsewhere had considerable emotional value, which could function quite inde-
pendently from their monetary or aesthetic value. The emotional value persisted,
and perhaps increased, once the token left the shrine. It is likely that the ritual
deposition of pilgrimage tokens in waterways occurs, therefore, not despite the
emotional value of the token, but because of it. For that reason, and particularly
given the bending of some of the tokens, the deposition should be considered not
as the discarding of the token, but as a deliberate, ritual sacrifice of it. This concept
is not necessarily radically different from the common medieval practice of offering
objects, including pilgrimage tokens, to shrines; in either case the supplicant gives
up something of value to him or herself, in hopes of achieving a desired outcome.
The material qualities of pilgrimage tokens are important to their status as items
of emotional value and as tools for emotional practice. The badges from Chartres
are between four and six centimetres in height, while the chemisettes are even
smaller. Some of the more elaborate pilgrimage tokens, especially those from the
shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury could be as much as ten or twelve centi-
metres tall, though these are unusual. The tokens are designed to be worn on the
body or clothing, but also are of a size to fit comfortably in the hand. The lead
content of the badges, while ensuring they could be made cheaply, allowed for
them to be bent in ritual practice, and the metal of the badge would have warmed
to the touch, allowing for a sense of reciprocity. In particular, the badge found in
the Vintry Coffer Dam in London has been worn smooth at the high spots of the
Virgin’s head and knees and the armrests of her seat,59 indicating that the badge
has been subject to rubbing and perhaps kissing, in the same way that wear
on images in books of hours can serve as an index to devotional practice.60 The
motivation for rubbing this pilgrim badge may have been devotional, but perhaps
it was also practised as a gesture of comfort; these motivations were not, after all,
mutually exclusive.

59 Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs, 226.

60 Kathryn M. Rudy, ‘Dirty Books: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts Using a
Densitometer’, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 2.1–2 (2010): 1–26. Pilgrimage badges
would have been an important source of visual imagery for the medieval faithful.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Signs of Emotion 57

The pilgrimage tokens from Chartres, like those from other shrines, therefore,
had an emotional value beyond simply evoking memories of the visit to the shrine.
While they undoubtedly functioned as souvenirs valued for their ability to evoke
memory, they also had amuletic properties, related to the powers of the sainte
chemise and the Virgin of Chartres herself which they depicted. These powers, or
agency, to cure and to protect against fire, death in battle, or in childbirth, could
be activated through rituals which existed alongside, though not necessarily out-
side, the orthodox practices of the Church. The Chartres badges had the ability,
therefore, not only to represent the experience of pilgrimage, but, as they were
held, or bent, or rubbed, kept or discarded, could also be used to regulate fear, or
amplify hope in their users.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

4
Capturing Christ’s Tears
La Sainte Larme in Medieval and
Early Modern France

Helen M. Hickey

I n t ro d u c t i o n

Of all of the relics associated with Jesus—which include the sudarium or veil of
Veronica, the sacrificial blood, the crown of thorns, pieces of the true Cross, nails
from the Cross, the pillar on which Christ was bound and scourged, Jesus’ tunic,
items used at the Last Supper, and the foreskin of the infant Jesus—the relic of
la Sainte Larme or the ‘Holy Tear’ of Christ offers particular challenges, by its
embodied and ephemeral nature, to emotions history and to our understanding of
(material) things. The historiography of the Holy Tear, which first appeared in
eleventh-century France, is still being written and is imbricated unsurprisingly in
studies of medieval and early modern piety and faith.1 Although a tear has a par-
ticular claim to being read as a product of emotion, or at least as a potent signifier
for it, it does not have a strong claim to being a ‘thing’. This chapter concentrates
on tears and emotions through Thing Theory, a theory that grapples with the way
material objects interact in and of themselves with living beings. Recent studies in
the history of emotions have proliferated to such an extent that there is now a rich
and varied archive of in-depth materials on the historiography of and literature on
tears.2 This analysis of the Holy Tear both employs—and sometimes necessarily
departs from—these studies. The ‘emotion’ signalled by the word larme (‘tear’) and
the properties of it as a ‘thing’ have not previously been explored together in the
narrative of the Holy Tear.

Many thanks to the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, and Medium
Aevum, at the History Faculty, the University of Oxford for their generous research support. I am
grateful to the ARC Centre for the History of Emotions and Sarah Randles for the invitation to
present at symposia at the University of Melbourne: Feelings Things: A Symposium on Objects and
Emotions (March 2013) and Relics and Emotions (March 2014). Thanks also to Stephanie Downes
for her assistance with translations from French.
1 Kimberley-Joy Knight, ‘Droplets of Heaven: Tear Relics in the High and Later Middle Ages’,
The Mediaeval Journal 6.2 (2016): 45–80.
2 Thomas Dixon, Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2015), provides a comprehensive list of recent publications for further reading in this field at 280–96.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Capturing Christ’s Tears 59

Liquid discharged from the tear ducts of the eyes would seem to be the most
fleeting of relics. While all relics carry religious significance, those which purport
to come from the actual body of Christ enjoy a rare high status. The Holy Tear is
directly associated with the events of Christ’s life. It is also a prefiguring of the
Resurrection (since Lazarus lives again) and is therefore considered to be a first-
class relic. The physical remains of a saint such as a bone or hair, a skull or a limb,
for example, were also highly valued items. The clothing of a saint and a holy item
used frequently by a saint were second-order relics, while anything that touched a
first- or second-class relic became an associative relic. By contrast, a tear, short-lived
through the natural chemical process of evaporation, could not be ‘present’ in the
same manner as other Christological relics. Unlike the Holy Tear, another liquid relic
of Christ, the Saint Sang (Holy Blood) left a residue or trace of its presence visible
in desiccated brownish patches on glass reliquaries that housed it.3 Nevertheless,
Church authorities recognized the importance of Christ’s tears as early as the fifth
century, when Pope Leo discussed the two natures of Jesus depicted in John’s
Gospel and gave the example of Christ’s tears for Lazarus (his humanity) and the
­miracle of Lazarus being raised from the dead (his divinity).4 The capture and
­stabilization of the Tear was a challenge for medieval semioticians, and it poses a
new challenge for historians of medieval emotions interested in the way materiality
itself ‘captures’ feeling.
An individual’s tears may represent an internal emotional state, generated by
thoughts and memories in the brain in complex feedback circuits of perception,
understanding, and interpretation.5 They also bathe and soothe the eye in the pres-
ence of irritants.6 Tears also have a long history within theology—the gift of tears
being a mandatory sign of compunction or felt piety.7 But when the tears of God
are excreted by a human form they pose an interpretive puzzle. The body of Christ
or ‘God made man’ is not the same as any body; Christ’s body shares his divine
nature. If Jesus was an all-knowing God, would he have had foreknowledge of the
death and resurrection of Lazarus? Although Christ, like Lazarus, will die, he will
rise up bodily whole into heaven, according to Christian doctrine. What, then, do
Christ’s tears do when shed in the presence of Mary and Martha? A partial answer
may be found in examining the emotional reception of the Holy Tear.
The Holy Tear is an exemplary case within the history of emotions that shows
that we cannot read the practice of emotion and the designation of ‘things’ uncritically

3 Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘The Blood of Christ in the Later Middle Ages’, Church History 71.4
(2002): 685–714; 685. From the twelfth century a quantity of the Saint Sang was cherished as a relic
at the Benedictine Abbey of La Trinité at Fécamp in the Seine-Maritime region on the north border
of France.
4 ‘The Letters and Sermons of Leo the Great’, trans. Charles Feltoe, in A Select Library of Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, XII (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1895),
Letter XXVIII, iv, 41.
5 Jerome Neu, ‘A Tear is an Intellectual Thing’, Representations 19 (1967): 35–61; 35, claims that
thought generates emotion tears.
6 L. Börje Löfgren, ‘On Weeping’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 47 (1966): 375–81; 375.
7 Pierre Adnès, ‘Larmes’, in Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique: doctrine et histoire, ed.
M. Viller et al., IX, cols. 287–304 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1976); Piroska Nagy, Le Don des larmes au Moyen
Âge (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

60 Helen M. Hickey

across temporalities. First, the chapter explores the early medieval origin stories
about the Holy Tear for their emotional valence. Second, it demonstrates that early
modern iterations of the Tear highlight its unique status as a religious and cultural
icon in the French Wars of Religion and within French court circles. In another
strand of the Tear’s life, in an early eighteenth-century French rural community, its
symbolic distribution as a ‘thing’ becomes even more focused. Embedded within
social networks that are driven by religious imagination, the Tear is invoked
in community prayer and processions for the most basic of utilitarian needs:
rain to end drought. Third, I examine the heated debates in eighteenth-century
France about the veracity of relics. In these debates, the Holy Tear is once again
the exemplary case, singled out by the eminent theologian Jean-Baptiste Thiers
as a spectacular fraud. Benedictine Jean Mabillon, diplomatist and medieval
historian, countered Thiers’s claim, arguing that the historical tradition of the Holy
Tear, and the emotions it has aimed to capture and provoke over time, confirm its
reliquary status.8

Pa rt I : Tea r s , Tales , T r avels — F ro m

B e t ha n y to V e n d ô me

The historical narrative of the Holy Tear of Vendôme begins around 1040 when the
Byzantine emperor of Constantinople, Michael IV (the Paphlagonian) requested
help in the Saracen wars in Sicily from Henry I of France. Henry sent Geoffrey
‘Martel’, comte d’Anjou et Vendôme, who was recompensed for his military
efforts at the end of 1042 with two gifts: the arm of St George and the Holy Tear
of Christ. The story of the Holy Tear derives from the account of Lazarus’ death
and resurrection in John 11:32–7, in which Jesus shed tears after seeing Mary
Magdalene weep at the sight of her brother’s empty grave: one of only two instances
of Christ weeping in Scripture.9 Deeply troubled and moved, he visits the grave
and performs the miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead. According to Adrien
Pillon, at the moment the tears were shed, an angel caught them in a phial, which
he gave to Mary Magdalene for safekeeping.10
When Geoffrey returned to France, he donated the Tear relic to the Benedictine
Abbey of La Trinité at Vendôme; Geoffrey had commissioned this building in the
1030s after he and his wife Agnes witnessed three stars shoot in quick succession
out of the sky and into a well outside the town: they chose this spot as the site of
the monastery.11 Here, Geoffrey instituted a shrine for the Sainte Larme, which

8 Jean-Baptiste Thiers, Dissertation sur la Sainte Larme de Vendôme (Paris: Pierre Esclassan, 1699)
and Réponse à la lettre du Père Mabillon, touchant la prétendue Sainte Larme de Vendôme (Cologne:
Héritiers de Corneille d’Egmond, 1700). For the counter-claim, see Jean Mabillon, Lettre d’un béné-
dictin à Monseigneur l’évesque de Blois, touchant le discernement des anciennes reliques, au sujet d’une
dissertation de Mr Thiers, contre la Sainte Larme de Vendôme (Paris: Pierre et Imbert de Bats, 1700).
9 The other is found in Luke 19:41, when Jesus wept over Jerusalem.
10 A. Pillon, Histoire et thèse sur l’insigne relique du précieux sang dite de la sainte larme (Paris,
1858), 2–9.
11 Louis Halphen, and René Poupardin, Chroniques des comtes d’Anjou et des seigneurs d’Amboise
(Paris, 1913), 151.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Capturing Christ’s Tears 61

was affectionately titled in the local language, Madame Sainte Larme.12 One of the
stained glass windows of the abbey appears to depict Pierre d’Alençon as Geoffrey
Martel offering the Tear to the abbey.13 Despite multiple competing accounts of
and destinations for the Tear’s arrival in France in the eleventh century, Vendôme’s
relic was the most famous, and the road through the city became one of six main
pilgrimage pathways in Europe.14
The Tear relic was encapsulated in rock crystal and enclosed within four
nested containers in a reliquary above the choir of the abbey. Conceptually fos-
silized in stone, it was here encased and captured as a camera captures a moving
image. The significance of the Tear’s crystal home should not be underestimated.
Medieval theologians such as Rabanus Maurus (780–856) and Rupert de Deutz
(c.1075–80–c.1129) believed quartz crystal possessed magical powers, but they also
believed that the stone, in its glittering transparency, functioned as an allegorical
sign because of its associations with the water of baptism, the ethereal nature of
angels, and the light of the resurrected body of Christ through his incarnation.15
Moreover, Rupert de Deutz wrote that the crystal originated from water, and was a
form of ice.16 In the early monastic literature associated with the abbey, it was
named la pierre (‘the stone’) in contrast to the fragile drop of water. The Holy Tear
was trapped inside contrary matter, in a concrete item that contained something
evaporative and left tracks but no lasting trace. The durability of the crystal gave
the Tear a permanent home, and the faithful an enduring material object. With
a leap of the imagination worshippers could envisage the Tear blended with the
translucent stone and use that concrete object as an aide-memoire to contemplate
the divine Tear’s aqueous nature.17
In Jacques Sanson’s L’Histoire généalogique des comtes de Pontieu et maieurs
d’Abbeville, the Holy Tear was described as ‘quelque chose surpassant la nature’
(‘a thing surpassing nature’). Unrecognizable to the human eye, the Tear could not

12 R. Crozet, ‘Le Monument de la Sainte-Larme à la Trinité de Vendôme’, Bulletin de la société

archéologique, scientifique et littéraire du Vendômois (BSASLV) (1963): 17–27; 17.
13 Jean-Bernard de Vaivre, ‘Une Représentation de Pierre d’Alençon sur les verrières de la Trinité de
Vendôme (circa 1280)’, Bulletin Monumental 140.4 (1982): 305–13.
14 By the thirteenth century, up to eight sites claimed to hold tears of Christ, including Allouagne
(Pas-de-Calais), Thiers (Puy-de-Dôme), Chemillé, église St-Léonard (Maine-et-Loire), Fontcarmot,
Saint-Maximin (Var), Orléans (St-Pierre-du-Puellier), and Selincourt.
15 PL 111–273, De universo, Bk. 17, ch. 9; cited in Cynthia Jean Hahn, Strange Beauty: Issues in
the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400–c.1204 (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press,
2012), 216.
16 Stefania Gerevini, ‘Christus crystallus: Rock Crystal, Theology and Materiality in the
Medieval West’, in Matter of Faith: An Interdisciplinary Study of Relics and Relic Veneration in
the Medieval Period, ed. James Robinson and Lloyd de Beer with Anna Harnden (London: British
Museum, 2014), 92–9.
17 Crozet, ‘Le Monument de la Sainte-Larme’, 12. Much work has been conducted into pilgrimage
sites and objects of veneration, and more recently pilgrimage as an economic venture. See especially
Adrian R. Bell and Richard S. Dale, ‘The Medieval Pilgrimage Business’, Enterprise and Society 12
(2011): 601–27; 601; Fernand Bournon, ‘Documents relatifs au pèlerinage de la Sainte-Larme de
Vendôme 1574–1666’, BSASLV (1885): 127–34; 128, for insights into church preparation that
includes the sale of trinkets and candles to pilgrims visiting Vendôme.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

62 Helen M. Hickey

be described by human speech.18 In François de Belleforest’s 1575 Cosmographie,

the relic is described with awe:
un Ange recueillit ceste Larme d’un grand nombre qui ruisseloyent des yeux du
Sauveur, et createur de tout le monde, formant soudain un vase qui a dire vrai est de
merveilleux artifice, sans rupture, soudure ny ouerture quelle que ce soit, et le dehors
duquel est blanc, et aussi transparent que Christal, mais de dire de quelle matiere, il est
fait, je croy que les plus experts lapidaires, & mineralistes y perdroyent leur latin, & la
sainte Larme (qui toujours tremblote dedans ce petit vaisseau) est de couleur d’eau,
et azuree.19
These two renditions of the properties of the Tear (its res and signification) show
that it transcends both nature and the properties of natural tears. Its power is
such that gemmologists or geologists are unable to understand it. In this sense,
the Tear is beyond words, made of inestimable matter that confounds those
who view it. Further, this is a thing made strange. The relic has no opening or
closure, no beginning or end. It resembles water and is azure in colour. In
Belleforest’s example, however, the Tear gets close to the idea of, to use Jane
Bennett’s words, ‘vibrant matter’, or a living and almost interactive thing. One
of the main characteristics of water is its ability to move or flow.20 Belleforest
writes that the Tear tremblote—that it vibrates or ‘trembles’—within its crystal
container. But trembling can also signify fear, which confers some inherent
agency on the Tear within its luminous casket, and offers a sense of the divine
awe which it was intended to provoke.
Adrien Pillon recounts the reception of another Holy Tear that arrived in France
at approximately the same time as the Tear relic at Vendôme. The narrative states
that the abbot, having received this precious gift from the hands of his lord, fell to
his knees, adoring the divine relic with a profound humility. He kissed it and
applied it to his eyes, which induced him to shed rushing tears. He passed the relic
to other religious in the community to kiss and they all miraculously found them-
selves in tears at its touch.21 This appears to be the only extant account in which
the Tear is openly said to have produced tears in its worshippers. These tears,
though, are miraculous tears—of what precise emotion we do not know—brought
forth by the relic. Counterintuitively, and overwhelmingly, the Holy Tear, the veritable

18 J. Sanson, L’Histoire généalogique des comtes de Pontieu et maieurs d’Abbeville (Paris: François
Clovzier, 1657), 100.
19 François de Belleforest, La Cosmographie vniverselle de tovt le monde (Paris: Nicolas Chesneau,
1575), 322. ‘[A]n Angel gathered this Tear from many that streamed from the eyes of the Saviour, and
creator of all the world, forming suddenly a vase that to tell the truth is a marvelous artifice, without
rupture, welding or any opening whatsoever; and the outside of which is white, and as transparent as
Christal, but to say of what matter it is made, I believe that the most expert lapidaries and mineralists
would have no idea, and the holy Tear (which ever trembles in this little vessel) is the colour of water,
and of azure.’ The spelling ‘Christal’ associates Christ with the transparent quartz crystal. The description
of the Tear was written in verse in a fifteenth-century manuscript (Oxford, Bod. MS Rawl. poet. 224),
and transcribed by Achille de Rochambeau in Voyage à la Sainte-Larme de Vendôme (Vendôme:
Lemercier, 1874), 89–96.
20 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2010).
21 Pillon, Histoire, 24, 10.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Capturing Christ’s Tears 63

Pleur [sic], (‘the genuine Tear[s of Christ]’) is employed for spiritual and physical
benefits other than direct emotional expression.22 The lacrima Christi, a bodily
trace of Jesus’ earthly presence, might be expected to concentrate on the emotions
of loss that were generated when Christ surveyed Lazarus’ empty tomb. But instead
it became renowned for its ability to cure ophthalmological disorders, especially
blindness. Pillon lists the miracles attributed to the Sainte Larme, all of which con-
cern ocular events: blindness, a thorn in the eye, a burnt face, a loss of one eye. In
Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 224, texts on Christ’s tear and Mary’s compassion are
juxtaposed, which may suggest that Marian compassio was central to the cult of
Christ’s own acts of weeping.23 Further, several French churches, all claiming to
house a reliquary in which the Holy Tear resided, became sites of judicial pilgrim-
age; that is, pilgrimages legally prescribed and undertaken as punishment for
­particular crimes, alongside spiritual pilgrimages.24 The Tear’s intercessory role is
portrayed in the release from prison of Louis de Bourbon, comte de Vendôme.
Louis was captured at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, and held prisoner in England.
He attributed his escape, after thirteen years, to his prayers and a vow he made to
the Holy Tear. He promised that on his return to France he would institute an
annual ritual in which a condemned prisoner would be ceremonially liberated
on the Friday preceding Passion Sunday. Happily, for a few prisoners, Louis
avoided being apprehended by guards, and is said to have rushed to Vendôme to
give thanks to the Holy Tear for his deliverance through God’s ‘miséricorde’.25
The Christological interpretation of the Tear strengthens the claim that Christ’s
tears were thought to show ‘misericordia’—mercy or pity, rather than his or others’
personal emotion.26
Pillon is keen to position the Tear as the most precious treasure of the Church,
which he does by aligning it with Christ’s blood. He achieves this by pointing out
that although the cross, the nails, the thorns, and so on have been sanctified by
being touched by the body of Christ, the Tear had also been touched (reddened or
empurpled) by divine blood, which was also part of Christ’s sacred humanity. Pillon
is unusual in providing a visceral or corporeal reference to the workings of the body

22 Jules Brosset, ‘Les Orgues de l’abbaye de la très sainte trinité de Vendôme’, BSASLV (1898):
194–217; 199, from a canticle to the Sainte Larme.
23 Oxford, Bod. MS Rawl. poet. 224, fol. 19r. On this folio, prayers to the Virgin Mary conclude,
and are followed by a Latin poem on the miracles connected with the Holy Tear.
24 See Katja Boertjes, ‘Pilgrim Ampullae from Vendôme: Souvenirs from a Pilgrimage to the Holy
Tear of Christ’, in Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British
Isles, ed. Sarah Blick and Rita Tekippe, vol. I (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 443–72; 448. Tax evasion and
insulting a town clerk were the crimes in question.
25 Oxford, Bod. MS Rawl. poet. 224, fol. 107r has a copy of the document that institutes the
‘Procession du Vendredi du Lazare’, from 1428 after Louis de Bourbon’s vow. The catalogue entry
gives the date of the copy as 24 April 1528. See also Rochambeau, Voyage à la Sainte-Larme, 45–8, and
64–9, for an Acte Notarié qui consacre le voeu de Louis de Bourbon a la Sainte-Larme—1428. See also
Michel Simon, Histoire de Vendôme et de ses environs, II (Vendôme: Henrion Loiseau, 1834), 280–96,
‘que si le Seigneur voulait, par sa miséricorde, le délivrer de sa prison’ (‘that if the Lord wished it, by
his mercy, to deliver him [Louis] from his prison’).
26 T. Koehler, Miséricorde’, in Dictionnaire de Spiritualité ascétique et mystique: doctrine et histoire,
ed. M. Viller et al. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1976), X, col. 1313.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

64 Helen M. Hickey

of Christ outside the Passion story, and he paints an intimate picture of tears flowing
out of bodily places where blood flows within living human bodies.
The word ‘thing’ has come under much critical scrutiny in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. (How) is a tear a thing? A tear might be described as a transient
thing. Tears are visible for a short time as a liquid suspension of chemicals in water
which flow from the eyes, having been produced by the human body.27 Jerome
Neu has argued that a tear is ‘an intellectual thing’ because the tear of emotion
comes from thought.28 Neu’s analysis attempts to undercut emotionality with
­neurocognitive studies where all motion leads from and to the brain. But a tear is
not a thing as, for example, a chair is a thing. A chair is crafted or manufactured
from other things by human beings. And yet the accounts above suggest the ways
in which a reliquary tear was considered to be an object that might be captured, in
stone, in order to remember it better. And remembering plays a crucial part in a
personal history of tears. Tears are understood through personal experience of how
bodies behave, through memories of kinaesthetic knowledge of the feel of tears
on faces, and the emotions that accompany them. Embodied knowledge makes
possible the ability to interpret tears as signifiers of and for emotion in ourselves
and others.29 This may be one explanation for the puzzling nature of the work that
the relic of the Holy Tear performs for its worshippers. The Tear may be mnemonic
of Christ’s suffering, but it is suffering that allows its adherents to suffer themselves
no longer.

Pa rt I I : C o u rt, Curia, a n d Classi c s

Over the centuries, the Holy Tear developed its own historiography. Yet the shape of
historiographical writing on the Tear shows interesting peaks from the seven-
teenth to the nineteenth century, and for differing reasons. For instance, it has had
a long association with French royalty. As early as the fifteenth century, Louis XI
donated a silver lamp for the Tear at Vendôme and provided a letter of protection
or exemption for the abbey.30 In the sixteenth century, the Tear attracted special
treatment during the Reformation, including Protestant rebuttal, and anti-papist
rhetoric. It features on Calvin’s list of relics as a model of the proliferation of
­irrational and exploitative Church practices. However, it was also important in the
French Wars of Religion, where its inherent ambiguities were politically exploited
to the benefit of royalty and the clergy. During the Huguenot crisis, the relic was
saved by being smuggled to the monastery at Chelles, where the abbess was the
sister of the duc de Vendôme, and one of the sisters of the king of Navarre resided.
Under noble patronage the Tear was relocated to St Germain-des-Prés, closer to Paris.
In total it was absent from Vendôme for thirteen years. As Alexia Noulin writes:

27 Löfgren, ‘On Weeping’, 375–81.    28 Neu, ‘A Tear is an Intellectual Thing’, 35.

29 Guillemette Bolens, The Style of Gesture: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 1–2.
30 Rochambeau, Voyage à la Sainte-Larme, 47.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Capturing Christ’s Tears 65

elle [the Tear] a connu un exil qui lui a été salvateur et a sans doute permis sa conservation.
Cet exil a également rendu possible son culte dans la région parisienne et indirectement
sa notoriété a fait que des lettrés ont mentionné cette relique, permettant ainsi de
pouvoir l’étudier 450 ans plus tard.31
The Tear was on the move, and here we have no doubt that it was a thing around
which strong emotions whirled.
An intriguing work, published as a set of sonnets extracted from various speeches
about the relic, provides strong evidence for royal connections with the Holy Tear
well into the seventeenth century.32 The work appropriates the Tear in two ways:
for religious didacticism, and as a springboard for literary elaboration through
­Classical Greek, Roman, and early Church history. Although undated, the printer’s
illustration on the title page portrays identical heraldic elements (although with
minute stylistic differences) as that printed on the title page of Guillaume du
Peyrat’s 1645 L’Histoire ecclesiastiqve de la covr ov les antiqvitez, which was written
under court patronage for Louis XIV.33 The first of the three sonnets in this very
slim volume describes a particularly affectionate display of physical devotion to
the relic. The narrator not only adores the Holy Tear but he/she kisses it one
­hundred times:
Je te baise cent fois, d’une bouche amoureuse
Des yeux de ton Autheur, qui est vray homme & Dieu
Je luy vien presenter, pour Sacrifice deu,
Mon cœur humilie, & mon ame pieuse.
Quand pour l’amour de toy, mon Sauveur, je t’adore,
Je l’admire, et la baise, la rebaise encore,
N’est-ce point adorer un seul Dieu glorieux?34
The narrator finishes the page requesting God’s bounty illuminate his/her soul and
grant the discernment needed to better apprehend spiritual truth.35

31 Alexia Noulin, ‘La Relique et ses tergiversations pendant les guerres de religion: la sainte
Larme, sa dimension sacrée et l’enjeu du pouvoir’, BSASLV (2012): 19–25; 25; C. Torchet,
Histoire de l’abbaye royale de Notre-Dame de Chelles, vol. I (Paris: Retaux-Bray, 1889), 271. ‘[I]t
has known an exile which has been its salvation and which without doubt has ensured its conser-
vation. This exile has equally rendered its cult possible in the Parisian region and indirectly its
notoriety has meant that men of letters have mentioned this relic, thus allowing it to be studied
450 years later.’
32 M. Ph. G. Ad. J., Sonnets, extraicts du discours de la Sainte larme plorée par nostre Seigneur, sur le
Lazare mort, et par luy resuscité, laquelle se garde et visite en l’Église de la tressainte Trinité à Vendosme
(Paris: Petit-Pas, n.d.).
33 Guillaume du Peyrat, L’Histoire ecclesiastiqve de la covr ov les antiqvitez . . . (Paris: Henry Sara,
1645), 171.
34 M. Ph. G. Ad. J., Sonnets. ‘I kiss you [relic] a hundred times, with an amorous mouth, / from
the eyes of your Author [Christ], who is true man and God / I come to present to him, in due Sacrifice /
my humbled heart and my pious soul. When for the love of you, my Saviour, I adore you, I admire it
[the relic], and kiss it, and kiss it again, Is this not to adore one sole glorious God?’
35 Rochambeau, Voyage à la Sainte-Larme. The last word in the last extant stanza, ‘yeux’, is
­followed by a comma so it is likely the rest of the sonnet was lost prior to Achille de Rochambeau’s
nineteenth-century collation, which gives a full stop in the same place, suggesting (perhaps incorrectly)
that the work is complete.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

66 Helen M. Hickey

The second sonnet commences with a Latin epigraph drawn from Book 2 of
Ovid’s Metamorphoses on the story of Phaethon’s death: ‘nec minus Heliades fletus
et, inania morti / munera, dant lacrimas, et caesae pectora palmis, / non auditurum
miseras Phaethonta querellas / nocte dieque vocant adsternunturque sepulcro’
(ll. 340–4).36 The daughters of the Sun (Phaethon’s sisters) lament their brother’s
death night and day. His fall causes them bitter sorrow and with Clymene
(Phaethon’s mother) they cry incessantly but in vain; the son/brother will not
return. The narrator then turns to the Holy Tear and recalls how Lazarus, unlike
Phaethon, was given life, his sight, and Heaven, a ‘chose estrange et rare’ (‘strange
and rare thing’).
The final sonnet is from the early History of the Church, and recounts the tale
of the cruel Emperor Maximinus who removed the right eye of Saint Paphnutius,
due to his hatred for Christianity. Constantine, though, turns around this injustice
by kissing the eye cavity and weeping. The Holy Tear is now described as a daughter
of Heaven, and praised as a ‘perle tresauthentique’ [sic] (‘authentic/true pearl’). The
narrator prays that God/Christ, the tear’s Author, will deign to illuminate his or
her eyes, and mind, and return sight to the blind heretic and cure the spiritual
blindness of Maximinus.
These short poems produce a thematic sense of the mastery of Christ’s Holy
Tear over tears, death, physical and spiritual blindness, and sorrow. The Holy Tear
paradoxically brings joy and love, physical affection, and requires utter devotion
and subjection. Through Ovid’s and Paphnutius’ tales the Tear is repositioned
­backwards in time in a genealogy that is both Classical and early Christian, centuries
before its institution in eleventh-century France. The Tear narrative, in these
crossover texts, crudely knits different generic conventions together, suggesting
that it is a malleable cultural cipher that can be grafted on pre-Christian time.
Viewed in this light, the relic is now a metaphorical ‘thing’ that can time-travel,
wielding and working its comparative magic on early modern Christians through
Graeco-Roman syncretism. The Tear divides the world into two: a world where
Christian miracles do not exist (despite the mythological circuits of the Greek gods
who can fly close to the sun, for example) and where Christianity, in the form of
Constantine, grants mercy to bloodthirsty political regimes such as Maximinus’
who despise the Christian message. The metaphorical implication is that the Tear
is a material thing, which can be touched and kissed, but which also has miraculous
powers. In another sense, the relic is now also a ‘textual thing’, as it cuts across dif-
ferent literary genres, within a web of courtly social networks that weave desire and
history into religious didacticism.
Another manifestation of the Holy Tear’s ability to confer identity and forge
communal bonds is the important religious performance of devotional procession.

36 Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. Frank Justus Miller and G. P. Goold, English trans. Frank Justus
Miller (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1977–84), Bk. ii, 82–4.
‘The Heliades, her (Clymene’s) daughters, join in her lamentation, and pour out their tears in useless
tribute to the dead. With bruising hands beating their naked breasts, they call night and day upon
their brother, who nevermore will hear their sad laments, and prostrate themselves upon his
sepulchre.’
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Capturing Christ’s Tears 67

In 1719, the people of Vendôme and the parishes of the Vendômois requested
permission from the mayor and civic authorities to stage a solemn procession to
honour and parade the relic of the Holy Tear. The purpose of the procession was to
implore the relic to move Christ to intervene in the severe drought in the region,
which had lasted several months. Through prayer, the Tear was being asked to
cause rain, to drench the earth in an act mimetic of the tears Christ had shed
on hearing of the death of Lazarus. The ritual was an elaborate affair: forty-five
Masses were offered, the procession lasted all day, and a new lengthy canticle
which narrated the story of how the Tear came to be in the town of Vendôme was
composed for the occasion.37 This was sung to a secular tune, ‘Du brave cavalier assis’
(‘Of the brave mounted cavalier’), which shows a change in the devotional practice
that usually insisted on the singing of hymns during such religious occasions.
The foundational narrative was scripted to include all of the key components of the
Tear’s history at Vendôme in order to refresh communal memory and revivify
devotion to the relic. But its temporalities included the here and now. The canticle
described the ceremony that it was in the act of creating, singing of the actual pro-
cession, and adding another strand to the relic’s potency some nearly 700 years
after its arrival in France.
This processional congregation sought to induce a flow of tears in Christ h ­ imself,
so much so that his mercy would send this agricultural community much-longed-for
rain. The emotion of Christ is vacant in this instance. As in most other instances,
such as ocular miracles, the primary miracle of the Tear here is functional; it induces
an emotional response only indirectly. Consistently in the records the Tear does
not seem to have been employed to induce tears in its worshippers, but rather, to
increase Christ’s tears, similar to those Mary Magdalene’s exhortations and distress
produced to induce him to produce another miracle.

Pa rt I I I : Fakes , F r au d s , a n d Fai t h

Some twenty years prior to the procession, the theologian and church historian
Jean-Baptiste Thiers published his famous dissertation about the abuse of relics.
Thiers’s polemic targets the widespread practice of procuring, worshipping, and
promoting false relics for profit throughout France, but he singles out in particular
the relic practices of the Benedictine Order. After listing many cases of mistaken
and fraudulently labelled relics, Thiers claims that the Holy Tear is a spectacular
and extraordinary example of a relic that cannot be tied to its name. Quoting
the authority of pope and Church authorities, Thiers cites Guibert de Nogent
(c.1055–1154), who famously disparaged the practice of venerating relics.38 Thiers

37 BNF MS fonds latin 12700, fols. 320v–321r.

38 Guibert de Nogent, ‘Against the Monks of Saint-Medard who claim to have the Tooth of
the Savior’, in Monodies and On the Relics of Saints: The Autobiography and a Manifesto of a French
Monk from the Time of the Crusades, Bk. 3, ed. and trans. Joseph McAlhany (New York: Penguin,
2011). The church of Sainte Médard claimed to own one of Christ’s teeth, which enraged Guibert,
and possibly Thiers.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

68 Helen M. Hickey

employs the scholastic quodlibet (a disputation method of question and answer

used in the medieval university curriculum), challenging the Benedictines to a
debate against the efficacy of the Tear. Could not the tear be one Jesus wept over
Jerusalem, or at the Garden of Olives, on the Cross? Who told you an angel
­collected this tear in a flask and gave it to the Magdalene? He questions John’s
­Gospel, commenting that the Apostle did not see an angel collect the tears; otherwise
he would have recorded it.39 Why did you conserve only a single tear? Thiers is
­particularly vexed by not knowing which tear was collected by the angel. He asks,
‘Celle qui y est, est-elle la première, la seconde, la troisième, la pénultième, la
­dernière, ou quelqu’autre de celles que Jésus-Christ versa sur la mort de son ami
Lazare?’ (‘This one [tear] that is here; is it the first, the second, the third, the second-
last, or the last or some other of those that Jesus Christ wept on the death of his
friend Lazarus?’)40 He also interrogates the efficacy of the reliquary. Why is the
Tear contained within two vases if it is miraculous? Is it not sufficient to hermetically
seal the Tear in one vase? He completes his dissertation by hoping that wisdom,
piety, and zeal will disabuse ‘les simples de la fausse créance qu’ils ont de la Larme
de Vendome’ (‘the simple folk of the false belief they have about the Tear of
Vendome’).41 Thiers’s questioning had a strong basis in rationality but material
facts were paramount in his trajectory. At the same time, his account has a quality
of almost childlike literalness.
Jean Mabillon in his Lettre d’un bénédictin defended the Tear’s authenticity
by drawing on the revelation of past custom, ecclesiastical tradition, and the
­longevity of the cult.42 In short, Mabillon claims that the Holy Tear is true because
thousands of people have worshipped it, and have done so for centuries. It has not
been denounced by consecutive popes and archbishops. Mabillon thinks it a
­temerity to even question such relics. He also chides Thiers for not examining the
Titres or History.43 He regards Thiers’ dissertation as an attack generated by ‘la passion
violente’.44 And he castigates Thiers by saying that one needs a just temperament
to pronounce on so delicate a matter. There were ancient documents linking the
Holy Tear to its eleventh-century origins, he claims, and because it once was
housed in a magnificent reliquary, it must be genuine.45
Mabillon was a pioneer and founder of scientifically based archival research
methods through his De re diplomatica, but he was also hesitant to distinguish
forged from genuine documents too rigorously, even allowing known forgeries
to rest with genuine diplomas. He employed ancient letters and charters, classifying
the various proofs under titles, such as ‘Preuves extantes’, and ‘Preuves littéraires’,
to illustrate the authenticity of the relic in his reply to Thiers.46 His refutation
encompassed appeals to the past itself as a genuine authority. This was a deliberate
curatorial policy in his work on medieval documents. It also explains how he might

39 Thiers, Dissertation, 24.   40 Thiers, Dissertation, 26.

41 Thiers, Dissertation, 26, 184.    42 Mabillon, Lettre d’un bénédictin, 9.
43 Mabillon, Lettre d’un bénédictin, 17.   44 Mabillon, Lettre d’un bénédictin, 5.
45 Mabillon, Lettre d’un bénédictin, 10.
46 Mabillon, Lettre d’un bénédictin, 47, 59. The former consisted of the now lost reliquary and
arcade of the Holy Tear, and the later, twelfth-century charters of endowments.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Capturing Christ’s Tears 69

be persuaded to defend a relic that is possibly fake through the same rationale. As
one recent Mabillon commentator claims: ‘he could even . . . allow his affection for
his order to temper the severity of his approach, as in the matter of the antiquity
of the abbey of St. Denis, and in the still more regrettable affair of the Holy Tear
of Vendôme’ (my emphasis).47 By reputation, Mabillon was a man who privileged
his concerns over his facts. In the seventeenth century, a letter between two English
antiquaries scrutinized Mabillon’s methods. Thomas Smith warned Humfrey
Wanley that although Mabillon attempted to distinguish genuine and authentic
charters from false ones, ‘it might bee always remembred, that hee is biased too
much by his education an[d] vow, and by the love and concerne, w[h]ich hee beares
for the honour of his own order, and therefore not to bee trusted upon his bare
word without the warrant of good reason and just authority’ (my emphasis).48
Mabillon, then, was able to reformulate the relic as possibly spurious but defensible
due to the feeling he carried for it, and, as a Benedictine, for the traditions of the
cult of the relic which had been instituted by his own Order at La Trinité in
Vendôme. Mabillon was circling around the idea that it did not matter whether
the relic was real or fake, but that people’s feelings could dictate whether or not
they wanted the relic to be miraculous. He argued that this was sufficient evidence
for its truth and on the level of blind faith, he was probably right.
The chronological end point for the Holy Tear’s widespread fame is the French
Revolution, when it disappeared both actually and, some hoped, incorrectly,
­symbolically. ‘In the revolution we visited some of those holy tears, in some phials
such as those at Vendôme’, ‘on trouva un grain de verre, qui figurait une goutte
d’eau; dans d’autres on trouva rien’ (‘one found a grain of glass, which featured a
drop of water; in others one found nothing’).49 In the early nineteenth century, the
Tear attracted some sentimental and romantic writing. The nineteenth-century
travel journal of Mary Boddington provides an example:
For the vial being carried yearly in procession on Good Friday, a prisoner expressly
chosen as one whose case was ‘piteux et rémissible’ was appointed to follow it, bearing
in his hand a lighted torch; which prisoner received free grace after the ceremonial, in
commemoration of the deliverance of Louis de Bourbon, Comte de Vendôme, who
being captured at the battle of Agincourt and incarcerated in the tower of London,
escaped through his faith in the holy tear.
There is something so beautiful in this human tear, so full of hope to the weak and
trembling, so consoling as a symbol of the link—even of affection, which may unite a
divine nature to an earthly and erring one, that I have never read those two words,
‘Jesus wept’, without a swell of the heart.50

47 David Knowles, The Historian and Character and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008), 234–5.
48 BL MS Harley 3781 fol. 84r, cited in Alfred Hiatt, ‘Diplomatic Arts: Hickes against Mabillon
in the Republic of Letters’, Journal of the History of Ideas 70.3 (2009): 351–73; 365, n. 41.
49 Jacques-Albin-Simon Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire critique des reliques et des images miraculeuses,
vol. II (Paris: Guien et Compagnie, 1821), 55–8; 58.
50 Mary Boddington, Sketches on the Pyrenees, vol. II (London: Longman, 1837), 348–9.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

70 Helen M. Hickey

Boddington appears to equate the Tear with the sublime in this example. Another
nineteenth-century writer, however, stated that the monks of the Holy Tear at
Vendôme popularized ‘a superstitious belief . . . that the crystal globe which enclosed
a stone heart, and was hung up over the monument, was efficacious in maladies
of the eyes. [T]he people came in great confidence to rub their eyes on this holy
relic.’51 Practicality as well as beauty, it seems, is in the eye of the beholder.

C o n c lu si o n

The concept and the relic of the Holy Tear offer a conversation between two
­ eanings inherent in the word ‘feelings’. The first concerns ‘feeling’ that involves
m
the sense of physical touch, and that quality both evokes and relies upon matter.
The touching of relics was a high point of veneration at holy places. The worshippers’
aim was to be as close as possible to the relic, and hence God’s power, in the belief
that miracles were possible through its intercessory powers.52 The quality of ‘virtus’
could work miracles through touch and be transferred from one substance to
another by direct contact or by second-order touch. Christ’s ability to heal through
touch was a common theme in the New Testament, even in something as mun-
dane as touching the hem of a garment. It was impossible to touch the Holy Tear
itself so the stone, a rock crystal, was immersed in water, removed, and the water
in which the stone had been immersed was then considered thaumaturgic because
it had been in contact with the relic. The second meaning of ‘feelings’ concerns the
emotions. What emotions create tears? What tears in—or from—others create
emotions in ourselves?
On an etymological level, une larme is a noun, a ‘thing’; la larme is a particular
thing. The act of weeping stems from pleurer, to cry or shed tears. The pleurants,
for example, are the ones who cry (act) but la larme is matter. Here it is tempting
to draw upon Heidegger’s binary of thing and object (with la larme as the thing
and the Tear relic as the object), but Bruno Latour’s critique of Heidegger suggests
that the distinction between a thing and an object is not as clear as Heidegger
would have us believe.53 All things (in a logical extension of Latour’s argument
against this easy binary, there are no objects) are part of human endeavour, desire,
communicative network, and/or social/political collaboration. The argument that
all objects are things because they are embedded in social and / or political networks
holds true when thinking about the work that the Holy Tear performs. Moreover,
Latour makes the point that the more we become obsessed with finding the facts

51 Louise S. Costello, A Pilgrimage to Auvergne, from Picardy to Le Velay (London: Richard Bentley,
1842), 188.
52 Anastasia Keshman, ‘Touching of Relics’, in Encyclopedia of Medieval Pilgrimage (Brill Online,
2016. <http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopedia-of-medieval-pilgrimage/touching-of-
relics-SIM_00153>, accessed 16 November 2015).
53 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Alfred Hofstadter (New York:
Harper & Row, 1971), 161–84; 164; Bruno Latour, ‘Why has Critique Run Out of Steam? From
Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225–48.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Capturing Christ’s Tears 71

about something, the more we are distanced from our object of study, and hence
our ‘concerns’ (Latour’s term) about that object of study. Although ‘concerns’ do
not equate to emotions, there is an argument to be made that cognitive feelings
overlap with the emotion field. As desires or drives towards knowledge, other than
sealed-off intellectual or factual knowledge (if there is such a thing), ‘concerns’ lean
into emotions. Although the movable relic imprisoned in its reliquary becomes
objectified, the impulse of its devotees is to get as near to it as possible, to touch it,
as if being physically near the matter of the relic is enough.
The genius of the Tear relic is that it marries piety and emotion to produce
­misericordia or mercy; but this is also its undoing, because the Tear does not signify
emotion per se. It is an empty emotion signifier. In its place is a ‘thing’, a material
object created out of apocryphal stories, the magic of gems, textual palimpsests,
and numinous belief. The beginning of the litany to the Holy Tear establishes that
transmutation from emotion to ‘thing as action or work’ very clearly. The refrain
to each of these lines is ‘Grant us Mercy’ (‘Faites-nous Miséricorde’).
Jésus, qui pleurez avec humilité,
Jésus, qui lavez le monde avec des Larmes,
Jésus, qui ressuscitez le monde avec des Larmes,
Jésus, qui éclairez les aveugles avec des Larmes,
Jésus, qui illuminez les entendements avec des Larmes,
Jésus, qui nourrissez les volontés avec des Larmes,
Jésus, qui nourrissez les esprits avec des Larmes,
Jésus, qui amolissez les esprits avec des Larmes,
Jésus, qui sanctifiez les corps avec des Larmes,
Jésus, qui rendez les âmes fécondes avec des Larmes . . . 54
We need a language that allows us to widen the way we write or speak about the
material world, whether or not in a religious context. Michel de Certeau has given
us a way of speaking about everyday place as a practised space, and Monique Scheer
argues that we can profitably use Bourdieuian concepts to extend our reading of
emotions.55 We want to and we do invest material objects with meaning, value,
and feeling. The Holy Tear offers rich avenues for theorizing questions about the
nature of things and feelings. However, it is also an exemplary case or model of
how emotions, things, and the words used to describe them, are not universal.

54 Rochambeau, Voyage à la Sainte-Larme, 87. ‘Jesus, who weeps with humility, . . . who cleanses the
world with Tears, . . . who revives the world with Tears, . . . who enlightens the blind with Tears, . . . who
illuminates our understanding with Tears, . . . who feeds our will with Tears, . . . who feeds our spirits
with Tears, . . . who soothes our spirits with Tears, . . . who sanctifies our bodies with Tears, . . . who
makes souls ripe with Tears’, etc. (my translation).
55 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984);
Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)?
A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51.2 (2012): 193–220.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

5
Holding the Sole
Shoes, Emotions, and the Supernatural

Hilary Davidson

How hard can we expect a magic pair of shoes to work? . . . Are we asking
too much? As our needs emerge from their redoubts . . . will the shoes . . . lose
patience with our demands and return us to the pisspots whence we came?
—Salman Rushdie1
You will never find wonderful and great things on the ground, but instead
placed on high, to fill others with wonder and reverence.
—Nun, Angela Tarabotti, defending Venetian women’s use of
chopines, 16602

From very early childhood, as soon as we walk, we wear shoes. The objects contain
and protect our feet from an infinite variety of hazards in an infinite variety of
environments, and materials. But shoes, unlike clothing, do not generally return to
abject flatness once they are removed from the body. Shoes hold their shape.
Eventually they also hold the shape of the wearer’s foot as it imprints in daily use.
The hollow inside of a shoe is a space existing by itself. As much as the foot shapes
the shoe, the shoe shapes the foot, from physical reformations of bunions and blis-
ters to more conceptual ideas of what the owner of that foot might be: a saint, for
example; a princess; a merchant on the make. The possibility of transformation
shoes hold, and their vessel-like qualities, have seen those hollows filled with ideas
around emotional and supernatural agency for centuries. If shoes are vessels, what
do they contain? Power. If power, what kind? Shoes in particular provoke dis-
courses of tension between energetic polarities. We encounter dynamics between
oral/literary, recording/concealing, doctrine/practice, sacred/profane, and public/
private. Shoes, real and imagined, become the nexus point of these transmissions
or balances, partaking of both oppositions, containing the tension. Transmitters of
power and stories, markers of status achieved, meeting place of doctrine and ­folklore,
holders of unspoken superstitions: shoes are potent carriers of emotionality.

1 ‘At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers’, in Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz (London: British
Film Institute, 1992), 60–1.
2 From Tarabotti’s Antisatira, quoted in Andrea Vianello, ‘Courtly Lady or Courtesan? The
Venetian Chopine in the Renaissance’, in Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers, ed. Giorgio Riello
and Peter McNeil (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 93.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Holding the Sole 73

The pre-modern encompassed social transitions from the relative unity of the
medieval Church to schismatic post-Reformation beliefs; from a largely oral to an
increasingly literary understanding; and from a world of sparser personal materiality
to the burgeoning consumer culture of the early nineteenth century. This chapter
explores beliefs invested in early modern shoes as ‘physical and psychic objects’, as
Ellen Sampson rightly identifies them, across three supernaturally invested pre-
modern areas: the religiously spiritual (saints’ relics), the transformatively magical
(folk tales and fairy tales), and the ritual quotidian (concealed shoes) to examine
parallel practices across uses of shoes in each context, and the responses to agency-
imbued footwear.3 The supernatural evokes emotions: wonder, fear, joy, anger. So
to examine shoes with magical agency or in magical contexts is to examine human
reactions to that magic, woven throughout as reoccurring affects of pre-modern
shoes, real or imaginary. Things as imagined, things as they are, things as used, and
things as discarded all have their own emotional resonance which weaves and
­interplays with the others to form a complex embodiment of feeling in materiality.
Many of the shoes retain emotional agency across time in fairy tales now part of
the Western canon, or were discovered in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
hidden in old buildings as markers of where emotion once was.
Thousands of words have tried to explain the power of shoes on human
­imaginations and bodies.4 ‘Across multiple cultures and societies’, Sampson
summarizes, ‘shoes are used as metaphors for behaviours, moralities and lives,
and become ­signifiers of social status, rites of passage and different forms of
enfranchisement.’5 Nearly all humans have experience with footwear, part of the
universal experience of body adornment and ‘dress’.6 The dressed body and knowledge
of how footwear feels therefore form a particularly large ‘emotional community’,
in Barbara Rosenwein’s influential conceptualization.7 Shoes’ possibilities as the nexus
of multiple emotional communities are recurring ideas in the following research.
Emotions are a continual, frequently atemporal state of becoming. As I ask elsewhere,
‘Where does an object’s life and capacity for emotional transmission end?’8 The shoe
as emotional object can carry an emotional charge that acts upon its encounterer
in the present day even if the quality of that charge is unable to be compared with
its charge for the original maker, wearer, or viewer. I am concerned with how ‘for

3 Ellen Sampson, ‘Worn: Footwear, Attachment and Affective Experience’, unpublished PhD
­thesis (Royal College of Art, 2016), 3.
4 Shari Benstock, and Suzanne Ferriss, ‘A Short Introduction’, in Footnotes: On Shoes, ed. Shari
Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Riello and
McNeil, eds., Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers; June Swann, ‘Foreword’, in Louise Mitchell and
Lindie Ward, Stepping Out: Three Centuries of Shoes (Haymarket, NSW: Powerhouse Publications, 1997);
Helen Persson, ed., Shoes: Pain and Pleasure (London: V&A Publishing, 2015); Rebecca Shawcross,
Shoes: An Illustrated History (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); June Swann, Shoes (London: Batsford, 1982).
5 Sampson, ‘Worn’, 6.
6 For practices of dress and adornment see Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress
and Modern Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
7 Barbara Rosenwein, ‘Theories of Change in the History of Emotions’, in A History of Emotions,
1200–1800, ed. Jonas Liliequist (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), chapter 1; Jan Plamper, The
History of Emotions, trans. Keith Tribe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), chapter 5.
8 Hilary Davidson, ‘Grave Emotions: Clothing and Textiles from Nineteenth-Century London
Cemeteries’, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture 14.2 (2016): 226–42.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

74 Hilary Davidson

material culture researchers, emotions might be considered a secondary set of arte-

facts arising from the physical artefact’s contexts’, be they psychic or locational.9
Many of the shoes presented here are elevated above the everyday experience by
virtue of height, status, spirituality, cost, physical position, or agency. Such footwear
has a correspondingly heightened emotional affect or works as the focus of belief.
They are things existing ‘in many registers at once as well as the processes that
become possible because of this both simple and complex fact’.10 If inanimation is
a quality of the non-living, shoes facilitate animation and motion and thus have a
pseudo-life, especially in tales where they can take over, and, through religious or
demonic magic, become animate themselves. The pre-Enlightenment hybridity of
religion and magic means that looking at fairy tales for what enchantedly magic
shoes might be, and saints’ relics for what religiously magical shoes are, is the same
coin, indivisible in action.

P re - M odern S hoes

Shoes are perennially popular research subjects for fashion and now cultural
­studies, an ‘overdetermined object’.11 As Riello and McNeil establish, ‘New studies
have given us awareness of the personal, social, and sexual connotations attributed
to footwear and created by footwear [while] cultural studies has focused mainly
on the psychological, affective, and emotional values of footwear.’12 However,
Sampson identifies an important point about these studies: ‘the shoe that is miss-
ing is the real shoe; the habitual material shoe; the shoes as a worn and bodily
object’ and that ‘this focus on the shoe as metaphor, signifier, or symbol obfuscates
the shoe’s material presence’.13 Her shoemaking background (and mine) gives her
an inherently material understanding of how shoes come to be and then decay.
My own presence ‘as observer, maker, and wearer, cannot help but disrupt and
alter the objects’ I write about. ‘My own subjectivity and sensory experience are
inseparable from the research; seeing, sensing and knowing have become entwined.’
Shoemaking is a craft invested with secrets, rituals, arcana, and profanity. It is a
trade passed on through the body in demonstration and by word of mouth.
Literary teaching is of minimal effect in understanding how to materialize a con-
structed form of the shoe the maker imagines. The body of the shoemaker is also
invested in the finished shoe, the hand’s individual marks, its making, blood, spit,
sweat, and sometimes tears, and the bodily effort required to wrestle the material
into shape.14 Even as shoes come new from the producer, their material form has

9 Davidson, ‘Grave Emotions’, 232.

10 Nigel Thrift, ‘Afterword’, in The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, ed. Dan Hicks
and Mary Carolyn Beaudry (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 634–45; 642.
11 Freud quoted in Sampson, ‘Worn’, 6.
12 Peter McNeil and Giorgio Riello, ‘The Art and Science of Walking: Gender, Space, and the
Fashionable Body in the Long Eighteenth Century’, Fashion Theory 9.2 (2005): 175–204; 176.
13 Sampson, ‘Worn’, 6.
14 Sampson (‘Worn’) explores this effect at length.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Holding the Sole 75

already been inherently imbued with energetic human presence. Along with some
hats, shoes were the only pre-modern garments produced on a mould, a shaped
substitute for a stylized version of a body part as reliquaries were shaped like the
part of the saint’s body they contained. Shoemakers work with old, talismanic mater-
ials of animal skins and iron to produce externalized independent ‘feet’. There is,
then, some supernatural element even in shoes’ creation. What this chapter attempts
is to link grounded materiality with intangible emotionality—often expressed
through the signification of metaphor—through the vehicle of pre-­modern shoes
to explore how the two are inextricable: the numinous is situated in the physical.
Early footwear’s value comes largely from its components. Materials such as
­leather, nails, textiles, and dyes had more value in the pre-modern period before
the production and consumption revolutions that coalesced through the industri-
alizing eighteenth century, especially in the construction of essentially transient
objects.15 Even sturdy leather shoes wear down quickly and require frequent repair
or replacement. Excavated hoards of medieval and early modern plebeian shoes
reinforce these ideas, as the shoes emerging are a patchwork of misshapen splits
and cobbling.16 People consumed on average two to three pairs of shoes a year by
the late seventeenth century and through the eighteenth, spending 20 per cent of
their available income on this mutable commodity.17 Only the very poorest went
without. At a base level, shoes were ubiquitous, a significant financial outlay, and
objects which came into and out of people’s daily lives regularly.
Leather, that literal second skin, retains the marks of cumulative gesture to
become a record of a person’s life and life force in their absence. Feet cannot
touch shoes without shoes touching feet. The affect is mutual and instantaneous,
an inescapable symbiotic simultaneity. Worn shoes become imprinted with the
wearer’s feet, traces of their gait and any abnormalities, incorporated in the shoes’
material form, which archaeologists can reconstruct from objects discarded hundreds
of years earlier. Such incorporation grounds the extensive everyday superstitions
recorded about shoes. People have put gold coins in shoes to walk on prosperity
and silver ones in wedding shoes to avert harm, thrown shoes at weddings to deter-
mine the next bride or for luck, demanded a token coin for a present of shoes ‘or
they walk away’, avoided putting new shoes on a table in case of bad luck, trodden
on toes of new shoes for good luck, burnt shoes to prevent disease, placed them in a
‘T’ before going to bed to dream of a future spouse, hung them in a cross by the
bed or turned them upside down at night to ward off bad luck, spat into the right

15 Giorgio Riello, A Foot in the Past: Consumers, Producers and Footwear in the Long Eighteenth
Century (Oxford and New York: Pasold Research Fund/Oxford University Press, 2006).
16 Francis Grew and Margarethe de Neergaard, Shoes and Pattens (Museum of London; London:
HMSO, 1988). Ongoing excavations of pre-modern shoes c.1200–1800 in the Copenhagen harbour
front are backing up this constant wear and replacement through the quanta of discarded shoes
­emerging. See Vivi Lena Andersen, ‘Old Shoes in a New Perspective—Fashioning Archaeology’,
Fashion Practice (2016): 1–16 <https://doi.org/10.1080/17569370.2016.1232886>; Vivi Lena Andersen,
‘Mellem Brosten, Knyst, Skolæst Og Mode. Sko Fra 1300–1800 Fra Arkæologiske Udgravninger
I København’ (Saxo-Instituttet, University of Copenhagen, 2016).
17 Riello, A Foot in the Past, 19–20.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

76 Hilary Davidson

shoe before putting it on, spat onto the sole of the left shoe before turning it upside
down to stop a howling dog, and many more practices.18
However, supernatural emotionality in shoes mostly occurs outside the quotidian
experience of functional footwear through elevation, wonder, or differentiation.
Materials defined high-status medieval footwear, with the best red Cordovan or
morocco leather created from the finest kidskins combined with the most expensive
dyes providing a density of worth for the wearer to flaunt. Some shoes were also
gilded. By the late sixteenth century, high heels had become fashionable in Europe
for both sexes as a physicality elite social strata could use to literally raise themselves
above others. Heels eventually superseded the older raised platform shoes as
markers of power.19 Heels covered in the older status symbol of red leather, or
­imitated with cheaper red paint became increasingly fashionable throughout the
seventeenth century, taking on exclusivity in France, where Louis XIV restricted
the right to wear red heels to those with court privilege.20 They signified ‘sophisti-
cation, international travel, and refinement’, a mobility of elite cosmopolitan
style.21 Sumptuary laws from the Middle Ages onwards codified how footwear
could mark out social scales by restricting certain heights of shoes and finishing
textiles, such as gold or silver lace and crimson velvet, to members of the upper elite.
Flouting these regulations was a form of aspirational social elevation, disrupting
the correct hierarchical order such laws tried (and usually failed) to reinforce.
High heels provided not only higher stature, but also the embodiment of
­‘constrained mobility’. Only upper-class members, especially women, could wear
shoes that clearly defined an inability to walk far (Fig. 5.1). From unisex beginnings,
as men’s high heels grew more ruggedly functional, women’s became increasingly
delicate and diminutive, creating ‘the illusion of a dainty foot’ which rapidly
became a marker of female attractiveness.22
Shoes with uppers distant from the sullying ground also allowed vamps covered
with increasingly elaborate embroidery, ribbons, and expensive fabrics, making
shoes a site for wealth displays. As female shoes became lighter throughout the
eighteenth century, their already precarious durability decreased: George II’s
daughters were allowed a new pair of shoes every week at the cost of six shillings a
pair, not due to excessive consumption but because they grew shabby so quickly.23
Shoes in pre-modern societies, therefore, represented moral, financial, erotic, or
spiritual worth. Viewers’ greatly more nuanced haptic understanding of materials

18 Iona Archibald Opie and Moira Tatem, eds., A Dictionary of Superstitions (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992).
19 Christopher Breward, ‘Men in Heels: From Power to Perversity’, in Shoes: Pain and Pleasure, ed.
Persson, 106–17; Elizabeth Semmelhack, Men in Heels (Toronto: Bata Shoe Museum, 2015); Elizabeth
Semmelhack, On a Pedestal: From Renaissance Chopines to Baroque Heels (Toronto: Bata Shoe Museum,
2009).
20 Elizabeth Semmelhack, ‘The Allure of Power’, in Shoes: Pain and Pleasure, ed. Persson,
39–51; 45.
21 McNeil and Riello, ‘The Art and Science of Walking’, 187.
22 Semmelhack, ‘The Allure of Power’, 45. McNeil and Riello note how ‘the fashion plate reiterates
the myth of impossibly small female feet and shoes in a manner unimagined in previous fashion
imagery’, ‘The Art and Science of Walking’, 196.
23 McNeil and Riello, ‘The Art and Science of Walking’, 185.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Holding the Sole 77

Fig. 5.1. Pair of women’s high-heeled shoes, c.1690–c.1710. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam,

BK-NM-9371-B.

in the pre-modern era cannot be underestimated as contributing to this under-

standing of worth. The visual qualities of splendour or beauty came as much from
social knowledge of a textile or leather’s place in hierarchies of quality, cost, and
rarity as from an aesthetic value.

Fairy Tales

The fairy tale as we know it is a phenomenon which came to fruition in early

­modern Europe during the transition from a primarily oral to a primarily literary
culture. The form developed from oral tale-telling traditions and slowly, as tech-
nology and literacy improved, morphed into a literary genre in the seventeenth
century, and became the focus of efforts to preserve ‘traditional’ oral tales by the
early nineteenth.24 Tales incorporated myths, legends, religion, hagiography, bawdry,
anecdote, and even, recursively, literary tales as they became part of cultural
memory. With roots as old as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, author Madame d’Aulnoy
coined the term ‘fairy tale’ or conte des fées in late seventeenth-century France. For
brevity I will refer to the mass of such material as tales, meaning the stories people
tell about their world and its reflections, demonstrating ‘pleasure in the fantastic,
curiosity about the real’.25 Magical shoes in tales essentially move between two
states: natural and supernatural realms; singleness and marriage; sin and virtue;

24 The subject has been comprehensively covered. See particularly, Maria Tatar, Off with Their
Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992);
Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London: Vintage, 1995);
Jack Zipes, ed., The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Jack
Zipes, ‘The Changing Function of the Fairy Tale’, The Lion and the Unicorn 12.2 (1988): 7–31; Jack Zipes,
The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm (New York:
Norton, 2001).
25 Warner, Beast to the Blonde, xvi.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

78 Hilary Davidson

life and death.26 They transcend boundaries, concerned with elevating charac-
ters beyond their origins, or being vehicles for punishments that degrade their
accustomed position. The context of the primacy of pre-modern material
­knowledges makes ‘extra-ordinary’, or ‘super-natural’ shoes in fairy tales more
comprehensible. The contrast between the listeners’ humble footwear and lavish
tale shoes is a key transmitter of wonder and enchantment. Such material value
of shoes and its connection with order connect physical shoes with shoes in
tales. Tales allow the space for the possible and the impossible to coexist, simul-
taneously and comfortably. If the uncanny is the familiar rendered strange, as in
concealed shoes, what is the strange rendered familiar? Roland Barthes would
say myth, the cultural rendered natural.27 Folklore and fairy tales and religious
traditions render the supernatural natural according to the parameters of the
society in which they travel or emerge. A shoe can become the symbol of where
the transformation occurs.28
Shoes with their own magical agency are rare in tales. ‘More than literary device,
the attribution of feelings to objects assumes the miraculous presence of divinity
in what are normally inanimate things,’ writes Kieschnik in a religious context.29
Enchantment can easily substitute divinity. Some shoes yearn so for their
Cinderella-heroine that they dart onto her foot of their own accord, ‘as iron flies to
the magnet’.30 More cruelly, shoes with independent supernatural agency are used
as punishment. There are many tales of people dancing with the devil, or being
cursed by dancing to death.31 Shoes are vehicles for divine punishment in religious
legends nearly indistinguishable from folk or fairy tales. A medieval story collected
by the Grimm Brothers as scholars combines the two magical aspects:
The priest then said, ‘May God and St. Magnus force you to dance for a whole year.’
It came to pass that God gave power to these words. Neither rain nor frost touched the
dancers’ heads neither did they feel heat, hunger or thirst. And though they danced
ceaselessly, their shoes did not wear out. The sexton ran up to the group and tried to

26 Isabelle Cardigos, ‘The Wearing and Shedding of Enchanted Shoes’, Estudos de Literatura Oral
5 (1999): 219–28; 223.
27 Roland Barthes, ‘Myth Today’, in Mythologies (1957; London: Vintage, 1993), 109–59.
28 There is a burgeoning literature on fairy-tale shoes. See Hilary Davidson, ‘Shoes as Magical
Objects’, in Shoes: Pain and Pleasure, ed. Persson, 26–35; Ellen Sampson ‘Dancing, Desire and Death:
The Role of Footwear in Fairy Tales’, in Fairy Tale Fashion, ed. Coleen Hill (Hartford, CT: Yale
University Press, 2015); Cardigos, ‘The Wearing and Shedding of Enchanted Shoes’; Victoria
Ivleva, ‘Functions of Textile and Sartorial Artifacts in Russian Folktales’, Marvels & Tales 23
(2009): 268–99; Marina Warner, ‘Footage’, Book 5, Tacita Dean: Seven Books Grey (Vienna: MUMOK,
Steidl, 2011), 9–34; Elaine Webster, ‘Red Shoes: Linking Fashion and Myth’, Textile 7 (2009): 164–77;
Elizabeth Wilcox, ‘The Nature of the Dance: A Feminist Reading of “The Danced Out Shoes”
(AT306)’, unpublished BA thesis (University of Utah, 2009).
29 John Kieschnik, ‘Material Culture’, in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion, ed. John
Corrigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 223–38; 231.
30 Giambattista Basile, ‘The Cat Cinderella’, in Cinderella: A Casebook, ed. Alan Dundes (New York:
Garland Publications, 1982), 3–13; 10.
31 AT D1415—magic object compels person to dance; AT Q386—dancing punished (for the
Aarne-Thompson (AT) Motif Index of Folk-Literature, see note 34 below); in The German Legends of
the Brothers Grimm, ed. and trans. Donald Ward (Philadelphia, PA: Institute for the Study of Human
Issues, 1981).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Holding the Sole 79

pull his sister away from the dancers, but only her arms followed him. When a year
had passed, Bishop Heribert of Cologne came and freed them from the curse. Four of
them died immediately and the others became very ill.32
Here, the divine power of saints causes a suspension of natural laws so that
shoes do not wear out, harnessing their role as facilitators of movement in order
to prolong the punishment. Hans Christian Andersen echoed this enchantment in
his 1844 story ‘The Red Shoes’. The Danish author’s father was a poor shoemaker
and shoes have personal psychological affect in his stories, as I have written else-
where.33 However, Andersen’s tales are consciously literary affairs written after
the impact of the Grimm Brothers’ first publication of Kinder- und Hausmärchen
in 1812, probably the most influential collection of tales ever published. They
represent the blending of oral tales into a literary form during an era of transition
into the modern world. While they purported to be a collection of authentic German
folk tales reflecting the spirit of the people, later scholarship has revealed the tales
were mostly transmitted through a middle-class source and heavily influenced by
French literary sources.
The Grimms’ tales have examples of most of the European shoe stories in them.
These are categorized in the Aarne-Thompson index of folk literature motifs and
denoted by an AT number.34 Obviously the key shoe tale is the Cinderella-type
(Motif 510A), dealt with separately below. Many other tales have supernaturally
functioning or signalling shoes in them. Probably the next best known is the
Worn-Out Shoes motif (AT 1015.1.1), told as ‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses’.
Here, the fragility of shoes alerts a king that his daughters are nocturnally active,
dancing underground with princes or devils or spirits, though the sexual connota-
tion is clear.35 Sometimes the shoes are merely worn through at the soles, reflecting
the realities of material eighteenth-century shoes’ increasingly delicate soles. Some
lively princesses have the supernatural space of their activity marked out by their
ploughing through up to seven pairs of iron shoes a night, impossible in normal
reality. The princesses degrade themselves from their already elevated position and
must be ‘saved’ by a discoverer, usually a poor soldier who is then elevated socially
himself by marrying one of them. The concern for moral virtue this represents is
best shown in a Magyar folk tale where the unmarried sisters are burnt as witches
after their discovery.36 Iron shoes always appear as punitive motifs; earthbound,

32 Ward, German Legends of the Brothers Grimm, 196.

33 Hilary Davidson, ‘Sex and Sin: The Magic of Red Shoes’, in Shoes: A History from Sandals to
Sneakers, ed. Riello and McNeil, 272–88.
34 The Aarne-Thompson (AT) Motif Index of Folk-Literature is the international referencing
­system for narrative motifs. Revised as the Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) Index (2004), the older
version is still used, as referenced here. Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification
of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux,
­Jest-Books and Local Legends, rev. edn (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1958).
35 Dancing in the afterworld (Motif E489.5) or underworld appears in many tales.
36 Rev. W. Henry Jones and Lewis L. Kropf, eds., The Folk Tales of the Magyars (London: Elliot
Stock, 1889), 141–4.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

80 Hilary Davidson

Fig. 5.2. Pair of women’s red morocco leather shoes, 1770–89. 2009.300.4750a–b.
Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of
the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of Herman Delman, 1954.

prosaic, functional, and anti-magic devices.37 In many Animal Bridegroom type

tales a wife must wear out three or seven pairs of iron shoes or boots seeking her
vanished husband. Unexpurgated versions of the Snow White story dance a wicked
stepmother or mother-in-law to death in red-hot iron shoes.
Red shoes when tied to a material are markers of elevated fashion or rank. The
characters who wear them can be punished for trying to move beyond their station
in life, a disorder of the cultural rendered as a ‘natural’ state of social hierarchy.38
Finely finished, expensive red leather is an elite, expensive material, one that makes
magical shoes of high worth, reflecting the same characteristics in their wearer,
especially when compared to plebeian leather shoes (Fig. 5.2).
Markers of real shoe fashions appear in fairy tales. The Grimms recorded a
woman ‘light-hearted and joyous’ in her new red shoes,39 and pert ‘Clever Gretel’
adorns her shoes with red rosettes. In a version of ‘Love Like Salt’ the ‘Turkey Girl’
puts on red morocco shoes as she reveals her noble birth.40 Besides bearing
traces of changing fashions across different cultures, and what marks out status in
footwear, this red morocco draws attention to the importance of contrasting
­materiality in shoe tales. Nowhere is this worked out more fully than in the shoe
tale of all shoe tales, the hundreds of variants of the story we know as Cinderella.
Marian Rolfe Cox, who wrote the first, and still magisterial, scholarly work on
Cinderella variants, considers that ‘the shoe incident, perhaps the most salient

37 AT H1583.1, time measured by worn iron shoes; AT 1125, travelling till iron shoes are worn
out; TM136, vow not to marry until iron shoes are worn out; AT Q502.2, wandering till iron shoes
are worn out (punishment); AT M202.1, promise to be fulfilled when iron shoes wear out.
38 See Davidson, ‘Sex and Sin’.
39 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, ‘The Juniper Tree’ (tale 47), trans. D. L. Ashliman, <http://www.
pitt.edu/~dash/grimm047.html>, accessed 12 May 2017.
40 M. E. R. Cox, Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-Five Variants of Cinderella, Catskin, and Cap
O’Rushes (London: The Folk-Lore Society/David Nutt, 1893), 172.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Holding the Sole 81

feature of Cinderella proper, was probably a story-telling commonplace before it

was introduced into the German poem of King Rother, which was written in the
early part of the twelfth century’.41 This legend sees Osnatrix setting the princess
on his knee before placing each of the mismatched shoes on her foot, ‘first the silver,
then the gold’, as it was a medieval custom ‘for the suitor to make a gift of shoes to
his prospective bride as part of the engagement ritual’. So, from the earliest days of
the Western tradition of the story this ‘shoe fundamentally signifies the recognition
of the donor’s submission or the recognition of an obligation of gratitude to a third
party’.42 The shoes also stand in for the person of the woman, which is one of the
key points of the story, substituting inanimate objects for a living soul. The shoe
must therefore reflect the inner quality of that soul, its worth in its external expression
as a woman, and in all the tales the shoes’ descriptive materiality does just that.
The Cinderella shoe relies on what it is made of for key significations about the girl
it substitutes.
Leaving aside the contentious glass slipper for a moment, Cinderella’s slippers
are always splendid. Some are aristocratic red shoes; others are of silk, satin, spangled
with jewels, matchless, or like the sun.43 However, the cinder-girl’s shoes are largely
gold, either the fabric or shaped from the metal (AT F823.1). Cox found that of
154 tales containing a lost shoe, it is golden in seventy-four instances. Where a tale
follows the Catskin model of three increasingly magnificent ensembles, silver shoes
(AT F823.4) usually precede the final golden pair (or in an African variant, a frog
vomits up one of each).44 As Cinderella’s shoes are a separated ‘self ’ representing
her essential worth to her suitor, so gold is the noblest metal. Across tales, they are
universally made of a precious or impossible material, depending on the cultural
context of the telling. Since fairy tales reflect the ‘socio-historical context in which
the narratives were created’, the shoes morph into the most valuable footwear found
where and when the tale is told.45 Basile’s sixteenth-century Neapolitan Cenerentola
loses the expensive platform pianelle overshoes that ‘raised her height by a span and
a half ’ and elevated the heroine for the listener by relating the story to a real, elite
shoe style, in this case the cork-soled chopines fashionable through early modern
Spain and Italy (Fig. 5.3).46
Within the larger cultural context, ‘Cinderella’s goodness changes character,’
to quote Marina Warner, ‘reflect[ing] canons of virtue and standards of beauty
according to circumstance’.47 The figure of the persecuted girl whose innate virtues
end up being rewarded is usually emblematic of what a ‘good’ woman is within a
culture. A ‘Cinderella’ slipper is not only an agent for change; it is a material dem-
onstration of appropriate virtue and emotional decorum. The identification of the

41 Cox, Cinderella, xli.

42 Thomas Kerth, King Rother and His Bride: Quest and Counter-Quests (London: Camden House,
2010).
43 Cox, Cinderella, 506.
44 William Bascom, ‘Cinderella in Africa’, in Cinderella: A Casebook, ed. Dundes, 148–68; 153.
45 Zipes, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition, 845.
46 Basile, ‘The Cat Cinderella’, 9. For a history of chopines, see Semmelhack, On a Pedestal.
47 Warner, Beast to the Blonde, 204.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

82 Hilary Davidson

Fig. 5.3. Sixteenth-century Venetian chopines, T.48&A-1914. © Victoria and Albert

Museum, London.

right girl by her foot fitting a shoe is known folklorically as the ‘slipper test’, and
only occasionally appears for men, when it is usually a boot test, boots being a
more dynamically masculine footwear.
Zipes’s study of the formative ‘Puss in Boots’ versions of Straparola, Basile, and
Perrault reveals the last added the titular boots.48 What the young man must
learn is to ‘wear the right clothes, pretend to be what he is not’—to change his
apparent identity—in order to succeed.49 The boots are not important to the prin-
ciple of the tale and serve mainly as markers of the cat’s supranatural abilities.
Perrault’s rhyming moral at the tale’s end maintains ‘that show and proper clothing
(spectacle and display) can also enable a man from the lower classes to move up in
society’.50 The shoe is a mark of civilization, a tool that, like all tools, changes or
transforms the user as much as it aids them. The supernatural human wears shoes
to achieve the power of the naked divine.
Madame d’Aulnoy published her elegant, satirical tale of ‘Finette Cendron’
about an enterprising heroine whose fairy casket provides her clothes that ‘were so
fashionable that ladies took her for their model’.51 When she eventually lets one of
her slippers fall, it is ‘of red velvet embroidered with pearls’. A ‘slipper’ is a backless
mule worn at court and for dancing that slipped easily off the foot, like those in
Fig. 5.4.
These very contemporary shoes made their printed appearance in 1698, mere
months before what would become the dominant Cinderella story, and shoe, in
Western and then global culture: Charles Perrault’s ‘Cinderella; or, the Little Glass
Slipper’, part of a collection of fairy tales published under his son’s name. Perrault’s
story is also the source of the most enduring, untrue idea about Cinderella’s

48 (AT 545b ‘Puss in Boots’). Jack Zipes, Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the
Culture Industry (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 17, 27. For further study of the tale,
see Denise Escarpit, Histoire d’un conte: Le Chat botté en France et en Angleterre, 2 vols. (Paris:
Didier, 1985).
49 Zipes, Happily Ever After, 22.   50 Zipes, Happily Ever After, 30.
51 Cox, Cinderella, 59.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Holding the Sole 83

Fig. 5.4. Embroidered red silk velvet slippers, c.1650s, T.631&A-1972. © Victoria and Albert
Museum, London.

s­ lippers: that there was a homophonous slip between the French vair, a type of
ermine fur, and verre, glass. This slip is argued as being from the oral to the literary
tradition, or from French to English translations. The first French edition’s title
page clearly shows glass/verre in the title. It is a book to which Balzac did not have
access in 1836 when he first suggested in fiction that the misreading had slipped
in after ‘hundreds of editions’—nearly 150 years after Perrault’s publication.52
Other nineteenth-century scholars took up the idea without interrogation until
it became enshrined as fact, as any online search reveals. Perrault was a member
of the Académie Française and a contributor to the first Dictionnaire Française,
so presumably was not hasty about slipshod meanings. Eight reprints of the book
before his death gave him ample time to correct any mistakes. Given the trend
for Cinderella-type shoes to be made of the most precious or impossible materials
of their day, glass/verre is more in line with magical footwear than fur/vair, which
does not appear in luxury fashion footwear in the seventeenth century. As Delarue
rightly notes, ‘vair is too thick a fur to be made into slippers suitable for a splen-
did costume’, and there is little evidence for fur slippers historically being the
kind of exalted elite fashion a Cinderella shoe required.53 There is a tantalizing
1879 reference to critics who ‘think that the material in question was a tissu en
verre, fashionable in Perrault’s time’, but I have not yet found any evidence for
such a fabric.54
While it is possible that many of the other golden slippers were cloth-of-gold, or
golden cloth, there is a magical quality about glass congruent with the supernatural
fairy-tale space. Shoes made of solid gold appear in ‘Aschenputtel’, the Grimms’
main Cinderella variant. Gold, silver, glass, and jewels are examples of the expensively

52 Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine, études philosophiques, ‘Sur Catherine de Médicis’

(1842); ‘Le Martyr calviniste’ (1841), 14–15.
53 Paul Delarue, ‘From Perrault to Walt Disney: The Slipper of Cinderella’, in Cinderella: A Casebook,
ed. Dundes, 110–14.
54 W. R. S. Ralston, ‘Cinderella’, in Cinderella: A Casebook, ed. Dundes, 30–56; 38.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

84 Hilary Davidson

durable made impossibly pliable. Such materials appear in other tales, including
a 1973 oral story collection from a Qatari princess where the virtuous beautiful girl
puts on diamond footwear.55 Glass shoes appear in a traditional closing formula
used by French storytellers and in Grimms’ tales too.
My head-dress was of snow; then the sun came out, and it was melted. My coat was
of cobwebs, and I had to pass by some thorns which tore it off me, my shoes were of
glass, and I pushed against a stone and they said, ‘Klink’, and broke in two.56
Glass shoes, like glass forests, snow hats, and cobweb coats, mark out the marvellous,
wonder-full realm of the tale, while recalling the argument that ‘definitions of
materiality should consider not simply the potential agency of objects but also the
inherent properties of their materials’.57 Impossible materials have a powerful
emotional charge, especially in exalted footwear.
The verre/vair argument represents the analytical focus on the literal established
by the nineteenth century instead of the older emotional meaning. Cendrillon’s
shoes should elicit heart-lifting wonder and a sense of the impossible in the
story’s audience, ‘to evoke an unexpected and exhilarating transformation, a
­magical turning into something completely different’.58 Compare the energy of
Giambattista Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti (The Tale of Tales), the first collection of
European literary fairy tales (1634–6), which ‘are unpolished and resemble rushed
transcriptions of oral stories’, with the moral correctness found in the Grimms’ final
seventh edition after the brothers’ extensive sanitizations.59 They purposefully
changed their tales between 1819 and 1857 to make them more instructional and
moral.60 Zipes also discusses the paradox of oral stories of an underclass being writ-
ten down by ruling and educated classes as a ‘threatening aspect of wondrous
change, turning the world upside-down’.61 Through a process of containment and
categorization by rational analysis, the early modern centuries encompass dimin-
utions or move to the opposite polarity in the areas in which shoes are vessels for
mystery. Belief around the power of relics diminished into superstition. Oral tales
of uninterrogated wonders told for the astonishment of adults diminished into
literary tales for children, rife with moral didacticism expressed in set textual
­versions. What was universal in culture such as the elevated, celebrated church rit-
uals and the breadth of folk tales became particular in the construction of fairy
tales and hidden, private domestic practice. Even the swaggering, astonishing heights
of shoes for both sexes lost their heels and elevations to reach flatness in the early
nineteenth century (Fig. 5.5).

55 Hasan M. El-Shamy, Tales Arab Women Tell: And the Behavioral Patterns They Portray, (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 279.
56 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, ‘Hans gets Married’ (tale 84).
57 Tim Ingold, ‘Materials against Materiality’, Archaeological Dialogues 14.1 (2007): 1–16, cited in
Roberta Gilchrist, ‘Magic for the Dead? The Archaeology of Magic in Later Medieval Burials’, Medieval
Archaeology 52 (2008): 119–59.
58 Armando Maggi, Preserving the Spell: Basile’s ‘The Tale of Tales’ and Its Afterlife in the Fairy-Tale
Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 2.
59 Maggi, Preserving the Spell, 9.   60 Zipes, Happily Ever After, 5.
61 Zipes, ‘Changing Function’, 27.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Holding the Sole 85

Fig. 5.5. Pair of women’s kid leather slippers, English c.1795–1810. Mrs Alice F. Schott
Bequest (M.67.8.131a–b). © Los Angeles County Museum of Art. <http://www.lacma.org>.

H oly S hoes

There is sometimes little difference between actions of folk-tale heroes and folk-
loric actions of saints. Relic shoes are one way the enchantment and wonder
represented by tale shoes intersect with material artefacts to form objects invested
with supernatural attributes, in this case religious magic. The cult of relics was
more prominent in the Western Church before the Reformation. Most stories of
miraculous shoes survive from the Middle Ages, continuously Catholic countries,
and in Eastern Orthodoxy, where the veneration of relics and icons was not
shunned.62 In Catholic doctrine, a first-class sacred relic ‘is a part of the saints [sic]
body. The second-class is a piece of the saints clothing or something used by the
saint, while the third-class is an object which has been touched to a first-class
relic.’63 As James Frazer says of magic, ‘The superstition rests [on] the sympathetic
connexion supposed to persist between a person and everything that has once been
part of his body or in any way closely related to him.’64 Saints’ relics are inciden-
tally holy, having absorbed the essence of the spiritual power or authority through
proximity rather than being deliberately imprinted.
As a relic object, the shoe of St Francis (d. 1226) is displayed in Santa Chiara
Basilica, Assisi. Pope Saint Pius V has his shoes on display at an altar shrine
with his bust.65 The shoes of St Peter Canisius (d. 1597), a Dutch-German

62 See Maggi, Preserving the Spell, for the influence of Catholic and Protestant values on early
­modern fairy tales.
63 Rev. William Saunders, ‘Church Teaching on Relics’, Catholic Education, <http://www.
catholiceducation.org/en/culture/catholic-contributions/church-teaching-on-relics.html>, accessed
21 October 2015.
64 Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough (London: Macmillan, 1922), 233.
65 ‘Altar Shrine & Bust with Original Shoes & Relic of Pope Saint Pius V’, Papal Artifacts, <http://
www.papalartifacts.com/portfolio-item/altar-shrine-bust-with-original-shoes-relic-of-pope-saint-
pius-v/>, accessed 21 October 2015.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

86 Hilary Davidson

Fig. 5.6. St Brigid Reliquary, National Museum of Archaeology, Dublin. Brass, s­ eventeenth-
century copy of fourteenth-century (?) original. © and courtesy Renee White.

Catholic, are displayed with his catechism. St Lucy’s shoe is one of her relics in
the cathedral of Syracuse.66 The brass shoe reliquary of Ireland’s St Brigid
(Fig. 5.6) is seventeenth-century or later, probably replacing an earlier vessel for a
fabric shoe relic.67
The metal slipper parallels in material form the solid gold footwear of Cinderella-
type tales. The saintly and the magical are often separated only by perspective, as
was the intersection of luxury and saintliness. St Peter’s slipper at Poitiers, made of
gold-embroidered satin, attracted Calvin’s ire: ‘See how they make him stylish after
his death as a compensation for the poverty which he had during his lifetime.’68
St Antoninus (d. 1459) suffered the same fate. Although famous for humbly enter-
ing Florence barefoot, and buried in Dominican habit, during translation in 1589
his remains were dressed in splendid vestments, including red silk satin shoes with
heels, using the footwear’s high worldly status to honour the inner spiritual worth
of the saint.69
Luther protested against the worship of relics, considering them ‘all dead things’.70
In Protestant Europe, Calvin’s Treatise on Relics (1543), widely available in French,
Latin, German, and English, targeted this central feature of the medieval cult of
saints. Commenting on John the Baptist’s shoe in Paris, Calvin remarked: ‘it was
stolen twelve or thirteen years ago, but they immediately found another one.

66 Daniel Thelen, Saints in Rome and Beyond (Lulu.com: Daniel Thelen, 2015).
67 The Antiquaries Journal 2.3 (1922), quoted in David W. Atherton and Michael P. Peyton,
‘St Brigid: Holy Wells, Patterns and Relics’, Clare County Library, <http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/
coclare/history/saint_brigid_ritual.pdf>, accessed 13 May 2017.
68 Quoted in Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from
the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 88.
69 Sally J. Cornelison, Art and the Relic Cult of St. Antoninus in Renaissance Florence (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2012), 280.
70 Marina Bagnoli, ed., Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe (London:
British Museum, 2011), 26.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Holding the Sole 87

Indeed, there will never be a shortage of such relics as long as the race of shoemakers
endures.’71 This replacement of relic shoes can conversely be evidence of holy
status. In the first place, making an object with the saint in mind during the
­construction is enough to imbue the result with the saint’s power and make it a
relic.72 There is also the example of the three Greek ‘Walking Saints’ who to this
day wear out their slippers when they go walking around performing miracles on
the islands of their burials. St Dionysios on Zakynthos (d. 1622) has a tomb often
found impossible to open. ‘Afterwards, when the tomb can be opened, seaweed is
found at his feet and his slippers are found to be worn thin. In fact, his slippers
need continual replacement because they receive so much wear.’73 Nuns on Kerkyra
(Corfu) make new boots of red velvet embroidered with gold thread for
St Spyridios/Spyridon (d. 348) every year.74 St Gerasimos of Kefalonia (d. 1579),
conversely, is thought to walk but has no shoe relics. The newly made shoes
become third-class relics, in Catholic terms, by being touched to the saints’ bodies.
Whatever wonder-working powers the embalmed flesh is believed to contain
transfer through contact to reside in the material object. Holiness is contagious,
and atemporal. Its influence endures as long as its material carrier does, transmit-
ting emotional power to new bodies and objects long after death. If ‘things are
counted as material prostheses to the human body, extensions that allow human
beings to become more alive’—an argument also made for fairy tales, that they
allow people to become more human—then saints’ shoes facilitate their aliveness
even after death.75
But are holy people truly dead? In the Middle Ages ‘the dead were considered
persons in a legal sense, legal subjects as well as subjects of relationships. That
is, “they are present among the living”. Only in modernity have the dead
lost their agency and legal status.’76 Bagnoli identifies the Enlightenment as
when this change resolves from the actual presence of the dead to mere mem-
ory; between a corpse that held the presence of the person and one definitively
lifeless. The emotional connection was between the soul and its body as much
as between the living and the dead. Here, the material invocation of a soul in
a shoe in a church sphere intersects with the secretive domestic practice of
concealing shoes.

71 Quoted in Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?, 88.
72 Professor Jonathan Wooding, personal communication.
73 ‘Mystagogy: The Sacred Slippers of Saint Dionysios: History and Tradition’, <http://
www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2013/12/the-sacred-slippers-of-saint-dionysios.html>, accessed 21 October
2015.
74 ‘The Veneration of St. Spyridon on Kerkyra [Corfu]’ (12 December 2008), <http://full-of-grace-
and-truth.blogspot.com.au/2008/12/veneration-of-st-spyridon-on-kerkyra.html>, accessed 21 October
2015. A July 2011 comment from a doctor attributes touching her child’s eye with a piece of Saint
Spyridon’s silk shoe as healing his ophthalmological problem.
75 Thrift, ‘Afterword’, 110.
76 Bagnoli, ed., Treasures of Heaven, 26.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

88 Hilary Davidson

C oncealed S hoes

There is now a body of work on the practice of concealing garments in buildings.

Dinah Eastop77 expanded June Swann’s pioneering work,78 by creating the online
Deliberately Concealed Garments database.79 Recent scholars investigated the
practice more vigorously, notably Ian Evans’s work on the practice in Australia,80
Sarah Randles on medieval material magic,81 and Ceri Houlbrook on archaeo-
logical contextualization.82 Concealment involves placing a worn garment within
a void space in a building, usually between floors, under doorsteps, or around a
chimney. They turn up during renovations or building work, and often seem to
have been placed during the original construction or during earlier repairs and
alterations. Everyone agrees there is no written evidence yet found on reasons
behind the practice of concealment, although Houlbrook uses the material culture
of archaeological evidence to approach some of the reasoning. Researchers infer
it is a protective gesture to avert bad luck, or bring good luck, and may be the
remains of older practices of live animal or human sacrifice built into founda-
tions to propitiate spirits. Shoes are one of the most common garments concealed
worldwide (Fig. 5.7).
When the object is a shoe, it is always worn, usually single, and often a child’s.
From a historical perspective the concealments are often valuable examples of
­plebeian clothing unpreserved in other ways. The Northampton Boot and Shoe
Museum keeps a database of concealed shoes, building on Swann’s research. It
currently records around 1,900 entries, covering North America, Australia, Europe,
Asia, and North Africa, with the oldest shoe dated c.1520.83 What is notable is that
when modern house owners find a concealed shoe, they are usually careful to

77 Dinah Eastop, ‘Garments Deliberately Concealed in Buildings’, in A Permeability of Boundaries?

New Approaches to the Archaeology of Art, Religion and Folklore, ed. R. Wallis and K. Lymer (Oxford:
British Archaeological Reports, 2001), 79–83; Dinah Eastop, ‘Outside in: Making Sense of the
Deliberate Concealment of Garments within Buildings’, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture 4.3
(2006): 238–55; Dinah Eastop and C. Dew, ‘Context and Meaning Generation: The Conservation of
Garments Deliberately Concealed within Buildings’, in The Object in Context: Crossing Conservation
Boundaries, ed. D. Saunders (London: James and James, 2006), 1–7, in preprint of the IIC Congress,
Munich, 28 August–1 September 2006; Dinah Eastop, ‘Secret Agents: Deliberately Concealed
Garments as Symbolic Textiles’, in Tales in the Textile: The Conservation of Flags and Other Symbolic
Textiles, ed. J. Vuori (Albany, NY: NATCC, 2003), 5–15.
78 June Swann, ‘Shoes Concealed in Buildings’, Northampton County Borough Museums and Art
Gallery Journal 6 (1969): 8–21; June Swann, ‘Shoes Concealed in Buildings’, Costume 30.1 (1996):
56–69.
79 <http://www.concealedgarments.org>, accessed 15 May 2017.
80 Ian Evans, ‘Touching Magic: Deliberately Concealed Objects in Old Australian Houses and
Buildings’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of New England, 2010).
81 Sarah Randles, ‘Material Magic: The Deliberate Concealment of Footwear and Other Clothing’,
Parergon 30.2 (2013): 109–28.
82 Ceri Houlbrook, ‘Ritual, Recycling and Recontextualization: Putting the Concealed Shoe into
Context’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 23.1 (2013): 99–112.
83 The countries are: America, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Czech Republic,
Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Scandinavia,
Sweden, and Switzerland. Rebecca Shawcross, ‘Concealed Shoes Database’, accessed 15 October
2015. Personal communication.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Holding the Sole 89

Fig. 5.7. Deliberately concealed leather child’s shoe, 1650–1720. Hampshire Cultural Trust,
A2001.51.

return the shoe to its niche, or replace it with another, even if they do not identify
themselves as superstitious. There are cases recorded of a shoe being sent for
analysis offsite and the homeowner experiencing a string of bad luck until the
shoe was returned.
Emotional shoes have a liminal ambiguity. No one is sure where the boundary
between shoe and wearer lies or where it ends once the shoe has been worn—if
ever. After person and shoe have worn each other, they are connected, whether
unknown householder or adored saint. The apotropaism of a concealed shoe is
engaged by the shoe having been worn and conveying some of the wearer’s wearing
into its materiality, comprising the thingness but not the affect of the object. Space
is traditionally where the divine and the malign get in. The devil proverbially
makes work for hands filled with space, not industry. Shoes are small, portable
space containers in a way other garments are not. When a human body fills them
and is then removed, they retain irreversible traces of that wear. It is probably the
containing vessel nature of shoes that makes them a good ritual concealment
object, as they can either ‘hold’ something of the spirit of the original wearer or
perhaps trap malignant forces. Then these space holders are further placed into
spaces in the building’s fabric. If a concealed shoe belonged to a dead person, ‘it
could act as a quasi-relic, allowing the object to be imbued with the spirit of the
dead person, endowing it with supernatural powers’ and might be able to exert
protection from beyond the grave, in the same way that Cinderella’s dead mother’s
spirit provides her transformative shoes in many versions.84
It may be that iron nails embedded in shoes’ heels contribute to their apotropaic
function.85 The prevalence of iron nails in the concealed shoes across all sites has
not yet been tallied. Iron is the oldest superstitious protection against spiritual beings

84 Randles, ‘Material Magic’, 121.

85 The presence of metal in Danish christening clothing is thought to have protective functions, for
example. See Tove Engelhardt Mathiassen, ‘Protective Strategies and Emotions Invested in Early
Modern Danish Christening Garments’, Textile 14.2 (2016): 208–25.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

90 Hilary Davidson

and their influences, such as fairies, witches, and demons. This is why horseshoes
protect, and sticking a nail or a knife into a witch’s footprint was thought to ensure
‘the dame could not stir a step till it was withdrawn’.86 Shoes are one of the few
ways to wear iron about one’s person. Bent iron nails are often found in witch
­bottles but the type of nails has not been analysed to date.87 Instructions from
1915 are to use ‘rusty nails from an old shoe’ to make a witch bottle.88 Pulling nails
from a shoe automatically bends the valuable component, which historically would
be straightened and used again.89 If, as has been suggested, part of the concealment
involves ritually ‘killing’ the object being concealed, shoes are already repeatedly
stuck with nails and ‘killed’ in their making of an object from layers of animal
hide. Piercing nails into ‘flesh’ with supernatural agency also recalls the nails of the
Crucifixion, another overlay of Christian folk tradition.
Reading into the beliefs around saints’ relics has highlighted a number of
­similarities with concealment discoveries that may help shed light on the implicit
beliefs behind the action of concealing shoes in buildings. If ancestral graves are
‘where the hearth fires are located . . . where altars stand with their requisite cult
objects, the bones, the idols, the magic stones’,90 the hearth too is where narrative
cinder-girls sleep, the place that frequently defines their named identities, and
where people most often conceal old shoes as a protective measure.91 The practices
around holy relics find direct equivalents in the domestic environment, responding
to ancient human beliefs. Altars are the chimney to the divine, the line of inter-
cession and interaction between those with spiritual authority on earth and the
spirits they commune with, whether shamans flying to talk with spirits or priests
in the preserves of a church. Indeed, the earliest known example of a concealed
shoe was found behind the choir stalls in Winchester Cathedral, dating from their
construction in 1308.92 Where Houlbrook considers that the study of concealed
shoes strengthens the wisdom of archaeology’s abandonment of ‘the stringent
­classificatory terms “sacred” or “secular”, “numinous” or “profane” ’, to abandon
these terms in a historical sense or to conflate them into one ‘supernatural’ realm
allows it to be expressed through shoes in multiple contexts of the church, stories,
and domestic settings.

86 Frazer, Golden Bough, 44.

87 Ralph Merrifield, The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic (London: Batsford, 1987). Recently a
man in Toronto carried a urine-filled bottle as protection ‘from bad people’, suggesting the practice
still carries a power of belief. See also Ronald Hutton, ed., A Feeling for Magic (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015).
88 Merrifield, Archaeology of Ritual and Magic, 173. Other ingredients commonly include hair and
nail clippings, consistent with Christian beliefs about these parts being superfluous for the immortal
body at Resurrection.
89 Personal communication from a shoemaker who spent the first two years of his apprenticeship
straightening bent nails.
90 Bagnoli, ed., Treasures of Heaven, 19.
91 See also Gilchrist, ‘Magic for the Dead?’, for a discussion of ash burials that ‘may be a remnant
of earlier rites . . . that were intended to safeguard the living from the dead’, 150.
92 Randles, ‘Material Magic’, 112.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Holding the Sole 91

The empathy evoked by imagining putting on a shoe based on one’s experience

of putting on a shoe is a mental and/or emotional (for where is the seat of the emo-
tions?) linkage with the past, creating an internal, intangible, yet affective connection.
Shoes retain the trace of where the human was. Their hollows and creases provide
a space for emotional imaginings, placing the viewer in the space of the wearer.
In the same fashion, fairy tales in their unpsychologized, unindividualized meta-
realm provide a space for wonder, for wondering what it might be like to dance
with the prince or see an unknown woman set a ballroom alight with her beauty.
Holy relics offer wonder about the divine, about the nature and transmission of
the holy, a place for contemplating the wonder of the spiritual made material and
the soul in transmission to the world. Even if the shoe is not facilitating actual
movement, such as walking or dancing, it catalyses the movement of power
through it, channelling emotions and beliefs. Its shape and the marks of wear help
this by materializing the energy of human actions.
Pre-modern shoes exist for us in the present and bring their emotionalities with
them or are used to create new ones. Their story, beginning long before our
­existence, continues to affect our own, both materially and in the imagination.
Cendrillon’s glass slippers never existed and through their lack of existence can
endure, finding new embodiments in every reader, and each new year. A Greek
saint’s shoes are remade each year to continue a supernatural tradition. The saint’s
pre-modern body touching the shoes brings them into the sphere of time past.
A thing—corpse or coin—from that time not only has the power to transmit
affect, but it also transmits and changes time, making a relic of the distant past
operational in an unthinkable future. A deliberately concealed shoe continues the
power of the action of its concealment by leaving the results of the action undis-
turbed. To find one is to make a decision about whether to alter the end result of a
historical gesture, the taking and hiding of a vessel object.
Many of these claims could be made about many types of objects. I argue that
it is the peculiarly liminal nature of shoes’ ability to contain and change, to record
gesture, and become a memorial of a living body that focuses footwear within a
distinct set of belief-bound practices, and vehicles to amplify the supernatural. The
activity of wearing is forever caught in the shoe’s leather. Every step, particle of
sweat, shift of weight, and rhythm of motion is laid down into the shoe like
­temporal strata, lying dormant while accreting new time over these lower layers
until resurrected by the professional investigator—archaeologist, historian, conser-
vator—who can reconstruct the actions of time. The application of belief, ritual,
or litany reconstructs the emotional charge of the relic shoe. Telling and retelling
a tale reinforces the symbolic value of folkloric shoes, which in tales are objects
like shoes in a hidden void space. They are; they are unanalysed in their own
­context; their meanings are mute and inferred. When the shoe is glass, no character
comments on its impossibility; it is uninterpreted. The point is not its interpretation
but its agency, what it does for the protagonist. Reading the tale shows the power
of the shoe without telling it. Mystery causes the encounterer of the mysterious to
have an emotional response of some kind through an object, which may be based
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

92 Hilary Davidson

in awe, fear, joy, or impatience. As Houlbrook and Swann point out, to know or
to speak about why people conceal shoes is to prevent the purpose of their con-
cealment from working.93 To describe the mystery is to reduce it.
Fairy-tale shoes also participate in the ‘fashion’ moment, the perfection of the
fantasy object without wear, affect, damage, or embodiment. To evoke wonder
Cinderella’s slipper must remain partially unmaterialized. Its visualized forms
­realize shifting layers of cultural value, of time and place and worth experienced
differently by individuals. As German intellectuals thought Basile ‘captured the
spirit of the Italian people’ (my italics),94 a Cinderella shoe captures the spirit of
the time and place in which that version of the story evolved, the wider values
of the environment where the tale developed; its specifics are unimportant beyond
the precious material and association with the heroine. Relics, including concealed
shoes, are by contrast specific and individualized: this shoe and no other contains
and transmits the power and has agency. In this way the universal particularizes.
A concealed shoe may capture a malign supernatural force or give a home to a
benevolent spiritual agency. The key point is the interaction between the specific
material form of the shoe and an intangible, immaterial emotion or force believed
held in its substance. No shoe seems to have ‘occult natural power’ (emphasis
added) in Gilchrist’s phrase.95 A central question is—what activates the power of
shoes?96 Can the unworn shoe have supernatural power? Here supernatural shoes
are ‘artefacts that are not destroyed through use but made by it’, in all cases, their wear
by a tale protagonist, saint, or ordinary person.97 Pre-modern shoes frequently
became vessels, in fairy tales as a metaphor for the listener’s experience, or through
a saint as metonym for the worshipper’s sinful body.
Supernatural early modern shoes are so because of the belief invested in them or
their cultural functioning and association with a wearer, and more than one critic has
observed that ‘classic literary magic tales have acquired a theological depth; they must
be taken as articles of faith’.98 As tales of saints emerge like legends, so fairy tales
have become ‘sacred narratives of Western spirituality’.99 In a sense, the materiality
of supernaturally invested pre-modern shoes surviving in relic, description, or
concealment functions to replace ‘magic’ with ‘emotions’ for the contemporary
encounter. Gilchrist’s theory of hybridity stresses that the cult of relics was ‘a dynamic
process that involved the sustained engagement of folk traditions and Christian
practice’, and that medieval people may not have perceived any difference between
magic and religious miracles as they operate on such indistinct boundaries.100
Concealed shoes partake of this engagement with the opposite emphasis, fulfilling
Mauss’s definition of magical rites being ‘private, secret, mysterious’ as opposed to
the rites of religion and cults.101 Tales function somewhere in between these two

93 Houlbrook, ‘Ritual, Recycling and Recontextualization’, 104; Swann, ‘Shoes Concealed in

Buildings’ (1996), 67.
94 Maggi, Preserving the Spell, 29.   95 Gilchrist, ‘Magic for the Dead?’, 119.
96 Randles considers concealment a possible activator, ‘Material Magic’, 25.
97 Sampson, ‘Worn’, 11.    98 Maggi, Preserving the Spell, 12.
99 Maggi, Preserving the Spell, 12.   100 Gilchrist, ‘Magic for the Dead?’, 120.
101 A General Theory of Magic (1902), quoted in Gilchrist, ‘Magic for the Dead?’, n. 5.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Holding the Sole 93

ritualistic spaces, being plebeian traditions told and disseminated publicly but
­usually absorbed in a private sphere where they ‘seek to awaken our regard . . . and
to evoke in a religious sense profound feelings of awe and respect for life as a
miraculous process, which can be altered and changed to compensate for the
lack of power, wealth, and pleasure that most people experience’.102 The elision
between the known, quotidian shoes of all the participants in all these rites and
the individualized shoe elevated by these rites or by a compensatory luxury of its
materiality is the same blurring of the boundaries and tension of polarities between
miracle and magic, between tangible object and intangible emotion, between what
is and what may be, between the natural and the supernatural worlds. The material
quality of shoes that makes them tangible, wearable objects is also the inherent,
indivisible quality that allows them so ably to hold the soul of supernatural emotions
in the pre-modern world.

102 Zipes, ‘Changing Function’, 11–12.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Pa rt I I
Binding Things
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

6
Get a Grip? The Tactile Object of
Handlyng Synne
Lara Farina

Caresses are not gathering information or aiming at an objective, they do not

prolong the momentum of moments or initiatives of the immediate or remote
past; they are aimless and repetitive.
—Alphonso Lingis1

Writing about the sense of touch, the philosopher Alphonso Lingis settles on the
caress as a sensory practice that exceeds the gathering of information. This tactile
gesture is neither goal-oriented nor subservient to tactical knowledge; it is ‘aimless’,
inefficient, its own end, suggesting both a pure form of ‘feeling’ and a sensory limit.
In this chapter, I consider a kind of object that has long been a recipient of our
caresses—the bound book—in a form where it is most directive of its own
handling. The relation of book and body is the constant subject of medieval
volumes used for spiritual direction. One such, a confessor’s manual with the
title of Handlyng Synne, provides us with especially rich material for a history of
feeling things.
The phrase ‘feeling things’ points us in several directions. Taken one way, it gives
us things that feel, that experience their own emotions or sensitivity—a phenom-
enon that would seemingly override their ‘thingness’ or status as objects. Another
path of interpretation takes us to human feeling about things, which would have us
consider objects that give rise to emotion ‘in’ people. Alternatively, this human feel-
ing, because of the ambiguity of the word ‘feel’ itself, could refer to people’s physical
touching of things with the hands or skin. Yet another direction would put us our-
selves into the action as the feelers, whether the feeling be emotional or tactile—it
is we who feel the things. Traditional scholarship typically eschews this last option,
favouring the critical distance that positions the scholar as an objective surveyor of
the object, thereby ensuring that the objectified stay as such. Taking this route
leaves the objective critic with only the second and third of the options above: a focus
on other people’s emotional feelings about objects or on their handling of objects.
Other people’s feelings, however, have ways of making us feel, too: we know feelings

1 Alphonso Lingis, Violence and Splendor (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 81.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

98 Lara Farina

by feeling them. Feeling other people’s feeling of and about objects, I will argue, is
also a way of feeling the object itself.
I have outlined the potential trajectories of this inquiry into feeling objects in
order to both demonstrate the importance of a sense of direction in discussions of
feeling and suggest the tendency of ‘feeling’ phenomena to draw us into ever
wider affective networks. Affective feeling and orientation are themselves histor-
ically linked in Western culture, particularly for religious communities. Medieval
theologians made the connection explicit: for them, affective devotion turned the
worshipper’s body ‘towards’ and sometimes ‘into’ God’s presence. The linkage
persists in recent theories of affect; the empirical studies on which they are based
are fundamentally measurements of movement, and it is movement that imparts
a sense of direction.2 We acknowledge the mutuality of feeling and traversing
constantly in our common expression that we ‘are moved’ by something emo-
tionally engaging. Yet affective movement is not always straightforward motion.
Sometimes it spins its wheels, tracing a recursive path, acting like the ‘aimless’
caress discussed by Alphonso Lingis in the epigraph to this chapter. Sometimes,
as Brian Massumi has argued, it moves in opposing directions at once in a paradox
of unintelligible action.3
Medieval writers, too, were interested in the contradictory, circular, and non-
sensical directions that affect could take. Devotional writing for religious and pious
laypeople paired the act of reading with movement, both the intimate movements
of the feeling body (sighing, weeping, cringing, ‘opening’ the heart, directing the
eyes, stirring with emotion, etc.) and more dynamic action (kneeling, pacing,
speaking, singing, handling rosary beads, holding objects). To direct this activity
towards a singular aim, monastic and mystical writing further conceived of affect-
ive devotional practice as a series of ascending steps to be mastered with increasing
expertise.4 But other advisory literature imagined its readers moving differently,
conceding to bodies’ tendency towards errant multidirectionality. Translating an
Anglo-French treatise on the sins into an English language confessor’s manual
aimed at ‘lewed men’, Robert Mannyng of Brunne addressed a heterogeneous,
two-tiered audience—one not uniformly practised at contemplative piety. His
work, Handlyng Synne—which is not for Mannyng just a text, but a ‘book’ to be

2 I discuss this in the work of Brian Massumi and Erin Manning below, but the recent theoriza-
tion of affect as spatial positioning/movement is perhaps most indebted to the work of Sara Ahmed,
which is more grounded in phenomenology than in cognitive psychology. See in particular her book,
Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC and London: Duke University
Press, 2006).
3 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC and London:
Duke University Press, 2002).
4 Affective writings following the thought of Bernard of Clairvaux and his disciple William of St
Thierry are particularly focused on distinguishing ‘levels’ or ‘stages’ of embodied love. See Bernard’s
‘On Loving God’, in Bernard of Clairvaux: Selected Works, trans. G. R. Evans (New York: Paulist Press,
1987), 173–205, especially 192–7; and William’s ‘Brief Commentary on the First Two Chapters of the
Song of Songs’, in Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis on the Song of Songs, ed. and trans. Denys Turner
(Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1995), 277–90. See also Hugh of St Victor on the ‘steps’ of
pious meditation in The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1991), 132–3.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Get a Grip? 99

held and touched in a specifically stated way—is particularly remarkable for its
attempts to facilitate an affective experience characterized by non-linear, paradoxical,
and uncanny ways of ‘being moved’. Feeling the book as an interactive object here
begins an affective positioning that knits together an ever-widening community in
the provision of spiritual care. Further, this affective orienting touches even the
contemporary scholarly response to Mannyng’s ‘touching’ manual.

Affec t i n g Pa s s a g e s

Although I have noted a historical continuity in Western ideas about affect—namely,

that there is a long-standing association of affect with orientation and movement—
the difference between medieval and modern writings on the subject bears some
further discussion before we turn to Handlyng Synne.5 An exemplary passage from
Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual will serve to illustrate recent claims made
for affect, the kinds of knowledge supporting these claims, and the challenges
inherent in applying them to pre-modern objects. Another significant passage, this
time from the work of Massumi’s collaborator, Erin Manning, helps to put recent
theory and medieval media in dialogue.
The anecdote that begins and best encapsulates Massumi’s influential theory of
affect concerns a German experiment measuring children’s responses to three
similar television programmes.6 The programmes were identical in their narrative
and imagery but varied in form: one, for example, was wordless, while the other
two contained voiceovers describing the action. The researchers asked the children
to rate the programmes on two scales, one from ‘happy to sad’ and the other
from ‘pleasant to unpleasant’; they also monitored the children’s physical responses,
measuring heart rate, breathing, and skin activity. Surprisingly, the saddest pro-
gramme, according to the children, was also rated the most pleasant. The physio-
logical measurements showed that the most ‘unpleasant’ programme provoked the
highest heart rate and deepest breathing. Yet this was not the programme to which the
skin responded most (measured by Galvanic response). Considering these fragmented
corporeal reactions to very similar texts, Massumi argues for the ‘primacy of the
affective’7 in the reception of images, noting that the ‘intensity’ of an image’s effect,
its power to stimulate a somatic response, is not related in any obvious way to
its content. Further, intensity may not parallel emotion, and the affective realm
may not even be emotionally intelligible—it is a domain in which the saddest
experience is also the most pleasant.
Affect here is not subject to any direction by the will. The study of the children
showed that the viewer’s emotion is at variance not only with textual content but
also with involuntary physical response, and even the physical response is at odds

5 For recent discussion of the current and potential use of affect theory in medieval studies, see
Stephanie Trigg, ‘Introduction: Emotional Histories—Beyond the Personalization of the Past and the
Abstraction of Affect Theory’, Exemplaria 26.1 (2014): 3–15.
6 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 23.    7 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 24.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

100 Lara Farina

with itself: the skin’s flushing did not match the heart rate or the breathing. The
children’s responsive bodies moved in all kinds of different directions and according
to different somatic logics. Massumi, therefore, proposes that affect is primarily an
unconscious phenomenon, one that follows a different path from that of consciously
recognized feelings. ‘Will and consciousness are subtractive,’ he writes of the results
of another cognitive experiment. ‘They are limitative, derived functions that reduce
a complexity too rich to be functionally expressed.’8 Unlike the secondary phenom-
ena of emotion or recognized sensation, then, affect itself is almost out of the realm
of the directly observable. As Patricia Clough has argued, affective bodies must
be technologically framed if their affects are to be known at all, much less under-
stood.9 In Massumi’s ‘experiment anecdotes’, affects, as non-verbal responses, have
to register their presence as numerical measurements.
This reliance on modern, scientific forms of measurement would seem to damn
any effort to reconstruct affective histories, as the present-day focus of the field of
‘affect studies’ also suggests.10 We are not able to hook medieval readers up to bio-
feedback machines, and even if we could, I would want to contest the claims of
cognitive psychology to establish the ‘true’ audience response. Fortunately for us,
medieval affective writings are their own instruments of somatic self-monitoring,
textual machines that could be said to bring affect to awareness as emotion and
sensation in the service of a particular spiritual programme. Book objects, as much
as film, television, and digital media, instigate affect, as the following description
in Erin Manning’s work Relationscapes makes manifest:
Watch her reading a book: she touches it, puts her face to it, listens to the pages, rustling,
smells it, looks at it. […] Affective tone is an environmental resonance of a feeling-
in-action, a vibratile force that makes a resonant milieu felt. By feeling the book, [she]
brings the book into relation with a force of pre-articulation that exceeds the book-
as-object. The book becomes conjunctive, valued within a complex responsive environ-
ment. Culling the bookness from the book, she makes the field of its musicality felt, its
texture, its force of becoming not only as an object to be read but a relation to be lived.11
Manning, a scholar of dance performance and other kinaesthetic art, highlights the
action of the encounter between reader and book. In this encounter, the book
‘becomes conjunctive’, a relational partner whose ‘bookness’ galvanizes affective
feeling. Engaging with this ‘bookness’ is not just looking at and interpreting text,
but an anticipatory gathering of sensitive physical movements.
Medieval practitioners of devotio moderna understood the encounter of book
and reader similarly. Bernard of Clairvaux famously compared the act of reading

8 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 29.

9 Patricia Clough, ‘The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies’, in The Affect
Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC and London: Duke
University Press, 2010), 206–26; 210–11.
10 The focus on contemporary culture is particularly apparent in surveys of affective criticism such
as Gregg and Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader, and in Patricia Clough and Jean Halley, eds.,
The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007).
11 Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT
Press, 2009), 219.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Get a Grip? 101

the Song of Songs to the promise of an intimate kiss, where ‘the lovely face of
Scripture readily attracts the reader and leads him on’ in a buzz of anticipation,12
and devotional writing of many kinds—from the relatively dour Ancrene Wisse to
Margery Kempe’s emotional Book—calls attention to a certain affective intensity
attending the production and reception of the text as object.13 Kempe’s project
of having clerks ‘wrytan & maken a booke of hyr felyngs & hir reuelacyons’ is
portrayed as so charged that the manuscript is tossed among scribes like a hot
potato.14 Even books with more orthodox content were still books and therefore
luxury objects with a good deal of affective ‘resonance’.15 Both as discourse and
artefacts, then, medieval religious writings have much to say about how readers
moved ‘with’ books in the past.
What remains a seeming impasse between medieval and modern paradigms,
however, is the sharp splitting of affect from emotion, recognized sensation, and
thought in accounts like Massumi’s and Manning’s.16 This is not to say that we
could not find medieval analogues to the somatic yet unconscious cluster of actions
that Massumi deems ‘affective’. When Bernard, for example, discusses ‘love’, he
posits its beginning as an innate corporeal disposition that is self-directed but
unaccompanied by knowledge.17 But seldom do we find an insistence on affect
and emotion as separate categories for analysis in medieval theories of the affective.
And the point of affective devotional writings like prayers, meditations, passion
narratives, and directive guides is precisely to merge instinctive disposition, emo-
tion, sensation, and thought, so that ‘there is a reflux from conscious experience to
affect, which is registered, however, as affect’.18 Insisting that we identify the
border between affect proper and its ‘traces’ in consciousness would seem to move
us farther away from the expression of medieval affectivity and possibly the
experience of it as well.
Nonetheless, contemporary affect theory does offer some provocations that can be
particularly helpful for thinking about variant forms of medieval affective reading—
for thinking about ‘intimate scripts’, as Sarah McNamer calls them, that do not
follow the contemplative programme outlined by writers like Bernard, Anselm,

12 From Bernard’s first sermon on the Song of Songs, Selected Works, 212.
13 I discuss the fraught expectations that devotional texts have for their readers in relation to the
Ancrene Wisse, the ‘Wooing Group’ texts, and other works in Erotic Discourse and Early English Religious
Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). See also Mari Hughes Edwards’s recent survey of
anchoritic literature, Reading Medieval Anchoritism: Ideology and Spiritual Practices (Cardiff: University
of Wales Press, 2009), 8–31. Numerous scholars have commented on the beginning of Kempe’s Book,
which portrays its writing as a process besieged by conflicting emotions and bizarre impediments; see,
for example, Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1994) and Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and the Translations of the Flesh
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
14 The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen, EETS 212
(London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 3.
15 See Sarah Kay, ‘Legible Skins: Animals and the Ethics of Reading’, postmedieval 2.1 (2011):
13–32, on affective responses to differing preparations of parchment.
16 See Trigg, who prefers the model of habitual ‘feeling’ proposed by Monique Scheer over ‘studies
that insist on the ontological priority of affect’, ‘Introduction: Emotional Histories’, 9.
17 See ‘On Loving God’, Selected Works, 192.
18 Glenn Burger, ‘Towards a Premodern Affective Turn’, postmedieval 5.1 (2014): 102–14; 106.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

102 Lara Farina

and Hugh of St Victor.19 Of particular promise is Massumi’s portrait of paradoxical

movement. While writing about the ‘wandering’ flesh is a commonplace in monas-
tic treatises on affect, reading, and meditation, Massumi’s description of affect as
moving in contradictory ways simultaneously, and his idea that somatic responses to
imagery can be synced with form and content differently, provides a different
temporal/spatial model for mapping feeling. Further, this emphasis on somatic
complexity, together with an interest in the incipient, anticipatory feelings profiled
by Manning, can be helpful for understanding affective works that prompt an
intense but emotionally unclear reaction. Most of the artefacts, textual and other-
wise, that are usually recognized as products of medieval affective piety are those
evoking powerful, easily identifiable emotions. Centred on the love and suffering
required for imitatio Christi, they aim to stoke erotic desire, pity, outrage, and
sorrow. But Handlyng Synne, while noted for the outlandish nature of its stories,
travels mostly in murkier emotional territory. It is more prone towards the uncanny,
the weird, and the conflicted, and it is thus more reminiscent of the affective realm
in which the saddest experience is also the most pleasant.
Besides its content, recent affect theory is also of interest here for its forms of
argument, i.e. the distinctive rhetorical strategies used by writers like Massumi and
Manning. The experimental anecdote, as I have suggested, claims a certain pride of
place in this writing. Short, descriptive narratives recounting scientific studies with
weird results carry much of the their work’s affective resonance, a certain measure
of which is evidenced by the frequency with which Massumi’s critics gravitate
towards his descriptions of experiments, though few bother to evaluate these
passages as aesthetic/affective devices. One often cited anecdote of Massumi’s
(about reaction to a televised speech by Ronald Reagan) is even cadged from the
work of that most popular chronicler of neuro-oddity, Oliver Sacks. Medieval
writers called these resonant, portable narratives exempla.20 In Robert Mannyng’s
hands, exempla, like the experimental anecdotes of today’s affect studies, deliver
the shock of the unexpected, establishing an intensity that bleeds into the exposi-
tory writing that surrounds them. Intriguingly, then, engagement with Handlyng
Synne may, by comparison, make us more aware of some of the affective resonance
of affective ‘theory’ itself.

H a n d li n g t h e F le s h , F eeli n g t h e B ook

Combining commentary on the foundations of Christian ethics (the Ten

Commandments, the Seven Deadly Sins, Sacrilege, the Seven Sacraments, and
Penance) with zesty illustrative narratives, Mannyng’s English translation of the
Anglo-Norman Manuel de Pechiez represents one contribution to late thirteenth-
century efforts to revamp instruction of the laity and promote the practice of

19 Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia,
PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 11–13.
20 Manning, too, borrows a case study from Sacks’s work. Relationscapes, 50–9.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Get a Grip? 103

confession.21 This educational campaign, championed by bishops like Robert

Grosseteste and John Peckham, prompted the writing of numerous works aimed
not only at laypeople but also at their spiritual advisers. Advisory texts in verse, like
the Manuel and Handlyng Synne, appeared alongside numerous reference works
that collected exempla for future use in sermons and other forms of pastoral care.22
The tales circulating through these works were often centuries old, excerpted from
commonly referenced works such as Gregory’s Dialogues and the Vitae Patrum, and
the new, thirteenth-century collections of exempla shared a great deal of material
between them. Of the sixty-six tales listed by Sullens’s diplomatic edition of
Handlyng Synne, only nine are of unknown origin.23 Yet Mannyng is not particu-
larly concerned with impressing the authority of his sources on his readers. While
he does cite ‘Gregory, the Pope’ and ‘that holy man, Bede’ as authors of some
exempla, he leaves other tales without a textual reference or only vaguely attributed
to one. Mannyng’s interest is primarily in the emotional impact of the tales
themselves. The collecting, sorting, sifting, and curating of exempla in this period
must have made selection of the most affecting tales a good deal easier than it had
been before.
The prologue to Handlyng Synne gives us a sense of the perceived need for such
a narrative arsenal. Mannyng states his purpose to be the betterment of English-
speaking ‘lewed men’. Not only is Handlyng Synne written in the vernacular, Mannyng
notes, but it is responsive to the ingrained habits and predilections of its target
audience:
For lewed men y under toke
On englyssh tonge to make þys boke,
For many beyn of swyche manere
þat talys & rymys wyle bleþly here
Yn gamys, yn festys, & at þe ale
Loue men to lestene trotouale
þat may falle ofte to velanye
To deadly synne or other folye. (43–50)24
Elements of textual form (narrative and sound), particular emotional and sensory
contexts, and personal constitution (‘manere’ or type) are swiftly connected here.

21 The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 made yearly confession a requirement of Christian
practice. D. W. Robertson’s influential article, ‘The Cultural Tradition of Handling Synne’, Speculum 22
(1947): 162–85, discusses the text in relation to the Church’s institutional agenda, but Jennifer
Garrison has recently disputed Robertson’s claims for its theological conservatism (‘Mediated Piety:
Eucharistic Theology and Lay Devotion in Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne’, Speculum 85 (2010):
894–922). A selection of thirteenth-century texts related to the education of the English laity can be
found in John Shinners and William J. Dohar, eds., Pastors and the Care of Souls in Medieval England
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998).
22 Such as the Liber Exemplorum (c.1275), the South-English Legendary (c.1280–90), Speculum
Laicorum (c.1285), and the Northern Homily Cycle (c.1300). See Idelle Sullens’s introduction to her
edition of Handlyng Synne (Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1983), xii–xlvi, which notes that these works
are contained in ‘hundreds of manuscripts’ (xvi). Handlyng Synne itself is found in varying degrees of
completeness in nine manuscripts, none of which ‘reliably reveal the author’s original poem’, xviii.
23 See Handlyng Synne, ed. Sullens, Appendix II.
24 All Middle English quotations are from Sullens’s edition. References are to line numbers.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

104 Lara Farina

Neither this dispositional nexus nor its individual components—even drinking

and gaming—constitute ‘velanye’. But they may instigate a movement towards it,
even if the chain of cause and effect is left unclear. Also unclear is whether a person’s
‘manere’ begets the pleasure in hearing story and song or whether the repeated
listening at feasts and games creates the type of person who enjoys such. The
impression Mannyng gives is of a self-enforcing aesthetic/affective loop, one habit-
ualized enough to sow irrational urges—‘folye’—in individuals and communities.
It is this affective power that Manning concedes to, yet tries to adapt by making his
own ‘ryme’ full of tales, so that ‘swyche men . . . may weyl dyspende here tyme’
(51–2). Over half of Handlyng Synne is devoted to exempla, with Mannyng mak-
ing modest rearrangement of the Manuel’s repertoire: he omits nine tales from
Scripture and patristic writers in favour of nine others with English locales and/or
particularly sensational, unattributed narratives.25 His first addition, for example,
is a story about a magically conjured leather bag that sucks the milk from neigh-
bourhood cows. This atmospheric flourish provides us with a taste of what makes
Handlyng Synne special despite its formal predictability. Mannyng is a master of
what we might call the medieval urban legend. His manual, full of grisly ‘mervels’,
traffics in creepy intensity.
We use the term ‘creepy’ to describe a combination of unease and cutaneous
sensation. We also use it of objects that give rise to this feeling. For an emotional
descriptor, the adjective adheres particularly well to inanimate things. If we talk
about a sad or happy house, for example, we are probably referring to the emo-
tional lives of the people who live in it. But a creepy house can be creepy on its
own, its very creepiness suggesting the life of the thing. Mannyng’s book is both his
and an iteration of a text with mouvance of its own,26 having found its translator at
an opportune time:
Yn that tyme [1303] tournede y þys
On englyssh tonge out of frankys,
Of a boke as y fonde ynne:
Men clepyn þe boke handling synne
Yn frenshe þer a clerk hyt sees,

25 Although comparison is greatly complicated by the number of variant manuscripts of both

Handlyng Synne and the Manuel des Pechiez, see Frederick J. Furnivall’s parallel edition for comparison
of the two: Robert of Brunne’s ‘Handlyng synne’, A.D. 1303: with those parts of the Anglo-French treatise
on which it was founded, William of Waddington’s ‘Manuel des Pechiez’, re-edited from mss. in the British
Museum and Bodlian Libraries, 2 vols., EETS o.s. 119 and 123 (London: Kegan Paul, 1901 and 1903).
Appendix II in Sullens’s edition charts the sequence of exempla in each. Mannyng omits a bestiary-like
passage on the Phoenix and tales taken from the Bible, Gregory’s Dialogues, Jacques de Vitry’s Sermones
Vulgares, and the Vitae Patrum. He includes a story about Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln,
together with tales set in Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk. Apart from the one about Grosseteste,
they feature the supernatural and macabre.
26 The term ‘mouvance’, as coined by Paul Zumthor in Toward a Medieval Poetics, trans. Phillip
Bennett (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), refers to the textual fluidity of medi-
eval poems attested to by their varying form in multiple manuscript witnesses. It has been applied to
thirteenth-century English devotional literature by Bella Millet, ‘Mouvance and the Medieval Author:
Re-editing Ancrene Wisse’, in Late Medieval Religious Texts and Their Transmission: Essays in Honor of
A. I. Doyle, ed. Alister J. Minnis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), 9–20, and has been taken up in
relation to the movements of medieval carols as dance/song/text by Seeta Chaganti in ‘Choreographing
Mouvance: The Case of the English Carol’, Philological Quarterly 87.1–2 (2008): 77–103.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Get a Grip? 105

He clepyþ hyt manuel de pecchees.
Manual ys handling wyþ hond,
Pechees ys synne to vnderstonde.
Þese twey wrdys þat beyn otwynne,
Do hem to gedyr ys handling synne. (77–86)
The book that comes to Mannyng is already possessed of self-reflective qualities,
bestowed by the Manuel’s author but now, as Mannyng repeats his source’s explan-
ation of its title, absorbed into the ‘boke’ itself. As pseudo-animate objects, the
material texts of the Manuel and Handlyng Synne have what we might call an
affordance for creepiness.27
Mannyng does indeed want his readers to feel ‘drede’, particularly as a reaction
to his macabre exempla,28 and although he does not have an English adjective
equivalent to ‘skin-crawling’, ‘creepy’, or ‘hair-raising’ to describe that feeling,
Handlyng Synne’s remarks on its intended use are fully engaged with cutaneous
affect, especially in the form of tactile feeling.29 The Manuel des Pechiez’s descrip-
tion of itself centres on the literal reading of ‘manuel’ as ‘en main deit estre porté’,30
which Mannyng translates as ‘handling wyþ hond’ (83). While some aspect of this
phrase extends to metaphor—it is further glossed ‘we handyl synne euery day’
(89)—Handlyng Synne’s prologue suggests at the same time that the literal holding
of the book enables the reader to reorient the sinful flesh. Mannyng emphasizes the
work’s handling to a much greater extent than his source, construing the act of
confession as ‘anoþer handling’ (97) and placing ‘Handlyng’ or ‘Handyl’ at the
head of the line in nine out of the twenty lines that discuss shrift (97–116). In
contrast, the Manuel mentions ‘en main’ not once after the explanation of its title.
More explicitly, the final section of Handlyng Synne’s prologue returns again to the
book as a manual object by directing its reader’s use of it: ‘Whedyr outys þou wylt
opone þe boke / Þou shalt fynde begynne on to loke. / Oueral ys begynnyng—
oueral ys ende / Hou þat þou wyl turne hyt or wende’ (121–4). These remarks give
Mannyng’s readers licence to read with the hands first, eyes later. Turn the book
around, open it wherever, and ‘wende’ through its pages with your hands: ‘Handyl,
hyt behouyþ þe, ofte,’ Mannyng enjoins (129). This persistent return to the skin-
on-skin experience of holding a parchment codex both heightens the awareness of
the tactile and posits cutaneous feeling as a medium for confronting the embodied
habituation of sin. Handling and sin are indeed ‘otwynne’.31

27 In relation to objects, an affordance is an aspect of the object that suggests a particular use for
the object or approach to it. Design that promotes ‘intuitive use’ of artefacts creates affordances. See
Victor Kaptelinin, ‘Affordances and Design’, in The Encyclopedia of Human–Computer Interaction,
2nd edition. Interaction Design Foundation. <http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/
affordances_and_design.html>, accessed 13 May 2017.
28 After the tale of the Sacrilegious Carollers (discussed below), Mannyng states ‘A tale hyt ys of feyr
shewyng, / Ensaumple & drede aġens cursing. / Þys tale y told to make ġow aferd’ (9252–4).
29 The Old French noun ‘orror’ from the Latin ‘horrere’ (to bristle, shudder, or shake with fear or
cold) was current, but the Middle English ‘orrour’ is not recorded until its use in the Wycliffite Bible
in 1382 (OED online).
30 French quotations are taken from Furnivall’s parallel edition.
31 Scholars often note Mannyng’s play with the concept of ‘handling’ when they introduce the
text and its purpose, but they seldom explore its somatic significance. Mark Miller’s ‘Displaced
Souls, Idle Talk, Spectacular Scenes: Handlyng Synne and the Perspective of Agency’, Speculum 71.2
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

106 Lara Farina

Of course, not everyone who encountered Handlyng Synne’s poetic material in

the late Middle Ages would have done so by holding one of its manuscript wit-
nesses in hand. It has been suggested that the work may have been read to pilgrims
visiting the shrine of St Gilbert at Sempringham Priory, where Mannyng began his
religious career.32 Even if this was not the case, most recent scholarship agrees that
the poem was intended for a broad audience as it contains both material purport-
edly for the ‘lewed’ and injunctions addressed to the clergy, who handle both
literature and laity.33 The directions concerning how the book should be handled
are doubtless aimed at the latter, as is the rest of the prologue. Since they appear in
the Manuel de Pechiez, too, we might think of them as circulated among a com-
munity of clerical readers, and thus as connecting individuals through their shared
feelings of and for the book.
That the ‘passing of books’ from one holder to another was perceived as a material
practice knitting together a devotional collective has been demonstrated by
Corinne Schleif in relation to manuscript illustrations.34 Like the web pages of
contemporary fan clubs, illustrations such as the miniatures of the Hornbach
Sacramentary show figures united in their relation to a central, ‘resonant’ book-object
(see Fig. 6.1). Over the course of five pages, the miniatures depict the sacramentary
itself as being handed between five people ‘as in a bucket brigade or line of sand-
baggers’: its scribe, his abbot, the monastery’s founder, St Peter, and Christ.35
Unlike modern-day fan sites, however, illustrations like these portray a book’s readers
as connected via tactile gesture, as the passing from scribe to abbot to founder,
reflecting literal handling, suggests. This is the case, Schleif argues, even when the
persons depicted were separated by time and space, like medieval religious and the
saints of late antiquity.36 The tactile practice here invoked, therefore, can entail
being touched by people not immediately present through objects that are.
I would add here that medieval books themselves are agents in this tactile relay.
Scholars who work with parchment codices are well aware that these objects bear
the traces of earlier handlings. Smoothed and softened patches, or darkened or oily
ones, indicate where hands were often placed. Stiff quires suggest limited reading,
while a manuscript’s tendency to fall open at certain pages can point us to places of
repeated consultation. Handlyng Synne’s encouragement of reading that engages
the book wherever it opens allows for its manuscript’s own tactile memory, the

(1996): 606–32, contains the most extensive discussion of this aspect of Mannyng’s prologue. While
Miller initially acknowledges the references to manual gesture as Mannyng’s way of ‘figuring’ the
materiality of sinful behaviour, his distinguishing of ‘the entire condition of sinfulness . . . from its
manifestations’ (‘Displaced Souls’, 615) leads him to treat these as imaginative abstractions relating to
the ‘trope of the book of human life’ (‘Displaced Souls’, 615).
32 Joyce Coleman, ‘Handling Pilgrims: Robert Mannyng and the Gilbertine Cult’, Philological
Quarterly 81.3 (2002): 311–26.
33 See Kate Greenspan, ‘Lessons for the Priest, Lessons for the People: Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s
Audiences for Handlyng Synne’, Essays in Medieval Studies 21 (2004): 109–21, on the poem’s engage-
ment with both clergy and laity. Coleman, ‘Handling Pilgrims’, 312–13, Garrison, ‘Mediated Piety’,
895–7, and Cynthia Ho, ‘Dichotomize and Conquer: “womman handling” in Handlyng Synne’,
Philological Quarterly 72.4 (1993): 383–401, also posit a broad audience.
34 Corinne Schleif, ‘Medieval Memorials: Sights and Sounds Embodied; Feelings, Fragrances, and
Flavors Remembered’, Senses and Society 5.1 (2010): 73–92.
35 Schleif, ‘Medieval Memorials’, 81.    36 Schleif, ‘Medieval Memorials’, 78.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 25/11/17, SPi

Get a Grip? 107

Fig. 6.1. Pirminius, the founder of Hornbach Abbey, gives the sacramentary to St Peter.
Solothurn, Domschatz der St.-Ursen-Kathedrale, Cod. U 1, fol. 9v. http://www.e-codices.
unifr.ch/en/dss/U0001/9v/0/Sequence-763

collective impressions of previous handlers, to orient those who touch it. The sense
of touch, the most reciprocal of the senses in Western anatomical models, is the
somatic medium best suited for this mutual impression of book and reader.
The book’s return of its reader’s touch is touching, like a caress, but it is also
creepy, given what the reader is directed to. Handling the book is, after all, hand-
ling sin, in all its dreadful grotesquerie. This emotional ambiguity is reminiscent of
the affective domain profiled by Massumi in his anecdote about the children’s pro-
gramme. Mannyng’s most popular exempla—the ones that medieval writers and
present-day scholars alike keep returning to—also evoke an uncanny and rather
unclear complex of emotions, ones that seem somewhat mismatched with the
didactic purpose of the material.37 Yet, like the discussion of handling in Handlyng
Synne’s prologue, these stories also portray and invoke somatic movement, having
a good bit to say about the quality of that movement. In the following section,
I turn to a sequence of exempla from the poem’s discussion of sacrilege to explore
the movement qualities that make for affective intensity and extend the ‘feel’ of the
book to auditors of varying literacy.38

37 See Miller, ‘Displaced Souls’, 610–12, and Coleman, ‘Handling Pilgrims’, 315, on the uneven-
ness of tone and punitive judgements in Handlyng Synne.
38 I want to thank Seeta Chaganti for her suggestion to focus on ‘movement quality’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

108 Lara Farina

S t icki n g , Twi tc h i n g , C i rcli n g

How might we gauge the affective intensity of medieval textual ‘programmes’

without readers hooked up to biofeedback machines? The impulse to return to
certain texts, passages, and figures may be a helpful indicator. Surviving medieval
copies of Handlyng Synne are of modest number: partial variants of the poem,
ranging from 12,683 lines to a mere 114, are found in nine manuscripts. But a
number of the poem’s exempla were of wider and more enduring popularity. Our
own scholarly handling of the text participates in these long-standing tendencies to
gravitate to certain tales. While the amount of scholarship on the poem is also
modest in amount, it tends to focus on a small number of exempla. These particular
tales are repeatedly included in anthologies and attract study not concerned with
Handlyng Synne in its entirety. They would appear, therefore, to be particularly
promising places for understanding Mannyng’s affective engagements with readers
and auditors.39
Chief among Handlyng Synne’s top hits are two tales from the section of the
poem discussing sacrilege, a unit heavily rearranged by Mannyng and particularly
dominated by exempla. The tale of ‘Rychere and His Wife’, in which a lay couple
have sex near a chapel and then find themselves stuck together like ‘dog & bych’
(8956) is a variant of a tale traceable to c.1100 and which appears in a diversity of
genres.40 The tale of the ‘Sacrilegious Carollers’, also known as ‘The Dancers of
Colbek’, recounts a freakish event reported to have occurred in East Saxony,
c.1015, where a group of dancers were cursed with a kind of spastic perpetual
motion. This legend, too, circulated in a variety of sources and perhaps modelled
later medieval accounts of similar attacks of dancing frenzies.41 A short version of
the story appears in the Manuel de Pechiez, but Mannyng substitutes a much longer
version from another source and underscores its importance by discussing his
purpose for including it (9246–55).42
While the two exempla have in common the theme of sacrilege, their emotional
charge comes from their shared portrait of unexpected corporeal adhesion; they
show us people (and not really very wayward people either) getting stuck together
and stuck in place. In the Richere story, the fornicating couple—who are married,
given legitimate refuge at a monastery, and in their own quarters when they do the

39 I have written on these tendencies in relation to current academic culture and practice in
‘Sticking Together’, in Burn After Reading/The Future We Want, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Eileen
A. Joy, and Myra Seaman (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Press, 2014), 29–36.
40 Dyan Elliott discusses variants of the tale in Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology
in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 61–80. See Frederic C.
Tubach’s Index Exemplorum: A Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales (Helsinki: Suomalainen
Tiedeakatemia, 1969), 85 (Item no. 1056) and 398 (Item no. 5276) for a list of sources containing
similar exempla.
41 For discussion of these records, see Harald Kleinschmidt, Perception and Action in Medieval
Europe (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), 42–56. Variants of the tale are listed in Tubach, Index
Exemplorum, 113 (Item no. 1419).
42 Mannyng’s version is based on one in The Life of St. Edith of Wilton, in Handlyng Synne, ed.
Sullens, Appendix II. For comparison with the Manuel, see Vol. II of Furnivall’s parallel edition,
283–91.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Get a Grip? 109

deed—stick to each other and to the place. Even when they are unstuck, they are
still stuck with the community of monks, since the affluent couple have to promise
lifelong financial support to the brothers to get their interceding prayers (8967–70).
The Colbek dancers, while moving constantly as a result of a priest’s cursing
them, circle in place with hands locked together for an entire year, exclaiming,
‘Why stond we, why go we not?’ (9161). Here, too, the collective retains a kind
of unity even when parted; the dancers are freed after twelve months but share a
peculiar twitchiness that sticks with them as they move off into different regions
(9214–25).
In both narratives, Mannyng underlines the fact that the bodies of the sinners
cannot be parted by nearby witnesses, and indeed, those viewing the spectacle also
find themselves pulled into these quaking, yet immobile ‘dances’. In the tale of the
carollers, when the priest’s son tries to pull his sister away from the dancing group,
her arm actually breaks off in his hand, effectively sticking to him and not her
(9013–19). The priest then tries to make the arm go away by burying it, but it
sticks around, resurfacing atop the grave each time it is put to rest (9130–5). In
doing so, his daughter’s arm turns its metaphoric description as the appendage of
his ‘owne flesshe’ (9121) towards a more literal reading as it refuses to part from
him. In comparison with the cursing clergyman, the monks of the Richere story
make out well, but Mannyng concludes this story by lashing out at adulterous
priests, sticking his moral to religious rather than their lay charges (8983–90).
When it comes to handling sin, then, Mannyng suggests that clergy are as vulnerable
as laity, stuck with affectively sensitive flesh and powerfully touched by the
involuntary movements of others. Moreover, mere proximity to ‘sticky’ people,
places, and things is enough for bodies to be affected by them, as we see in the
Richere story. Most other versions of this tale portray the couple as having sex in
the church, or even on the altar, but, in Handlyng Synne, the pair are just ‘too near’
a chapel, a twist that gives sacred ground the power to creep outside its visible
borders and grab on to those nearby.43
The stickiness of these sacrilegious situations draws upon a particularly medieval
experience of the sense of touch. As Chris Woolgar has argued, touch was con-
sidered to be the most powerful means by which spiritual or moral qualities could
be transferred from one body, place, or thing to another in medieval England.44
The tactile transfer of the sacred, when properly practised, demonstrated the power
of relics, shrines, and tombs as conduits for divine intervention in the created
world. Mannyng, having trained at Sempringham Priory, would have observed
striking demonstration of this belief by the visitors to the shrine of St Gilbert, who
often lay atop the saint’s tomb in the hopes of being blessed or healed of illness.45
But the touch of the sacred could also go curiously wrong. Woolgar notes that
objects could be accidentally consecrated by coming into unintended contact

43 See Elliott, Fallen Bodies, for discussion of these.

44 C. M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale
University Press, 2006), 29–62.
45 Coleman, ‘Handling Pilgrims’, 316.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

110 Lara Farina

with the holy, and that, once such contact was made, its effects could not be
easily undone. Accidentally consecrated objects needed to be carefully seques-
tered, lest their further movement set off a chain reaction of the numinous
improperly handled—an unwitting ‘bucket brigade’ of sacrilege.46 The exempla
of Handlyng Synne’s section on sacrilege showcase related concerns about the
transference of sacred or profane qualities through touch: both body parts and
whole bodies are ejected from holy ground, while at other times sacred spaces
act like magnets or traps.
The form of the carole, the particular kind of dance featured in the ‘Colbek’
exemplum, is an especially potent reference for communicating what this sacrile-
gious adhesion might feel like, and, indeed, the repeated association of the dance
with graveyards and burial sites suggests that its depiction may have been a common
trope for evoking the gravitational pull of sacred spaces and bodies.47 In most
accounts of the carole (or chorea), dancers join hands and move in a circle, often at
a fairly accelerated speed, and sometimes circling a particular object. This circular
movement was punctuated by the dancers’ ‘striking’ of one foot against another,
which suggests that a jerking motion cut across the smoother acceleration in
one direction. The combination of sustained manual contact between dancers,
centrifugal speed, and forceful counter-movements doubtless required fast
reflexes—the ability to sense and respond to the movements of others without
thinking. Of this ability, improvisational dancer Steve Paxton writes, ‘this quick-
ness is faster than habitual movement/thought and is based on acceptance of
imminent forces, letting the body respond to the reality it senses and trusting it to
deal with the situation intuitively’.48 Like the performances of contact improvisa-
tion with which Paxton worked, the carole featured movements that produce the
sense of one’s body moving without thought, responding to the twitches, jerks, and
flows of other dancers. Further, improvisational dancers like Paxton also suggest that
this quasi-autonomic ‘intuitive’ movement most often envelops spectators as well:
I always remember the same response, basically. The space would get warmer and
warmer throughout the performance, and when it was all over, there would be a lot of
dancing in the audience. People would be jumping all over one another. They would
stick around afterwards and really want to start rolling around and want to jump
on you.49
Early versions of the ‘Dancers of Colbek’ tale similarly note that an attraction to
the dance spreads among spectators by a kind of affective modelling (‘que similes

46 See Woolgar, Senses in Late Medieval England, 42–3, for a brief account. The subject of accidental
consecration was a particular focus of Woolgar’s plenary lecture at the ‘Sensing the Sacred’ conference
held at the University of York in July 2013.
47 Guibert of Nogent described the arrangement of tombs in what he thought to be a pre-Christian
cemetery as ‘in modum caraulae’, and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s labelling of Stonehenge as a ‘chorea
gigantum’ in memory of the dead was repeatedly cited by his readers. See Robert Mullally, The Carole:
A Study of a Medieval Dance (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 20–5.
48 Quoted in Helen Thomas, The Body, Dance, and Cultural Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003), 105.
49 Lisa Nelson, quoted in Thomas, The Body, 105.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Get a Grip? 111

simile de ecclesia allactarent ad iniquitatis nostre choream’).50 In accounts like this,

the carole seems to have been regarded as propelling its movement among the ‘like’,
constituting them as a collective, and minimizing the role of the will in joining the
action.
Seeta Chaganti has argued that the form of the carole ‘foregrounds certain medi-
eval preoccupations with the ways in which one does and does not control one’s
own body, as well as the defining limits for perceiving the nature of the body’s
motion’.51 Chaganti, following Mark Miller, sees Handlyng Synne’s dancers as
peculiarly ‘abstracted’ from themselves as a result of the curse, simultaneously
moving and stuck observing themselves being moved. I would argue that this para-
doxical feeling—moving but not moving, acted but also acted upon, going in ­different
directions at the same time—is both a set of sensations that would have echoed the
dance’s expected effects (in its usual, uncursed form) and the affective state that
Handlyng Synne aims to reproduce for its readers and listeners. For auditors listening
to exempla excerpted from Mannyng’s ‘book’ as a whole, or for readers opening the
book where the hands take them, tales like that of the sacrilegious carollers could
recall and thus evoke the feelings that constitute this affective condition of moving
in two different manners simultaneously.52
For those others who may have read the sacrilege section in its manuscript
sequence, Handylng Synne has another way of summoning these feelings: for
moving on while sticking in place is also a structural principle in Mannyng’s
arrangement of exempla. As we move from one to the next, the tales resist becom-
ing discrete ‘steps’ in the right direction. As Miller has argued, readers of exempla
expect these stories to provide closure in the form of a concluding lesson, but
Mannyng’s versions often feature details that interrupt the story’s didactic progress
and disable any tidy moral.53 Many readers have noted, for example, that the dan-
cers’ punishment is particularly harsh (they are even depicted as pitiable in the eyes
of observers in the tale), and Miller argues that their characterization from the
beginning as ‘foles’ who move ‘yn wodehed as hyt were in cuntek’ (9020–1) (i.e.
twitching madmen) makes them hardly ‘exemplary’ protagonists.54 Further, they
are never cured of their condition: they remain afflicted and possibly deranged at
the end of the tale. As they splinter off in different directions, they are much the
same as they were at the start, no more or less capable of controlling themselves.
Even the arm never gets buried but is made into an above-ground memorial, stick-
ing around for everyone to see (9138–40). Similarly, in Mannyng’s treatment of

50 From Theoderic’s account, transcribed by Orderic Vitalis (cited in Mullally, The Carole, 19).
51 Chaganti, ‘Choreographing Mouvance’, 83.
52 While I do not have space to develop the argument here, it is worth noting that the musical
form of the carol, the sung accompaniment to the carole dance, could also allow for the experience
of two structures at once, as is apparent in the ‘criss-crossing of literary and musical factors’ such that
‘a carol without any textual relation between the burden and stanza may nevertheless have musical
rhyme and vice versa’ (Manfred Bukofzer, quoted in Karl Reichl, ‘The Middle English Carol’, in
A Companion to the Middle English Lyric, ed. Thomas G. Duncan (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005),
150–70; 159). On the relation of carol and carole, see Reichl, ‘The Middle English Carol’, 161–5,
and Mullally, The Carole.
53 Miller, ‘Displaced Souls’, 611.    54 Miller, ‘Displaced Souls’, 617.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

112 Lara Farina

the Richere story, the guilt of the couple is considerably more questionable than it
is in other versions, and the outcome seems to have more to do with establishing
lay indebtedness to monastic prayer than it does with rectifying the sin of forni-
cation. While here the couple is soon unstuck, at the same time, none of the
characters moves on. To get unstuck, Richere and his wife must promise to stick
with the abbey; the monks, in turn, stick the miracle in a written story so that it
will stick around forever, so Mannyng can recall it and stick it to his readers in
turn. These tales insist on lingering stories, and they give us images of the affecting
remnants of morally ambiguous narrative, of material things, that is, that persist
into the ‘now’ of reading, bringing their creepiness with them. The reappearing
arm of the dancers’ tale outlives even the end of its host story: shortly after the
­carollers narrative ends, Handlyng Synne picks up the tale of Balshazzar’s feast, with
its disembodied arm writing cryptically on the wall.
The recursive arm could be regarded as a metonymic extension of the uncanny
touch of the book. Massumi argues that the intensity of affective response to
imagery and form has a tendency to ‘bleed’ into any surrounding text, and that the
duration of this response is the measurable indicator of ‘intensity’. The exempla of
Handlyng Synne have a similar tendency towards lingering affective saturation,
extending their reach much like sacred ground that overflows its borders. Their
questionable pairing of sins and consequences, lack of expected resolutions, and
evocation of uncanny feelings (of simultaneously moving and not moving, willing
and unwilling, being attracted and repelled) could not be better calculated to keep
readers suspended in a state of uneasy uncertainty, feeling the tales well after they
have ended, but not able to rest in any clearly defined emotional or moral territory.55
Miller argues that Mannyng’s exempla return his readers to the moral problems at
hand in a manner particularly well suited to the practice of confession, a ritual
requiring repetition.56 Confession is not a cure; it provides a periodic awareness to
which the sinner must strive to return, but not with the hope that sin can be tran-
scended.57 We are always handling sin, the poem’s prologue states, so we have
stories that return us to the start of this process rather than provide us with a relief
that makes us feel better.
It is perhaps this quality that is most responsible for the predominant critical
understanding of Handlyng Synne as a brutalizing work, trafficking predominantly
in feelings of terror, dread, and shame.58 Mannyng himself even admits this as his
motive at times, and we could see his deployment of circling/sticking ‘courses’ of
narrative movement as performing the same work as the ‘Dancers of Colbek’
exemplum—transforming enjoyable feeling (the intuitive, self-propelling, and

55 I have discussed these movements in relation to the Freudian concept of the Uncanny in
‘Sticking Together’, 32–5.
56 Miller, ‘Displaced Souls’, 616.    57 Miller, ‘Displaced Souls’, 615.
58 In addition to Miller, Greenspan, and Coleman, see Robert J. Hasenfrantz, ‘Terror and Pastoral
Care in Handlyng Synne’, in Texts and Traditions of Medieval Pastoral Care, ed. Catherine Gunn and
Catherine Innes-Parker (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), 132–48, and Andrew J. Power, ‘Telling
Tales in Robert Mannyng de Brun’s Handlyng Synne’, in The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the
Twentieth Century, ed. Helen Conrad O’Brien and Julie Ann Stevens (Dublin: Four Courts, 2010),
34–46.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 25/11/17, SPi

Get a Grip? 113

unifying motions of the carole) into fearful witnessing of the removal of self-
control that marks sin. But sheer unpleasantness is, obviously, not the whole story.
Mannyng appears to enjoy telling stories of the macabre, and we clearly enjoy
reading them. If Mannyng is to revisit the pleasurable to make it creepy, he is
inevitably recalling it in the first place and inviting it, too, to linger.

A S U B T L E TO U C H

If we take the manual turning and ‘wending’ of Mannyng’s book as the phenomenal
basis of a preferred reading practice, that reading can appear to be ultimately less
like ‘grasping’ and more like the ‘caressing’ that Lingis describes—aimless and
repetitive. To be led by the feel of the book, whether felt by hands moving on
parchment or in the enjoyment of a hair-raising story, is to let go of purposeful
direction and to accept a state of suspense/suspension. However you handle the
book, Mannyng writes, you will always find yourself at both the beginning and
the end. Not only does this comment suggest recursive movement; it also collapses
the reader’s sense of the body in time. Simultaneously at beginning and end,
Mannyng’s reader is to hover, mesmerized, moved by narrative but not moving
through it, rather like the carollers who, it should be noted, are impervious to the
effects of time and weather while dancing.
While this ‘aimless’ somatic movement may seem to be the furthest thing from
monastic emphasis on directing the self through exertion of the will (a process
guided by metaphors of moving upward, onward, or into), Mannyng’s manual
seeks to constitute its own affective community though its promotion of shared
cutaneous, kinaesthetic, and proprioceptive phenomena. The affordances of the
book as a resonant, tactile object—the action of its particular, historically tuned
‘bookness’, as Erin Manning might say—give Mannyng a medium not only for
confronting the paradoxes of affect but actually summoning and utilizing their
confused sensitivities. Galvanized and put into repeated circulation, these uncanny
feelings are, in Mannyng’s work, the essential, embodied ground for reading/per-
forming the devotional self, for reading, that is, the self with the book.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

7
Emotional Debris in Early Modern Letters
Diana G. Barnes

A few of these lines are blurred by falling tears,

Tears which are as heavy as my words.
—‘Briseis to Achilles’, in Ovid,
Heroides, ll. 3–4

In this couplet Ovid’s heroine Briseis describes the ink, the page, her tear-stained
script as emotional debris, that is, as material traces of the feelings that moved her to
write this letter to Achilles. Together, the words and the damaged physical letter
represent her heavy heart: the material artefact gives testimony to its emotional birth.
Another way of putting this would be to say that the emotional debris that Briseis
claims is palpable is her emotional history, a history, at least, of the emotions felt
during the writing of the letter. Of course, Briseis’ claim that the residue of her
emotion is tangible in her letter is a fictional device. She writes of an imaginary
materialization of her emotion. Only in our mind’s eye do we see Briseis’ handwrit-
ing on the page; we read it mediated through print. We imagine Briseis recording her
thoughts on the page naturally as they occur to her, but read them in finely wrought
verse. Yet Ovid does not let us forget the material features of her letter; indeed this is
something reiterated over and again in all the epistles that make up the Heroides. In
poetic terms the device is used to move the reader: Briseis’ insistence that the words
alone cannot adequately capture the extremity of her feelings heightens the emo-
tional impact of the poem. It also raises questions about the emotional residue in
material artefacts, specifically manuscript letters. As historians have observed, even
the most mundane of early modern manuscript letters can exhibit distinctly liter-
ary qualities.1 In what follows I will employ literary critical analysis to highlight
the part literary devices play in the accretion of emotion in material letters.
We may detect emotional debris in the material qualities of any handwritten
document, but inevitably more so in familiar letters whose function is to stand in
for face-to-face conversation between friends and intimates. Letters are objects that
represent, facilitate, and ultimately document a dynamic historical relationship
between writer, reader, but also deliverer, archivist, and scholar.2 Emotion may be

1 This is the opening premise of Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their
Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 2.
2 I am thinking about the implications of Bill Brown’s argument that ‘The story of objects asserting
themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Emotional Debris in Early Modern Letters 115

suggested by a tremor in an upright line, a blot of ink, a torn page, an abrupt

rupture or closure, a coded sign, an uncharacteristically hurried scrawl, the choice
of seal, the colour of the sealing wax, or a piece of coloured silk floss embedded
within the wax. Nevertheless, when we move beyond the realms of poetry, it is
difficult to pin these material signs to a manifest emotion with certainty. The
tremor in the hand, the ink blot, and the torn page, for example, may simply indi-
cate that the writer, reader, bearer, or archivist was bumped at an inopportune
moment. And yet we should not disregard these traces altogether; intentional or
not, they were features of an epistolary vocabulary familiar to early modern writers
and readers.3 Alan Stewart describes this pervasive cultural phenomenon as ‘a
grammar of letters’.4 Reading early modern letters transcribed and edited by
experienced scholars in modern published collections is certainly convenient, but,
as those of us lucky enough to have read manuscript letters in an archive know only
too well, there is a loss. The printed edition erases the trace of the hand, the
character of the script, the quality of the paper, how it was folded, a smudge, a
watermark, and so on. In this chapter I want to take seriously the connection
Briseis makes between her words and her tear-damaged lines to consider how the
terms and processes of the Ovidian verse epistle, as it circulated broadly in the early
modern period, illuminate the emotional traces captured in a selection of manu-
script letters. My focus is upon the texture of the material letter rather than the
narrative content, although this distinction is often blurred.5 Each of the letter-
writers selected for discussion wrote for a practical purpose: Arbella Stuart (August
1609) to thank a patron; Lady Margaret Longueville to complain of her sister to
her mother; Brilliana Harley to convey wartime news to her husband; Charles I
to maintain intimacy with his wife; Beata Pope, Countess of Downe, to commu-
nicate lovingly with her daughter; and Maria van Rensselaer to resist directions to
send her son far away. As we shall see, when these writers sought to convey emo-
tion in letters, they strained the resources of the available discourses, quotidian and
aesthetic, and this has left traces in the material letters they produced.
In a recent article on the letters of Madeleine de Scudéry, Joan DeJean coined
the intriguing phrase ‘postal emotions’, and more specifically she invoked the idea
of ‘conflicting postal emotions’. DeJean’s term describes the quality of emotional
exchange in letters of Scudéry’s circle following the introduction of a regular and
affordable intra-city postal service in Paris in 1653. She argues that over the three-
year period in which the service operated, epistolary discourse became more fluid
and natural in its representation of emotion. This, she proposes, was due to the

of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject–object relation’ for the emotional
history of letters. Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2001): 1–16; 4.
3 See W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, Sewanee Review 54 (1946):
468–88; Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed.
David Lodge (London: Longman, 1988), 167–71; Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Modern
Criticism and Theory, ed. Lodge, 197–228; and Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 119–21.
4 Alan Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5.
5 On emotional narrative in early modern letters see Gary Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity:
Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (Newark, DE: University
of Delaware Press, 2005), 109–42.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

116 Diana G. Barnes

letter-writers’ ability to rely upon the regular and efficient dispatch and delivery of
letters afforded by the postal service. For writers in Scudéry’s circle the postal
service also represented new possibilities for fiction. During this period Madame
de Scudéry began to think about emotion differently, and she introduced the topic
of ‘une distinction entre ses nouveaux amis, ses particuliers amis et ses tendres amis’
as a topic for discussion at her weekly salon. She began to develop the ‘Carte de
Tendre’, or map of emotions, that is the centrepiece of her novel Clélie, histoire
romaine (1654–60). DeJean makes a compelling argument about how change in
an everyday communication technology effected change in the expression of
emotion in literary form, but I would like to challenge her assumption about
period. She posits that epistolary discourse became more pliant to representing
emotion from the mid-seventeenth century, and that, prior to that time, letters
were formal and constrained. In a footnote towards the end of her article she writes
of ‘the scarcity of surviving early modern letters that are truly private, that is, that
display any type of personal emotion’.6 I recognize that we are all guilty of glib
sleights of hand as we spotlight one set of issues and texts in favour of another, but
DeJean’s assumption made me think about why the representation of emotion in
early modern letters was unreadable to a sophisticated critic of seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century literature.
In brief, most formal accounts of early modern letters identify the letters of
Cicero as the locus classicus of the genre. They recount the renaissance of familiar
epistolary form that followed Petrarch’s recovery of Cicero’s Ad Atticum in 1345.7
They sideline the influence of Ovid’s verse letters, due to their poetic form.
Although early modern letter-writing manuals support this, insofar as they do not
include verse epistles in their copious taxonomies of the form, this account tells
only half the story. Cicero’s epistolary oeuvre provided a model for letters between
friends, where friendship is defined as an affective bond between equals. Ciceronian
epistolary language binds letter-writers and their addressees by establishing mutual
sympathy, shared interests, trust, reason, justice, and parity of emotional invest-
ment.8 In this sense Ciceronian epistolary emotions are bridled by known and
mutually respected limits and guarantees. By contrast the Ovidian model entails
affective bonds between unequal pairs who differ in every respect—male/female,
sovereign/subject, free/captive, powerful/disempowered, etc.—and whose invest-
ments in the bond differ.9 Ovidian emotions are always excessive and never under
control. Whereas the writer of a Ciceronian letter anticipates a sympathetic and

6 Joan DeJean, ‘(Love) Letters: Madeleine de Scudéry and the Epistolary Impulse’, Eighteenth-
Century Fiction 22.3 (2010): 399–414; 413 n. 26.
7 Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early
Modern England (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 211–40; Lisa Jardine, Erasmus,
Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1993), 3–26.
8 Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1990), 180–2.
9 Danielle Clarke, ‘“Formed into words by your divided lips”: Women, Rhetoric and the Ovidian
Tradition’, in ‘This Double Voice’: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England, ed. Danielle Clarke and
Elizabeth Clarke (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 61–87.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Emotional Debris in Early Modern Letters 117

just reader, the writer of an Ovidian epistle has no such guarantee; indeed she
recognizes that her letter may be torn, disregarded, lost in transit, or received
unsympathetically.
The influence of Ovidianism on early modern English poetry was pervasive.10
Early modern poets found in the Heroides a compelling model for poetry, but most
adaptations do not take epistolary form. This is true of the extremely popular and
widely imitated historical complaints collected in The Mirror of Magistrates (1559)
and William Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece (1594), for example.11 Following
Geoffrey Chaucer’s Legende of the Good Women (c.1386), these Ovidian adapta-
tions feature the moving eloquence and tragic dignity of the violated heroine but
represent it as speech rather than writing, as monologue rather than dialogue.12
This shrouds a radical dimension of the original. For Ovid the letter is a weapon of
the weak, a form that allows the raped, abandoned, imprisoned, and traded women
to mount an emotionally compelling intervention on the Homeric account of the
Trojan wars that sidelined them.13 In the Iliad Briseis is an item of exchange
between men, a battle spoil taken by Achilles as his concubine, and then traded to
pacify Agamemnon. In the Heroides Briseis accuses her captor-lover Achilles of
too readily relinquishing her to Agamemnon, and of being too slow in securing her
return. Thus Ovid’s Briseis exhibits agency, eloquence, dignity, and a cogent counter-
argument—in the face of tragedy and humiliation—that she lacks in the Iliad. As
a rhetorical form modelled upon oratory, the letter afforded Ovid’s violated women
a means of claiming a discourse imbued with heroic authority. The complaints of
Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the Mirror capture this heroic dimension, but they
downplay features that are represented more effectively in epistolary adaptations.
In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England letter-writing was a quotidian form
available to the literate.14 Letters document, or materialize, the transit of emotion

10 For an overview see Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993);
John F. Miller and Carole E. Newlands, eds., A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid (Chichester:
Wiley, 2014); Georgia Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004); Susan Wiseman, ‘The Rhetoric of Complaint: Ovid’s Heroides in the Renaissance and
Restoration’, Introduction to Special Issue of Renaissance Studies 22.3 (2008): 295–433. Raphael
Lyne, ‘Love and Exile after Ovid’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 288–300.
11 See Richard Helgerson, ‘Writing Empire and Nation’, in The Cambridge Companion to English
Literature, 1500, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 310–29, esp.
322–3; and Huw Griffith, ‘Letter Writing Lucrece: Shakespeare in the 1590s’, in Rhetoric, Women and
Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne (Abingdon: Routledge,
2007), 89–110.
12 See John M. Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979).
13 On the pen as weapon see Margaret W. Ferguson, ‘Renaissance Concepts of the Woman Writer’,
in Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press), 152–3; and for illustrations, see Marie-Hélène Tesnière and Prosser Gifford, eds., Creating
French Culture: Treasures from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press in association with the Library of Congress, Washington DC and the Bibliothèque nationale de
France, 1995), 173–5.
14 See Katherine Gee Hornbeak, ‘The Complete Letter Writer in English 1568–1800’, Smith
College Studies in Modern Languages 15.3–4 (1934); and Jean Robertson, The Art of Letter Writing: An
Essay on the Handbooks Published in England during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London:
University Press of Liverpool/Hodder, 1942).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

118 Diana G. Barnes

from the heart to the hand to the page, and letter-writing manuals demonstrate
step by step just how the claim to heroic authority can be made. Letters could be
dispatched to overcome the tyrannies of distance and captivity. When Ovid
insists upon the materiality of Briseis’ letter, he challenges assumed-as-given dis-
tinctions between aesthetic and prosaic artefacts and the heroism and eloquence
of victor and victim, thereby spotlighting emotional histories manifest in material
letters real and imagined.
But what did the Ovidian poetic legacy mean for seventeenth-century letter-
writers and readers? They may well have been aware of Michael Drayton’s England’s
Heroical Epistles, an enormously popular adaptation of the Heroides first published
in 1597 and republished regularly over the following century. It insists upon the
material letter at every turn. The influence of Ovid’s Heroides was not confined to
poetry, however. Typically early modern letter-writing manuals laid out how the
art of letter-writing devolved from classical oratory and drew liberally from Cicero’s
letters to his friends. Ovid’s verse epistles were mentioned briefly: Erasmus cursor-
ily directs readers to Ovid for love letters without detailing the model (in stark
contrast to his copious style); and Juan Luis Vives cites Ovid in a mundane discus-
sion of whether the address is integral to a letter itself, or merely a guide to the
bearer.15 Letter-writing manuals of the late sixteenth century, such as Angel Day’s
The English Secretary (1586) or William Fulwood’s The Enemy for Idleness (1568),
show traces of Ovid’s influence where they treat love letters, but they neither
acknowledge nor thematize the debt.16 Nevertheless, since medieval times, both
Ovid’s Heroides and letter-writing had been employed in the teaching of rhetoric.
Writing letters in the style of the Heroides was a common exercise in the Elizabethan
grammar school classroom.17 Typically the process involved double translation
exercises, that is, translation from Latin to English and then back again. This activ-
ity was geared to familiarize the student with a classical writer’s rhetorical style and
thereby prepare the student to adapt it to his own purpose, but repeated over and
over, the exercise served to inculcate the values and sentiment of the text. In The
Scholemaster (1570) Roger Ascham makes it clear that the double translation of
Cicero’s letters should encourage a kind of sympathetic emotional flow between
the student, the classical master, and the teacher.18 Writing a generation later, John
Brinsley adapted Ascham’s method and recommended the double translation of
Ovid’s verse letters as a means of encouraging a ‘facility for getting the phrase and
vein of the Poet’.19 Brinsley’s idea of ‘the phrase and vein of the poet’ effectively

15 Erasmus, De conscribendis epistolis (1522), in Literary and Educational Writings 3, De conscriben-

dis epistolis, De civilitate, in The Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. XXV, ed. J. K. Sowards (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1985), 204; Juan Luis Vives, De conscribendis epistolis (1534), intro. and
trans. Charles Fantazzi (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 79.
16 On Angel Day, see my Epistolary Community in Print, 1580–1664 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013);
on Fulwood, see W. Webster Newbold, ‘Traditional, Practical, Entertaining: Two Early English Letter
Writing Manuals’, Rhetorica 26.3 (2008): 267–301.
17 Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid; Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, and
Emotion (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 79–80, 83–4, 87.
18 Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, ed. Edward Arber (London: Constable, 1935), 25–7.
19 John Brinsley, cited in Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 165.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Emotional Debris in Early Modern Letters 119

naturalizes the absorption of verse-epistle techniques into quotidian and utilitarian

writing practices.20
As the pulse is maintained by the heart, the figurative locus of emotion, then
imitating the ‘phrase and vein’ coursing through an Ovidian letter is an inherently
emotional business. For the early moderns such imitative processes were not confined
decorously to the pedagogical scene. As Wye Saltonstall intimated in the letter to
the reader appended to his 1637 translation of the Heroides:
Ladies and Gentlewomen, since this book of Ovids, which most Gentlemen could
reade before in Latine, is for your sakes come forth in English, it doth at first address
it selfe as a Suiter, to wooe your acceptance, that it may kisse your hands, and after-
ward have the lines thereof in reading sweetned by the odour of your breath, while the
dead letters form’d into words by your divided lips, may receive new life by your
passionate expression, and the words marryed in that Ruby coloured Temple, may
thus happily united, multiply your contentment.21
Saltonstall asserts that reading ‘dead letters’ was a somatic process; and that absorbing
the words of Ovid’s letters into the pulse could trigger a chain of emotional
reactions in the reader, ones that then shaped his or her own writing of letters.
Not all the letter-writers cited in this chapter had access to the kind of humanist
education laid down by Ascham and Brinsley, and I have unearthed no hard
evidence that they read Ovid, but I will proceed with the assumption that because
Ovid’s Heroides and its derivatives circulated broadly, they provided ready tools for
writerly expression, and readerly interpretation.

I nk B lots

Early modern poets and translators associated the ink blot with Ovid. It is a key
term in George Turberville’s 1567 translation Ovid’s Heroical Epistles (1567), as the
following extract from his version of ‘Breseis to Achilles’, shows:
My flushing teares did cause
The blots and blurres you see:
Yet in these dreerie droppes I know
The weight of wordes to bee.
In turn Drayton signals his debt to Ovid by working the teary ink blot into his
poetic adaptation of Ovid’s Heroides to English history, as, for example, in this coup-
let from his epistle ‘Queen Margaret to William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk’ which
reads ‘Farewell, sweet Pole, faine more I would endite, / But that my teares doe blot
what I doe write’ (England’s Heroical Epistles, 1597). Clearly the ink blot is not
simply a literary device but an inevitable feature of manuscript letter-writing.

20 Brinsley was not alone in theorizing the pedagogical utility of aesthetic exemplars. Abraham
Fraunce (Arcadian Rhetoric, 1588) and John Hoskins (Directions for Speech and Style, c.1599) did so in
relation to Sir Philip Sidney’s oeuvre. See my Epistolary Community in Print, 65, 70–1.
21 Ovid’s Heroicall Epistles, trans. Wye Saltonstall (1636): sig. A4v.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

120 Diana G. Barnes

Fig. 7.1. Beata Pope, Countess of Downe, to Lady Frances North, 1679. HM 52405, The
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

The North Family Correspondence held at the Huntington Library includes an

autograph letter written by Beata Pope, Countess of Downe, to her daughter, Lady
Frances North, in 1679, which is covered in ink blots (Fig. 7.1). Each blot seems
to heighten the emotional impact of what Pope writes. In this chatty letter Pope
conveys love for her daughter and her family, and relays local news. She blots on
opening as she expresses her concern over the health of her sick grandchild. The
inky stain makes it difficult to decipher precisely what she writes, but give or take
a word, it reads:
Dear harte,
I cannot [express?] how greatful I am that you fonde my Deere childe so well,
and came safle to yor owne hows, my affectinate services to my sonne I have sent
him to [2] cheas, wch I hope he will except from his most feaithful servant[.]
Pope blots again when she recounts the ‘great Joy and Ringinge of Bells’ for Lady
Falkland’s marriage, and once again when she reports the ‘sad relacion, of Poore Sr
Edward Poole how dide suddenly as hee was riding abroad [BLOT] carried dead
to his owne hous, wch was [BLOT] affliction to his Lady and his poor [BLOT]-ren’.
At each of these points she expresses emotion—gratitude, joy, and grief—all of
which is underwritten by her overwhelming desire to maintain intimate dialogue
with her daughter. My reading of the Huntington Library’s holdings of this letter-
writer leads me to conclude that Beata Pope was a messy writer who regularly, and
probably inadvertently, daubed her correspondence with excess ink from an
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Emotional Debris in Early Modern Letters 121

Fig. 7.2. Beata Pope, Countess of Downe, to Lady Frances North, 1679, verso. HM 52405,
The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

unblotted pen. Meaning is not entirely determined by the intentions of the author,
however. In this case the broader context confers meaning. Let us consider the con-
clusion of Beata Pope’s letter, where the ink blot has leached through the page, cast-
ing a dark hue over her subscription (Fig. 7.2). Surely, when Lady North read her
mother’s subscription—‘It is the Dayly prayrs of her that is unfanedly yor moste
affectionate mother, whiles I Breath’—she must have felt a prick in her heart,
intensified by the well-placed characteristic blemishes of her mother’s fair copy.
This effect is heightened by the desire Pope expresses in her postscript for a white
hood with black spots ‘if they be woren’. Any handwritten line is vulnerable to the
meaning-changing effect of a blot of ink; ‘But what’s so blessed-fair that fears no
blot?’ (l. 13), Shakespeare asks in Sonnet 92.22
Beata Pope’s inadvertent blot, however, should be distinguished from other
intentional blots. Let us briefly consider an autograph letter Sir John Ferres wrote
to his cousin Sir Walter Ferres, in 1604, held at the Folger Shakespeare Library.23
Joking about Walter Ferres’s propensity to blot the account books, John Ferres
wrote ‘my boke is now perfecte, although in yours you had made many [fingerprint]
blottes’. Ferres’s inky fingerprint is an intentional mark made to tease his cousin; it

22 William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1985), 106.
23 Sir John Ferrers (c.1580–1633?), an autograph letter to his cousin Sir Walter Ferrers, from
Warwick, dated 30 July 1604. Folger MS Le.675, repr. in Alan Stewart and Heather Wolfe, Letter
Writing in Renaissance England (Washington DC: Folger, 2004), 83–5.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

122 Diana G. Barnes

is not evidence of unbound emotion in Ovidian style and yet it too has an emo-
tional quality. Striving to guide his cousin to interpret his blot correctly as a familiar
jest, John Ferres continues: ‘I hope you will geve your poore frend leve to be merry
with you, who is much devoted to your loves.’ John Ferres recognized the ink blot
as a sign available for epistolary communication but that it was a dangerously
unstable signifier whose meaning was not easily harnessed to express his familiar
affection for his cousin: in blotting he risked offending his reader.

T he H and

In the Ovidian tradition much emphasis is given to the hand of the author that
guides the pen that marks the page. The hand was also shorthand for handwriting,
or script. Typically the hand represents the immediacy of the writing, tying the
author’s concerns firmly to present circumstances. Turberville underscores this in
his translation of Canace’s epistle to Machareus: ‘My right hande holdes the pen,
the left a sword, / And in my carefull lappe the paper lyes’ (‘Canace to Machareus’,
Ovid’s Heroical Epistles, ll. 2–4). Likewise, in a later translation, Hypermnestra
recalls her refusal to murder her husband, Linus, as her father, Danaus, King of
Argos, had commanded, in the lines: ‘The frightful memory of that dire night /
Enervates so my hand, I scarce can write.’ In closing, she reminds the reader that
her script is impaired by the manacles that bind her hands: ‘Here I must rest my
hand, tho much remains, / ’Tis quite disabled with the weight of Chains’
(‘Hypermnestra to Linus’, trans. ‘Mr Wright’, Ovid’s Epistles Translated by Several
Hands, 1680). These Ovidian tropes were popularized and adapted into English
poetics. Over and again Drayton emphasizes the slippage between the hand and
handwriting, as, for example in Rosamond’s epistle to Henry II:
If yet thine eyes (great Henry) may endure
These tainted lynes, drawn with a hand impure
Which faine would blush, but feare keep blushes back,
And therefore suted in dispayring blacke.
(‘Rosamond to King Henry II’,
England’s Heroical Epistles, ll. 1–4)
In the Ovidian tradition, handwriting captures the letter-writer’s psychological
state. The blackness of the ink on the page testifies to her mood. In translating the
Ovidian verse epistle into contemporary idiom, Turberville, Wright, and Drayton
draw upon the terms of contemporary epistolary culture and humoral theory to
describe handwriting. They invoke a familiar slippage between the ‘gall’ of the oak
tree used in making the ink and the gall or black bile of melancholy.24 Ink is not
the only material quality that gives emotional colour to a letter-writer’s hand.

24 Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters, 48. See also Michael Bristol, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the
Publication of Melancholy’, in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things and Forms of
Knowledge, ed. Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin (London: Routledge, 2008), 193–211; 204. On
the making of ink, see James Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Emotional Debris in Early Modern Letters 123

Early modern readers were acutely aware of the socio political implications of
script, or handwriting style. As the names imply, secretarial, italic, and court
hands were social practices.25 At first glance, and if we consider only the words,
then Arbella Stuart’s August 1609 letter to Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, High
Treasurer of England, is perfunctory, formal, and entirely unemotional. It opens
as follows:
My honorable good Lord, I yeild you humble thanckes for the honorable care it hath
pleased you to have of me both in the election and effecting of this suite; which shall
ever binde me to humble thanckfulnesse towards your Lordship[.] For whose long life,
and happinesse I pray to the Almighty and rest
Your Lordships much bounden and assured frend
Arbella Stuart.26
As Sara Jayne Steen, Stuart’s first editor observes, Stuart was a skilled letter-writer
who knew how to manipulate the visual rhetoric of her letter for emotional effect.27
Steen’s print edition, however, had a limited capacity to demonstrate this.28 The
first thing to note of Stuart’s material letter is the fact that the letter is in her hand,
and that, together, the formality of her even italic hand and her courteous expres-
sion convey her gratitude. James Daybell points out that such features of material
letters were readily discernible social signals. Increasingly over the period the auto-
graph letter was viewed as more intimate and familiar than one produced with the
assistance of a secretary. Daybell observes that ‘The act of writing oneself, although
often practical, conveyed emotion, politeness and respect. An autograph hand,
therefore, might be interpreted as a marker of affect, duty and obligation.’29 By
writing in her own hand, Stuart signals that she is writing to a superior. She
enhances this effect by writing in the italic, a hand originally associated with
humanism, but from the early seventeenth century, viewed as an easy hand par-
ticularly suited to women.30 At the time of writing Stuart was fourth in line to the
throne, James I was blocking her marriage, and the recent death of her powerful
grandmother and agent, Bess of Hardwick (January 1608), had left her in need of
influential allies such as Salisbury. The appropriately feminine italic hand in which
Stuart’s letter is written emphasizes her deference to social mores. This is reinforced
by the use of blank space in the letter. At least half a page separates the text of
her letter from her signature. By contrast, in a letter she had her secretary write for

and the Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012),
37–41.
25 On handwriting as social discipline, see Goldberg, Writing Matter.
26 Arbella Stuart to Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, §72, in The Letters of Lady Arbella Stuart, ed.
Sara Jayne Steen, Women Writers in English 1350–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994),
232. Arbella Stuart to the Earl of Salisbury August 1609. SP 14/47 f. 254, National Archives of the
UK, repr. in State Papers Online.
27 Sara Jayne Steen, ‘Introduction’, in The Letters of Lady Arbella Stuart, 35–8. See also Sara Jayne
Steen, ‘Fashioning an Acceptable Self: Arbella Stuart’, English Literary Renaissance 18.1 (1988): 78–95.
28 Digital editing facilitates comparison of manuscript and transcription. The State Papers Online
database provides a multiformat edition of this letter.
29 Daybell, The Material Letter, 86–7.
30 Laetitia Kennedy-Skipton, Elizabethan Handwriting 1500–1650 (New York: Norton, 1966), 66.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

124 Diana G. Barnes

her to Sir Robert Wilbraham a few months earlier (3 November 1607, SP 14/28 f.
150, PRO), her signature is placed much closer to the body of the letter.31 Stuart
shows greater respect to Salisbury than to Wilbraham. Thus, contra DeJean, even
formal, public letters, such as Stuart’s, have an emotional dimension; it is h ­ eightened
by the materialization of the hand on the page.
The hand can give away an emotional quality irrespective of the writer’s prose or
intent. Consider the following example of a letter written by Brilliana Harley to
her husband Robert Harley, in April 1643 (British Library Add. 70110, f. 80).
The context tells us that she wrote under some pressure, and the physical letter
itself confirms this. During this period the couple was separated by the unfolding
drama of the English Civil War. Brilliana Harley was managing the family estate,
Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire, while Robert Harley was involved in parliamen-
tary politics in London. Royalists were threateningly camped nearby, and she
sought advice over the management of the estate. Her letter is written on a tiny
scrap of paper. Harley’s hand is usually very clear but in this letter it is cramped and
difficult to make out. It gives the impression of having been written hastily, as
though strong feelings impelled her to abandon her usual composure of script.
This is supported by the content. The letter opens with her conventional fond
wishes for her husband’s well-being, which ‘hope’, she writes, ‘gives [her] some
comfort in the midst of many trubells’. She assures him that she is resigned to
‘what it pleasis my gratious God to Exercis me with’ but prays for the ‘strength’ to
face what lies ahead. She explains: ‘the rison why I send this bearer is to desire you
to write me, two or three words what I had best doo for the suply of the Provisions
of my ^the^ howes’. Worrying about his reaction, she continues: ‘deare Sr be not
displeased that I have so offten rwit to you a bout this for I am very unwilling to
doo any thinge that you doo not a prouve of ’. Then she makes a final request ‘but
if you pleas to write me word wheather I should stay at Brompton or no’. She
closes ‘I beceach the lord to preserve you and to give you a happy meeting with her
that beggs your love and prayers as your most affectionat wife Brilliana Harley.’
This is a variation on a conventional subscription fitting a letter from wife to
husband, but its emotional impact is heightened by the material features of the
text, the hand, the paper, the context of war, and the bearer.

T he C arrier , B earer , or P ostboy

Ovid’s Heroides do not specify carriers, bearers, or postboys, but in the spirit of the
Heroides, writers do so to invite readers to consider the semantic implications of
the means of delivery of a material letter. Transportation and delivery represent
another chapter in what we might call, after Igor Kopytoff, the emotional biography

31 On space in manuscript letters, see Jonathan Gibson, ‘Significant Space in Manuscript Letters’,
The Seventeenth Century 12.1 (1997): 1–10. Gibson specifically complains that Steen’s otherwise
meticulous edition does not account for the use of blank space.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Emotional Debris in Early Modern Letters 125

of a letter.32 It is a recurrent theme in early modern manuscript and fictional

letters, especially those concerning love. Nicolas Breton’s regularly reprinted
epistolary collection A Post with a Mad Packet of Letters (1602) is presented as the
miscellaneous contents of a postboy’s packet. The frontispiece woodcut illustration
of the postboy on horseback galloping across mountainous terrain with his packet
over his shoulder, his bugle to his lips, and the floating caption ‘For Love, For Life’
underscores the Ovidian device unifying the collection.33 Manuscript letter-
writers also frequently refer to the bearer and how letters were transported. Some
of this information could be recorded on the outside of the folded letter. When
Brilliana Harley writes: ‘the rison why I send this bearer is to desire you to write
me, two or three words what I had best doo for the suply of the Provisions of my
^the^ howes’, she acknowledges that she has used either a bearer who is not tried
and proven or a known bearer out of schedule. As she realizes, her husband would
note this prior to opening and reading her letter, and this information would
flavour his reading of its contents. The carrier of a manuscript letter was preferably
a person known and trusted by sender and recipient. He represented an important
part of epistolary communication.34 Harley also writes, in the 1643 letter cited
above, that ‘our God has bine mightily seen at Gloster the relation of which this
bearer will tell you’, alerting her husband to the fact that supplementary informa-
tion will be conveyed by the bearer.35 This was not uncommon. Indeed the bearer
was another figure in the communicative act of epistolary exchange. Frequently, as
the Harley example shows, the bearer would be trusted to convey information that
could not be committed to paper. Here, a gap in the text—the writer’s omission of
certain information—points to the emotional and material conditions under
which the letter was written, dispatched, and read. Trust in the bearer, anxiety
about conveying politically sensitive information, and desire to communicate
more directly are threads in the emotional fabric of the material letter.
Anxiety about bearers was heightened during the English Civil War, when letter-
writing was a crucial means of conveying politically sensitive information and
holding together political and religious communities under siege. In 1645, Charles
I wrote to his wife, Henrietta Maria, that, owing to the bearer (and his projected
route), he would only engage in an exchange of emotions and cover no topical
issues. He writes:
My Dear heart, though it be an uncomfortable thing to write by a slow Messenger, yet
all occasions, of this (which is now the only) way of conversing with thee, is so welcome
to me as I shall be loath to loose any, but expect neither new or publick business, from
me, by this way of conveyance; yet judging thee by my self even these nothings will
now be unwelcome to thee.36

32 Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in The Social
Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986), 64–91.
33 The postboy also appears on the frontispieces of other published collections of letters, as, for
example, The Prompter’s Packet (1633) and The Secretary of Ladies (1638). See Barnes, Epistolary
Community in Print, 75–6.
34 Daybell, The Material Letter, 128–40.    35 British Library, Add. 70110, f. 80.
36 §9 Charles I to Henrietta Maria, The King’s Cabinet Open’d (1645), 8.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

126 Diana G. Barnes

The royal couple had already had a number of their letters intercepted. As it was
necessary to use a slow messenger, thereby increasing the risk of interception, he
determines to bracket news of political events, and represent only his emotions. He
assumes that she will welcome such sweet nothings as he would himself. In spite of
his intentions, Charles I is unable to cordon off an emotional space distinct from
the political backdrop. In the same letter he details how much he adores his wife
by listing in cypher those loyal friends and followers whose company is inferior to
hers, making it obvious that his emotions are interpolated through all dimensions
of his life experience. His closing line ‘Believe me, sweet heart, thy kindnesse is as
necessary to comfort my heart, as thy assistance is for my affairs’ underscores his
inability to separate his emotion from the events that generate and fuel it. The
emotional residue of these conditions is palpable in his letter.

T he D rafts

Drafting and redrafting are common devices in Ovidian epistolary discourse used
to convey the letter-writer’s distress and uncertainty. Drayton captures this effect-
ively in the following lines from Matilda’s epistle to King John:

I set me downe, at large to write my mind,

But now nor Pen, nor Paper can I find;
For still my passion is so powerful o’r me,
That I discerne not things that stand before me:
Finding the Pen, the Paper, and the Waxe,
These at command, and now Invention lacks;
This sentence serves, and That my hand out-strikes;
That pleaseth well, and This as much mislikes,
I write, indite, I point, I raze, I quote,
I enterline, I blot, correct, I note,
I hope, despaire, take courage, faint, disdaine,
I make, alledge, I imitate, I faine:
Now thus it must be, and now thus, and thus,
Bold, shame-fac’d, fearless, doubtfull, timorous;
My faint Hand writing, when my full Eye reads,
From ev’ry word strange Passion still proceeds.
(‘Matilda to King John’, England’s
Heroical Epistles ll. 27–42, my italics)

In epistolary poetry then, drafting and redrafting signal emotional equivocation,

but this emotional effect is not confined to literary letters.
Around January 1683, Maria van Rensselaer drafted and redrafted a letter to her
brother-in-law Reygart van Rensselaer. At that time she was acting patroon of the
Dutch patroonship of Rensselaerwyck in New Netherland, as her husband Kiliaen
van Rensselaer had died a few years earlier. Reygart van Rensselaer was then head
of the family business and based in the Netherlands. Evidently he had written to
ask van Rensselaer to send her son, also Kiliaen van Rensselaer, to Amsterdam to
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Emotional Debris in Early Modern Letters 127

learn the family business. Maria van Rensselaer was reluctant. Aside from a natural
maternal concern about sending a child to the other side of the earth, by this stage
she was disabled by a degenerative and painful condition of the hip, and she relied
upon the help of her sons. Following the conventions for mercantile correspond-
ence, Maria van Rensselaer opens one of the extant drafts with a perfunctory greeting
and acknowledgement of Reygart’s letter. Next she responds to his suggestion
about Kiliaen, then acknowledges Reygart’s own struggles, and offers her sympathy
and prayers.37 It reads as follows:
Dear Brother: Yours dated the 14th of May I received in reasonable health, together with
the enclosed [letter] to Secretary Livingston, which I copied, sealed and sent to him.
I see from your letter that you would like to have my [son] Kiliaen come over to
assist you and in time to get acquainted with his father’s house. I should be heartily
pleased if it were possible to send him over, but as Hendrick lives with Momville and
Johannis is still too young to take charge of anything, Kiliaen must remain with me, in
order to have better supervision here. He is at present at Baston. I hope that he will
soon be home, for I need him badly. I can well believe that you have much to do in [set-
tling] the estates of father and mother, deceased, brother Jan Baptist, deceased, and uncle,
deceased, and that it all comes down on you. May God Almighty give you strength and
health, so that things may come to an end there, for here they are going from bad to
worse and while there is no governor here things drift along and every one does what
seems best in his eyes.38
Maria van Rensselaer’s other draft also opens by acknowledging Reygart’s letter but
moves quickly into a lengthy description of her life and an assertion of the Christian
principles she wants Reygart to understand she honours. In the second paragraph
she tackles the matter of young Kiliaen going to Amsterdam, writing in a passive
tone that ‘it seems this cannot be’ and ‘It seems that it pleases God to send me
more feebleness’. The draft reads as follows:
Sr Reygart van Rensselaer
Dear Brother: Your letter of May 14, 1682, came duly to hand. Brother will please
not think it strange that I was surprised not to get any letter, for I am here alone and like
to hear that you and our friends are well. Be pleased, therefore, not to take it ill that
I wrote so, and also, how I was to proceed with the farmers. I am very sorry to hear of
your long illness and of all the misfortune and sadness that has befallen you. The good
Lord himself said to His disciples: ‘In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of
good cheer; I have overcome the world.’ Only let us always keep our leader, Jesus
Christ, before our eyes and firmly trust that nothing happens without His will.
You write about my son Kiliaen’s [coming over] to help you and be of some service to
you. I hope, please God, that this may take place soon. I heartily wish that my son Kiliaen were

37 On mercantile letter-writing, see Donna Merwick’s study of Maria van Rensselaer’s father-
in-law’s letter-writing practices in ‘A Genre of their Own: Kiliaen van Rensselaer as Guide to the
Reading and Writing Practices of Early Modern Businessmen’, The William and Mary Quarterly 65.4
(2008): 669–712; and of Dutch merchants more generally, see Suze Zijlstra, ‘To Build and Sustain
Trust: Long Distance Correspondence of Dutch Seventeenth-Century Merchants’, Dutch Crossing
36.2 (2012): 114–31.
38 Maria van Rensselaer to Richard van Rensselaer [January?] 1683, in Correspondence of Maria van
Rensselaer 1669–1689, trans. and ed. A. J. F. van Laer (Albany, NY: University of the State of New York,
1935), 84.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

128 Diana G. Barnes

with you, but it seems that this cannot well be, for I shall need him very much. It seems that
it pleases God to send me more feebleness, for I have had a severe fainting spell, and I can
not miss him. He is at present at Baston to see how it is there with the silverware business,
but if it please God he will soon be home and write to you himself. (My italics)39
There is no internal evidence for which draft was penned first, but it is tempting to
assume that the example cited second was written after the first. Whereas the
bluntness and directness of the former seem to represent a raw emotional response
to an abhorrent suggestion from the head of the family, the latter shows evidence
of recasting to make her position more persuasive. There is some strategy here but
it is hardly literary. Maria van Rensselaer understood that an effective letter was a
crafted persuasive argument that harnessed and shaped emotion and not an
unedited natural outpouring of thoughts onto the page. The existence of the drafts
represents a material history of the emotional work that went into producing a
letter under difficult circumstances. This effect, however, was not one she intended
to convey to Reygart van Rensselaer, but rather a cross-temporal effect the archive
makes available to modern readers.

A G riping Tone

Early modern writers particularly admired the emotional tone of Ovid’s Heroides.
This quality was established by the letter-writer’s copious description of the heart-
felt passions motivating her writing. In other words the tone makes a claim about
the material conditions that produced the letter. Ovid’s heroines draw attention to the
material features of the epistolary discourse to create the impression that the reader
is experiencing the letter as it is being written. Neither Ovid nor the early mod-
erns viewed passionate effusion as either the antithesis of reason or as a sign of
weakness. Ovidian heroism entails a passionate logic capable of undermining
hegemonic ideals. Linda Kauffman writes that in the Heroides ‘Ovid challenges the
values of Augustan Rome [and] conventional notions of origins, of fathers, of
paternity, of authority, of identity [offering] Instead […] amorous epistolary
discourse—with all its erotic, emotional, and sensuous intensity’.40 In the sixteenth
and early seventeenth century, poetry that strove to capture this powerful e­ motional
and iconoclastic quality was described as ‘complaint’. The Mirror for Magistrates,
the title of the popular collection of English historical complaints edited by
William Baldwin, underscores the recognition that passionate poetic suasoria had
a legalistic quality. And the title of Drayton’s adaptation, England’s Heroical Epistles,
emphasizes the heroic quality of verse written in this mode. Following Mme de
Scudéry’s adaptation of the Heroides, Les Femmes illustres, ou Les Harangues héroïques
(1644), the style was also known as a ‘heroic harangue’, acknowledging the

39 Maria van Rensselaer to Richard van Rensselaer [January?] 1683, in Correspondence of Maria van
Rensselaer 1669–1689, 87–8.
40 Linda S. Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fiction (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1986), 61.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Emotional Debris in Early Modern Letters 129

c­ onnection between heroism and argument.41 This passionate language of feminine

heroism associated with letter-writing was not confined purely to poetry. It was an
expressive resource available to the writers of ‘real’ letters.
A letter Lady Margaret Longueville wrote to her mother Hester Sandys, Lady
Temple, in the 1630s, held in the Huntington Library, conveys a griping tone,
heightened by emotional copia. It opens:
Dere mother givee mee leue to trobble you a littell, with that wich hath trobbled mee
so much: wich is the bakebiting of my sister: ^Millysent^ she thanks god you haue
called her bake from gooing astray: I pray god you may call her from this falte: wich
in my apinyon: is wors then the other: for that is an imperfecksion: of too much
love[, and] this of too much hatred: I beleve no tails: but what I hard with my yeres . . .

Then Longueville just goes on and on:

she sayd share ther was something lakeing that I came to your: chamber: as if I neuer
hade come to you but for my ends: I wish my fortune hade bine such that I might not
haue hade cares to haue axt: and I shuld haue bine more proud of that, then euer
Allexsander was of concering the world: and then she said if she mared, she hopt you
wolde leue with hor: and she wolde not sit sollinly, by you, as I did
Let hor knoe that: that fort[une]: that shee bilds apone anothers ruens shall neuer
bee blest to hor, in the end: and for my sollinnes: it may bee I was in some trobble and
came to my frinds to haue found comefort: therfore she might haue jouged charitably
on mee: then she is angery att any thing that my brother Tho:[mas] and I haue[.]42

Longueville’s letter has immediacy; her carelessness of composition, and the

stream-of-consciousness effect of her thoughts tumbling out onto the page one on
top of the next, heighten the impression that she writes to unburden herself of an
overwhelming distress. But we cannot be absolutely sure that this is not a studied
effect. Copia, metaphorical iteration, and repetition were recognized rhetorical
devices employed to heighten emotional impact. Adapting the principle from
Cicero’s De oratore Erasmus recommended the letter-writer should affect diligent
negligence, to give the impression of immediacy.43 Writing to persuade her mother
to side with her against her sister, Longueville has every motivation to employ
available rhetorical devices. She seems ‘scarce certain of [her] owne conceipts’, that
is, so overwhelmed by emotions that she cannot think straight, as Angel Day
described writing a love letter in his letter-writing manual The English Secretary
(1586).44 Longueville achieves this impression effectively, although she is not
writing a love letter.

41 This was translated into English as Les Femmes Illustres, or, Twenty Heroick Harangues of the most
Illustrious Women of Antiquity (1693). On heroic emotion in Ovid, see Clarke and Clarke, eds., ‘This
Double Voice’.
42 Lady M[argaret (Temple) Longueville] to Hester (Sandys), Lady Temple, [1631 <> 1637], Huntington
Library STT 1411.
43 Erasmus, Conficiendarum epistolarum formula (1520), in Literary and Educational Writings, 258.
44 Angel Day, The English Secretary (1586), 232.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

130 Diana G. Barnes

T he A rchive

The process of archiving of letters can also leave an emotional residue palpable in
the material text. Charles I’s letters to his wife and friends were captured by
Parliament and published in The King’s Cabinet Open’d (1645). Parliamentary
propagandists recognized that epistolary intimacies take on entirely different
meanings when circulated publicly in print: Charles I’s loving assertions to his wife
were presented as evidence of his betrayal of loyal followers. Beneath each pub-
lished letter the editors noted that ‘This is a true copy examined by Miles Corbet’,
or one of the other editors. This annotation nicely documents the mediation,
agency, and emotional investments of those who capture and preserve dead letters
so that they ‘may receive new life by [the] passionate expression’ of future gener-
ations of readers.
Once archived, letters continue to absorb emotional traces. Consider the
image of Maria van Rensselaer’s damaged letter in Fig. 7.3. It was damaged by
the fire that ravaged the New York State Library in March 1911. Looking at its
singed edges must bring a pang of loss to any scholar of early modern culture.
Arnold J. F. van Laer devoted his career to translating seventeenth-century
Dutch documents in the New York State Archives, including the letters of Maria
van Rensselaer and her husband Jeremias. Although many of the Dutch papers
survived the fire, because they were stored in lower shelves, the collection on
van Laer’s desk and his handwritten translation were lost. Van Laer worked tire-
lessly to retrieve smoking documents from the debris; he recalled that ‘some of
the volumes were so hot that they could hardly be touched with the hand’.45
Charles T. Gehring, his successor, reported that afterwards van Laer ‘came close
to a nervous breakdown’ from which he never fully recovered, and that he
stopped translating for a decade.46 He did continue his work, however, as cap-
tured in a moving photograph of him working on a fire-damaged manuscript
published in the Albany Evening News in 1932.47 Knowing the background
events, for Gehring the fire-damaged pages of the surviving letters give testi-
mony not only to van Laer’s personal trauma but also to his public-spirited
heroic service to archival history. The singed letter documents neither the writer’s
nor addressee’s emotion but a disappointment and loss we would-be readers
share when faced with the disintegration of fragile epistolary manuscripts and
the emotional histories they document.

45 A. J. F. van Laer, cited in Paul Mercer and Vicki Weiss, The New York State Capitol and the Great
Fire of 1911 (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2011), 74.
46 Charles T. Gehring, cited in Russell Shorto, ‘Three Conversations’, in Explorers, Fortunes and
Love Letters: A Window on New Netherland, ed. Martha Dickinson Shattuck (Albany, NY: New
Netherlands Institute & Mount Ida Press, 2009), 4–5.
47 John Mooney, ‘State Archivist Lives in Past during Days of Tedious Translating of Dutch
Letters: A. J. F. Van Lear [sic] Works on Damaged Van Rensselaer Manuscripts’, Albany Evening News
(1932), repr. in Mercer and Weiss, New York State Capitol, 72.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Emotional Debris in Early Modern Letters 131

Fig. 7.3. Maria van Rensselaer, to Jan van Wely and Jan Baptist van Rensselaer,
[November 1675?], page 3, Van Rensselaer Manor Papers, Correspondence of Maria van
Rensselaer, 1669–1689 SC7079 box 6, folder 5. The New York State Library, Albany,
New York.

C onclusion

A blot appears on the verso of a letter Charles II drafted to his mother in 1649 after
receiving news of the execution of his father, Charles I. This manuscript letter is
held at the Bodleian Library amongst the Clarendon state papers, a collection of
documents Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon amassed in his capacity as Secretary
of State to Charles II during the Interregnum, and supplemented by papers people
donated to aid his writing of The History of the Rebellion (1702). In this case the
blot does not obscure the author’s words but the first collector’s. A note in another
hand which reads ‘under the above Blot is written in Lord Clarendon’s Hand “not
sent”’ seems to convey the distress of a later archivist.
The material qualities of manuscript letters provide crucial documents for a
history of emotions, but we must step back from our post-Romantic assumptions
about the truth of emotional discourse as transparently representing a writer’s feel-
ings. We need to read these artefacts in their own discursive and material terms.
Attending to the literary qualities of these letters aids in this endeavour. By reading
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

132 Diana G. Barnes

a selection of early modern manuscript letters alongside the Ovidian poetic

epistolary tradition in vogue at the time, I do not mean to make the causal claim
that one directly shaped the other but rather to suggest that the pervasive and
contiguous literary epistolary tradition associated with Ovid’s Heroides provides
useful clues to better understanding how the non-verbal material qualities of a
manuscript letter capture emotional debris of the author, reader, archivist, copyist,
postboy, and publisher.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

8
Emotional Attachments
Iron Hands, their Makers, and
their Wearers, 1450–1600

John Gagné

In 1498, three mercenary bombardiers—experts in the manual craft of military

ballistics—found themselves defending the town of Buti, some twenty kilometres
east of Pisa.1 Following France’s invasion of 1494, which liberated Pisa from
Florence’s domination, the two cities had been at war. Unable to remain neutral,
several neighbouring Italian states offered support to the weaker city, Pisa. Our
three bombardiers were thus in Venetian employ in a small town in Pisan territory,
training their guns on Florentine opponents. Unlucky men. The defenders of Buti
capitulated to Florence’s forces, captained by Paolo Vitelli (1461–99), a merciless
adversary. If the conflict at Buti is remembered today, it is because Vitelli punished
the Venetian bombardiers by cutting off their hands.
Those hands of flesh and bone—and their putative replacements, artificial
hands forged of iron—are the subject of this chapter. Specifically, it pursues the
relationship between dismemberment, suffering, and artificial limbs in the years
around 1500. That relationship deserves investigation for several reasons. For one,
the interconnection of these elements allows us to follow new histories of the
human body for an era when artisanal and medical knowledge vigorously under-
took biological–machine coextension. It permits us to inquire into the nature of
that bionic body (What was it? How did it work?), and into the politics such a
move attached to people (through an interrogation of the powers deployed
through technology, class, and gender). Moreover, to link human subjectivities
to these prosthetic objects—insofar as we can, with only faint echoes of their
wearers’ voices—reminds us just how intimately embodied they were. That reminder

I warmly thank the participants in two seminars who responded to this research: first, the ever-incisive
Alchemists Reading Group in the History Department at the University of Sydney; and second, the
interlocutors at Ofer Gal’s workshop on ‘Passions, Imagination, and Bodily Functions in Early
Modern Thought’ in September 2015. In particular, for their comments and stimulus, I owe a debt to
Francesco Borghesi, Cynthia Klestinec, Gideon Manning, Katharine Park, and Paolo Savoia.
1 Bombards were large artillery constructed of iron or bronze. See Kelly DeVries, ‘The Technology
of Gunpowder Weaponry in Western Europe during the Hundred Years’ War’, in Guns and Men in
Medieval Europe, 1200–1500, ed. Kelly DeVries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 285–98; 288–92.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

134 John Gagné

must guard us from the trap of medical or technological triumphalism, in which

sovereign knowledge of the body and its facsimiles serves as the shared rationale
for both science and history. Yet this chapter tries, sometimes at the limits of
speculation, to trace less familiar consequences than merely the forward march
of Western military-scientific savvy.
Those consequences concern the social world of acquired disability in the
Renaissance. In particular, the evidence I consider relates to fighters in wars who lost
limbs through violence.2 The chapter attempts to recover the networks that the
injured had to activate in pursuit of re-enablement. Field surgeons, specialist wood-
or metalworkers, and senators all contributed their expertise to this goal. Aspiration
to physical wholeness required—as the cultivation of these networks testifies, but so
also does the intricacy of the artificial limbs themselves—uncommon persistence and
determination on the part of the injured. One of the remarkable elements of these
lives is, in fact, their narratives of re-enablement. The idea of the repristination of the
body through art was an ambitious one in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. That
ambition needed to be shared not just by the inventive artisans who provided new
limbs, but by the injured who envisioned their own potential for reintegration. In
fact, it is possible that this shared vision and ambition bridged the worlds of the
wounded and the prosthetician. One of my contentions is that these two groups—
fighters, more specifically gunners, and prosthetic-makers—overlapped in ways we
have yet to recognize, especially as regards their shared artisanal techniques.
The chapter also seeks to revise assumptions that the iron hand was a great rarity
in Renaissance culture.3 On the contrary, more than thirty prosthetic hands survive
from 1450 to 1600, suggesting a medico-technical environment that classed such
devices as eminently feasible, if still beyond the remit of everyday therapies. These
extant hands, mostly in European museum collections, offer material evidence
where texts fail to speak. They help us recover the nature of injuries (right hand
versus left; above or below the elbow) and the physical qualities most desired from
prostheses (flexion and extension permitting movement and grip). In one case, two
hands made serially for the same man illuminate how these desiderata informed
technical modifications suited to their wearer’s use. The objects thus embodied the
ambitions outlined above, while also inhabiting the artefactual space between the
maker’s abilities and the wearer’s desires. Moreover, copies of limbs highlight a not-
able passage in the history of artisanship between the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. During this period, craftspeople articulated in writing an ‘artisanal
epistemology’ that elevated the habitus and experiential knowledge of the artisan’s
bodily labour to a new level of dignity.4 Manual production (techne, Aristotle’s
lowest form of industry) formulated claims to equality with practice (praxis) and

2 Congenital and disease-related disabilities deserve separate historical focus in their own right; on
this question, see Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body (London:
Verso, 1995).
3 Yuval Harari, The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War
Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 68.
4 Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004), 59–127.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Emotional Attachments 135

theory (episteme). The Renaissance prosthetic turned the dexterity of artisanal

technique towards a refashioning of the body itself. Knowledge built in bodies
could, in turn, rebuild bodies. By embedding its reading of prostheses in the social
and intellectual world of artisanal communities, this chapter outlines an alterna-
tive to techno-progressivist accounts by probing the role of objects (prostheses) in
forming collective or individual subjects (makers and wearers). Perhaps in exploring
those relations, we can begin to imagine pre-modern false limbs activating narratives
of affect and passion. ‘Like seeds around which an elaborate crystal can suddenly
congeal.’ writes Lorraine Daston, ‘things in a supersaturated cultural solution can
crystallize ways of thinking, feeling, and acting.’5
The key to this chapter’s reading involves recognizing how the quality of that
cultural solution was essentially masculine. Prosthetic limbs manifested the union
of knowledge and technology as the products of male labour in workshops and
in war. To see men’s embodied experiences as the shared platform for this suite of
objects and ideas is to acknowledge that the fantasy and the technique of casting
iron hands was inextricable from the milieu of men’s work. The chapter also
­suggests that those objects cemented affective bonds amongst makers, carers, and
wearers: the fraternal community, perhaps even more than the prosthetic itself,
acted as the site of emotional attachment. Lacking testimony from wearers about
the sentimental significance of their prostheses, we rely instead on the community’s
cues to parse the shadings of emotion in the process of dismemberment.6 Ultimately,
still greater analytical possibilities may lie in pursuing ‘feeling’ in its alternative
meaning as a tactile sensation, since the prosthetic also fruitfully confronts ­pre-modern
theories of embodiment and touch.

T he B ombardiers of B uti

Reconnecting individuals to their prosthetics in this period is nearly impossible;

records that testify to those connections are elusive. Here, I present a brief case in
which the objects are lost but some circumstantial evidence about the men remains.
Vitelli mutilated the gunmen at Buti in early September, 1498. The cruel act made
news in Venice; the chronicler Marin Sanudo noted their fate in his voluminous
jottings.7 By late autumn, three bombardiers had travelled from central Tuscany to
the city on the lagoon. In his History of Venice (written 1530–44; published 1551),
Pietro Bembo recapped this chain of events, and added valuable commentary:
The Florentines under Paolo Vitelli attacked Buti and took the town’s surrender. Though
it was taken in this way, all the gunners had their right hands cut off so that they would

5 Lorraine Daston, ‘Introduction’, in Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, ed.
Lorraine Daston (New York: Zone, 2004), 20. For the work that objects undertake in ‘post-social’
modernity, see Karin Knorr Cetina, ‘Sociality with Objects: Social Relations in Postsocial Knowledge
Societies’, Theory, Culture & Society 14.4 (1997): 1–30.
6 On affect, see Heidi Hausse, ‘Bones of Contention: The Decision to Amputate in Early Modern
Germany’, Sixteenth Century Journal 47.2 (2016): 327–50.
7 Marin Sanudo, I diarii, vol. II, ed. Riccardo Fulin (Bologna: Forni Editore, 1969), 191.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

136 John Gagné

no longer be able to practice their profession, and with each man’s hand hung from his
neck they were sent away. Some of them came to Venice and implored the Senate’s
protection. The senators allotted all of them a pension for as long as they lived, with
exemption from all taxes. They gave their word to the Senate that once they had artificial
iron hands (manibus ferreis fabrefactis), they would return to their trade and make them-
selves useful to the Republic and, if sent back to Pisa, would avenge their injuries.8
Bembo provided more commentary than any other informant, and uniquely
mentioned two notable elements. First, he linked manual craft both to the men’s
punishment and to the vow they swore in exchange for Venice’s beneficence.
Hanging severed hands from a criminal’s neck was a common Venetian penalty for
capital crimes; it may or may not be an interpolation on Bembo’s part.9 Second, he
imagined the engine of the men’s vow to be their desired iron hands, a kind of fore-
casted reintegration that nowadays would be called a narrative of ‘prosthetized
rebirth’.10 Bembo is the only source to mention replacement hands for these men.
But his descriptions cannot be discounted as fanciful. Senate minutes confirm that
one bombardier appeared as a supplicant on 14 November, and three more fol-
lowed on 10 December 1498. We learn their names, as well: Peter of Burgundy,
Jan Matthis of Holland, Little John of England, and Veit Tapis, probably a German
or Swiss. The last three, who petitioned together, are described as having lost both
hands (amputatione [sic] fuerunt ambe manus ab hostibus). The Senate moved to
grant them stipends of three ducats a month and employment in the city’s salt
office; the motion passed in a vote of 163 to four.11 One of the handless gunners
from Buti (talgiate [sic] ambe le mano) reappeared before the Senate in the new year
and met with equal warmth.12
Venice’s senators were familiar with supplications like these ones. In the years
around 1500, war threatened in a number of theatres. Not only had the state
deployed soldiers in the Pisan conflict, but its forces met French armies in a string
of increasingly demanding engagements, and from 1499 to 1503 its fleet battled
in the Ionian Sea against Ottoman advances. Veterans of these campaigns (not
to mention their heirs) petitioned the Senate for support and stipends, often in
compensation for wounds and dismemberment. For instance, after Venice’s navy
recaptured the fortress on the island of Cephalonia from the sultan’s troops in summer
1501, the senators weighed how to reward the injured. A letter from the commanding
admiral highlighted the most valiant of them and their sacrifices: Jacomo Padoan,

8 Pietro Bembo, History of Venice, vol. I, trans. Robert W. Ulery Jr (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007), Bk. IV, para. 27, 278–9.
9 Guido Ruggiero, Violence in Early Renaissance Venice (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 1980), 47–8.
10 Cassandra Crawford, Phantom Limb: Amputation, Embodiment, and Prosthetic Technology
(New York: New York University Press, 2014), 3.
11 Archivio di Stato di Venezia (hereafter ASV), Archivio del Senato, Deliberazioni—Terra, registro
13, fol. 173v, 14 November 1498 for Peter of Burgundy; and fol. 175v, 10 December 1498 for the
other three.
12 ASV, Archivio del Senato, Deliberazioni—Terra, registro 13, fol. 179r. 23 January 1498 modo
veneziano (i.e. 1499). This gunner’s name—Fayt Tapis—suggests a reappearance of one of the last
three men; the records indeed count him as a fourth victim of the Buti mutilations (uno bombardier
e tre schiopeteri).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Emotional Attachments 137

hit by ‘an arrow in the eye’, Gasparo de Capodistria, ‘whose arms and legs were
burned by the Turks’, Nicolo de Santa Maura, ‘who was lamed in the arm by a cannon
shot’, Nicolo da Korçula, ‘who had one hand struck off ’.13 The list goes on.
Such cases illustrate that the gunners of Buti were not unique. While an unknowable
number of fighters and civilians died in such conflicts, a significant population of
soldiers survived even despite significant physical traumas. Moreover, they sought
support and employment from the Venetian state. Faced with news of the Cephalonia
survivors, the senators voted unanimously to reward the most grievously injured
among them with positions at the Sea Customs Post (dogana da mar). Such facts
open a window into the world of the war-wounded, showing that a state like
Venice—and perhaps others around Europe as well—staffed its institutions with
teams of incapacitated veterans, no longer capable of plying the trade of mariner
or gunner, but able still to labour in the quotidian industries of governmental
apparatus. One could propose that, in general terms, the deployment of wounded
men in the service of state agencies had two corollaries. First, it coupled the visibility
of disabled bodies in specific urban enclaves with the charitable politics of the
regime. Through its social welfare practices, the city organized and instrumentalized
bodies that were otherwise in danger of slipping into the amorphous pool of indigents,
a group the state pathologized.14 Encounters with the salt office, Sea Customs Post,
or other agencies thus entailed a reckoning with bodies marked by war. Second—
and it is perhaps a critique of the first corollary—these manoeuvres can be read as
a means of social discipline, and in particular as an expression of what Michel
Foucault labelled an ‘anatomo-politics of the human body’, an optimization of the
body’s capacities, ‘the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness
and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls’.15
To construe these bodies as salvageable tools may have been a project shared by
both state and veterans. That imagined project also raised a question: could those
broken bodies, already salvaged from death and poverty, be re-optimized through
some form of art?

C ommunities of T echni q ue

That form of art, at least in Bembo’s telling of the Buti gunners’ tale, was the
mechanized iron hand. Before considering the hands themselves in the following
section, this section locates the artisanal know-how for fabricating such devices in
particular craft environments, or communities of technique. Few scholars have
pursued the circumstances that established the conditions for the mechanized

13 ASV, Archivio del Senato, Deliberazioni—Terra, registro 14, fol. 70v. 14 June 1501. On the
conflict at Cephalonia, see José Enrique Ruiz-Domènec, Il gran capitano: ritratto di un’epoca (Turin:
Einaudi, 2008), 228–31.
14 Michelle Laughran, ‘The Body, Public Health, and Social Control in Sixteenth-Century Venice’,
unpublished PhD thesis (University of Connecticut, 1998), 21–3, notes that Venice’s ‘first extensive
poor law’ dates to 1528, in the wake of a prolonged experience of plague.
15 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 139.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

138 John Gagné

prostheses that appeared in the century between 1450 and 1550. Documents
attesting explicitly to makers’ identities or training remain elusive. Best known
is the testimony of the French surgeon Ambroise Paré (1510–90), who named
his collaborator on a mid-sixteenth-century iron prosthetic as ‘the little fellow
from Lorraine’ (le petit Lorrain), a ‘locksmith living in Paris, a man of great wit’.16
Scholars have otherwise presumed that makers were—or had links to—armourers.17
Certainly the latter conjecture makes sense, but it is the world of the locksmith
that deserves pursuit here, since it encompassed an ensemble of craftsmen who
shared expertise in finely calibrated metalwork, gears, and triggers: all components
that would help to render iron prostheses responsive and lifelike. This group of
artisans included locksmiths, but also clockmakers, gunsmiths, and surgeons.18
The conditions that brought these workers into dialogue were the wars of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the contemporaneous fascination for
mechanical engineering. Passion for mechanics may not have developed in direct
response to war, but it soon found martial applications from the massive (siege
engines) to the delicate (gunlocks). Transformations in military technology, in the
aggregate, concentrated the percussive forces that could be brought to bear upon
humans. In turn, surgeons faced new challenges mounted by ballistic weapons—
particularly explosives—that mangled flesh and complicated effective medical
intervention. The surgical fieldbook, a popular and expanding genre in the fifteenth
century, catered to the desire to share therapeutic knowledge, including the design
of surgical tools.19 While medical authors had described such tools in their
writings from at least the thirteenth century, the circulation of woodcuts in printed
surgery manuals clarified and standardized the instruments’ design.20 In some cases,
the tool went by the name of the author who first proposed it in graphic form.21
An irony lurks in the corresponding history of ironwork for war and medicine.
Namely, artisans forging matchlocks may have been the very same artisans fashioning
surgical retractors. If not, they at least belonged to the same community of technique,
producing finely articulated metalwork that served the opposing goals of wounding

16 Ambroise Paré, Dix livres de la chirurgie avec le Magasin des Instrumens necessaires à icelle (Paris:
Jean Le Royer, 1564), 118–19.
17 Vittorio Putti, ‘Historical Prostheses’, The Journal of Hand Surgery 30.3 (2005): 310–25; 317.
Originally published in Italian in La chirurgia degli organi di movimento 9 (1925): 4–5.
18 On the phenomenon of ‘occupational migration’ amongst clockmakers and other smiths, see
Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, trans. Thomas
Dunlap (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 188–96.
19 Ralf Vollmuth, Traumatologie und Feldchirurgie an der Wende vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit
(Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 2001), 19–25, reviews the German-language authors involved in the genre’s
expansion in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, noting authors who probably developed their
surgical skills in war.
20 Mario Tabanelli, Tecniche e strumenti chirurgici del XIII e XIV secolo (Florence: Olschki, 1973).
For modern facsimiles of medieval instruments, see vii, figs. 93–5. See also Jean-Pierre Martin,
Instrumentation chirurgicale et coutellerie en France: des origines au XIXe siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan,
2013), 47–62.
21 The best-known case of such an instance is the bullet-removing forceps published in 1555 by
Alfonso Ferri, a tool subsequently known as the ‘alphonsinium’. See John Kirkup, ‘The History and
Evolution of Surgical Instruments, VII: Spring Forceps (Tweezers), Hooks and Simple Retractors’,
Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England 78 (1996): 544–52; 547.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Emotional Attachments 139

and rescuing flesh. It is reasonable to add to this community locksmiths (from

whom the gunmakers borrowed lock technology), and gunners (who forged guns
and mastered the intricacies of their moving metal parts).22
This proposal to see metalworkers and manipulators as an interconnected
mechanist fraternity finds support in the writings of early fifteenth-century
­polymath engineers from both German and Italian traditions. For over fifty years,
­historians of technology have pointed to these intriguing figures, authors like
Konrad Kyeser (1366–1405), Giovanni Fontana (1395–1455), and their suc-
cessors.23 Authors of splendidly illustrated technical miscellanies focusing on
engineering marvels, these men articulated in text and image the heretofore exclu-
sively oral and manual know-how of artisans in such a way as to dignify themselves
and their knowledge to potential patrons.24 Fontana, a Venetian, offers a particu-
larly valuable instance of a single person evidencing expertise in a number of the
skills identified above. Trained in arts at Padua, Fontana served as a physician to
Venetian military forces at Udine in the 1430s. His surviving works concern such
topics as clockwork, measurement, artillery, and aqueducts.25
In his Bellicorum instrumentorum liber (Book of Instruments of War, c.1420),
Fontana proposed an array of defensive fortifications, siege engines, and other
weapons. But no less striking are the hydraulic fountains, labyrinths, armoured
masks, shadow projectors, and particularly the technologies reliant upon geared or
toothed metal elements (clocks, mobile automata with articulated limbs, and lock-
picking tools) that show Fontana notionally in dialogue with a number of artisan
communities.26 Although no surviving metal prostheses appear to predate 1450,
Fontana’s treatise confirms his exploration of all the confluent fields—medicine,
metalwork, artillery—even within a single manuscript. Contemporaries and successors
elsewhere, as we will see in the next section, tread pathways similar to Fontana’s.
His writings also testify to the particular fertility of the Venetian environs for
technological speculation. For instance, during the very years when Buti’s bombardiers
appealed for pensions, Giancarlo Rainieri installed the new timepiece in the

22 On locks, see Mathieu Linlaud, Serrures médiévales: VIIIe–XIIIe siècles (Rennes: Presses Universitaires
de Rennes, 2014), especially 194–200 on locksmiths, about whom there is little information before the
fifteenth century; on fifteenth-century gun ignitions, see Cesare Calamandrei, Meccanismi di accensione
(Florence: Editoriale Olimpia, 2003), 21–5, 41–6.
23 Lynn White Jr, ‘Kyeser’s “Bellifortis”: The First Technological Treatise of the Fifteenth
Century’, Technology and Culture 10 (1969): 436–41; Eugenio Battisti, L’Antirinascimento (Milan:
Garzanti, 1989), 249–86; Bert S. Hall, ‘Der Meister sol auch kennen schreiben und lesen: Writings
about Technology ca. 1400–ca. 1600 A.D. and their Cultural Implications’, in Early Technologies,
ed. Denise Schmandt-Besserat (Malibu, CA: Undena, 1979), 47–58; Pamela O. Long, ‘Power,
Patronage, and the Authorship of Ars: From Mechanical Know-How to Mechanical Knowledge in
the Last Scribal Age’, Isis 88.1 (1997): 1–41; Michael Wyatt, ‘Technologies’, in The Cambridge
Companion to the Italian Renaissance, ed. Michael Wyatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2014), 100–38.
24 The drift of this argument relies upon Long, ‘Power, Patronage, and the Authorship of Ars’, 1–6.
25 Marshall Clagett, ‘The Life and Works of Giovanni Fontana’, Annali dell’Istituto e Museo di storia
della scienza 1.1 (1976): 5–28.
26 Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. Icon 242, Giovanni Fontana, Bellicorum instrumentorum liber
cum figuris (Venice, c.1420): fountains 27v; labyrinths 9v; masks 34v; shadow projectors 67v; clocks
with automata 51r; mobile automata 59v–60v, 63v–64r; lock-picking tools (grimaldelli) 35v–36r.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

140 John Gagné

San Marco clock tower (a work appraised in an official report by a team of specialists
including a gunsmith); and in 1502 an entrepreneur succeeded in gaining a
stipend from the Venetian Senate after pitching a perpetual motion machine,
a cogged set of chained wheels that could be used to saw wood or to mill grain,
something that ‘could return great profit to your Arsenal’, the petitioner noted.27
Neither clockwork nor the ambition to capture perpetual motion was novel, but
by linking these competences laterally across specializations—that is, through
networks of related metalwork trades—craftsmen cross-fertilized the techniques
captured in mechanized prostheses.28
The most propitious environment in which artisans might fashion objects like
metal hands was military-industrial, and Venice was home to Europe’s most
extensive arms factory: the Arsenal. In that secretive, high-walled shipyard-cum-
military workshop, thousands of labourers constructed warships and equipment.
One French visitor in 1459 described ‘fifteen hundred workers, or more, who do
nothing but build ships’, and listed hundreds more plying other tasks.29 In the
same decade, the first documents appear attesting to the government payrolling
bronze gun-founders in the Arsenal.30 The city was also dotted with other metal-
smiths (fabbri).31 If we can imagine the mutilated gunners from Buti in search of
workers with the competences to provide them with prostheses, then the Arsenal—
replete with technical specialists and fellow gunners—was a valuable hub to solicit
fellow craftsmen willing to lend a hand.
Although unique in its scope around 1500, Venice’s Arsenal faced competitors.
North of the Alps, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (r. 1486–1519) stockpiled
weapons and experts at his armoury at Innsbruck; he ordered his artillery-master
Bartholomäus Freysleben, a locksmith and bombardier, to inventory all available
weaponry.32 In its nearly three hundred pages, the illustrated catalogue collated
innumerable arms of all sizes and shapes. The artist also depicted the armoury
inside and out, and portrayed it as a military workshop where gunners built,

27 On the appraisal of the clock, see Victoria Avery, Vulcan’s Forge in Venus’ City: The Story of Bronze
in Venice, 1350–1650 (Oxford: British Academy, 2011), document 20, 20 November 1500, 353–4.
The gunner was Sperandio Savelli, and the evaluation reveals that parts of the clock were fashioned
from broken artillery pieces. For Rainieri and the clock more generally, see Alberto Peratoner, L’orologio
della Torre di San Marco in Venezia (Venice: Cafoscarina, 2000), 11–24; for the perpetual motion
machine, see ASV, Archivio del Senato, Deliberazioni—Terra, registro 14, December 1502 [no day
given], fol. 177v.
28 On these related mechanical traditions, see Derek J. de Solla Price, ‘On the Origin of Clockwork,
Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass’, Bulletin 218: Contributions from the Museum of History
and Technology (1959): 82–112. It is also worth noting the possibility that metalworkers were part of
surgeons’ guilds, where their skill in fabricating blades would be of critical use. The Venetian College
of Surgeons licensed a certain ‘Silvester Faber’ (faber = smith) in 1497 and again in 1498. Biblioteca
Marciana, Venice, MS It. Classe VII 2327 (= 9721), Collegio medico-chirurgico, Atti ‘A’, 1476–99, fol. 72r,
and MS It. Classe VII 2328 (= 9722), Collegio medico-chirurgico, Atti ‘B’, 1478–1549, fol. 6r.
29 Jean de Chambes, cited in Ennio Concina, L’Arsenale della Repubblica di Venezia (Milan: Electa,
2006), 38.
30 Avery, Vulcan’s Forge, 23–6, 45–54.    31 Avery, Vulcan’s Forge, 35–43.
32 For the order, see Regesta Imperii (RI) XIV, 3, 1, 10919. Maximilian to the Raitkammer of
Innsbruck, 22 September 1500.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Emotional Attachments 141

Fig. 8.1. Gunners in the Imperial Armoury, Innsbruck. In Bartholomäus Freysleben,

Zeugbuch, 1502. Illustrations by Jörg Kölderer. BSB-Hss Cod. Icon. 222, fol. 72r.

inspected, and fired weapons (Fig. 8.1).33 These European arms factories, whether
Italian or German, shared certain fundamental qualities. They benefited from
vibrant metallurgical industries flanking the Alps that abetted the arms race of the
fifteenth century, and they shared a caste of experts as well: many of the gunners in
northern Italy were German-speaking; indeed, none of the Buti bombardiers was
Italian.34 Moreover, they shared a culture of military handiwork pursued in secret-
ive state-owned factories almost exclusively staffed by men.35 The world of military

33 Freysleben’s manuscript, illustrated by the court artist Jörg Kölderer, is now at the Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek, Zeugbuch Kaiser Maximilians I., BSB Cod. Icon. 222 (dated 1502). On the
manuscript, see Wendelin Boeheim, ‘Die Zeugbücher des Kaisers Maximilian I.’, Jahrbuch der
Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses (1892), 94–201.
34 On the craft of German artillery masters—and Nuremberg as a particularly active hub of
technological transfer and internationalism—see Volker Schmidtchen, Bombarden, Befestigungen,
Büchsenmeister (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1977), 176–96; 180–3. For the alpine mining industry, see
Costanza Cucini Tizzoni and Marco Tizzoni, eds., Il ferro nelle Alpi: giacimenti, miniere e metallurgia
dall’antichità al XVI secolo—Iron in the Alps: Deposits, Mines, and Metallurgy from Antiquity to the XVI
Century (Bienno: Comune di Bienno, 2000).
35 Women worked in Venice’s Arsenal as sail-makers, although they laboured in their own work-
house, as did many other specialists. See Concina, L’Arsenale, 38. Likewise, women might occasionally
own metal workshops in Venice, but masters were keen to train sons and male apprentices, and they
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

142 John Gagné

metalwork, then, differed from the typical urban craft workshop, normally
described as a ‘family enterprise’.36 Instead its engine was war and its workers, pre-
ponderantly male, pursued the reciprocal applicability of their skills across several
fields. We cannot know whether the Buti bombardiers ever sought or obtained
iron hands. But we can at least confirm that their own professional networks had
already undertaken the collaborations necessary to provide them.

E xtant I ron H ands

From the century or so between 1450 and 1600 about thirty iron hands/arms sur-
vive, almost equally balanced between right and left.37 To reckon precise dates for
iron objects can be difficult; without knowledge of provenance, attributions of
origin and age must remain tentative, but specialists propose that the earliest
European prosthetic hands date to the fifteenth century, and probably from its
second half. The most celebrated of this period belonged to the German war cap-
tain Götz von Berlichingen (1480–1562), who suffered wounds to his right arm at
Landshut in 1504, during the War of Bavarian Succession. Dissatisfied with his
first prosthetic, he later replaced it with a version tailored more specifically to his
desires.38 A memoirist and sometime poet, Götz might otherwise have remained a
minor regional figure had not Johann Wolfgang von Goethe found inspiration
in his Falstaffian life to conjure a 1773 drama, Götz von Berlichingen with the
Iron Hand, a reflection on the twilight of feudal German society around 1500.
Highlighting the warrior’s salty turns of phrase, his determination, and stolidity,
Goethe positioned Götz as an upright man facing new and smothering political
tides. Thanks to the play’s success, Götz (and his hand) assumed a role in the
­medievalist nostalgia of German nationalism even before 1800.39 Both of Götz’s
prostheses remain celebrated patriotic relics at the Schlossmuseum in Jagsthausen.
In 1836 workers dredged an iron hand, putatively from the sixteenth century,
out of the sludge of the Rhine at Alt Ruppin; it belonged for many years to the
local Gymnasium and is now in the collections of the Neu Ruppin Museum. Only
a couple of hundred kilometres south-west of Jagsthausen, restorations to the

discriminated against daughters; records show widows to be the only women involved in metalwork.
Avery, Vulcan’s Forge, 55–67.
36 Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 109.
37 Many of these prostheses are catalogued in Liebhard Löffler, Der Ersatz für die obere Extremität:
die Entwicklung von den ersten Zeugnissen bis heute (Stuttgart: Enke, 1984), 7–65.
38 On the two hands, see Günther Quasigroch, ‘Die Handprosthesen des fränkischen Reichsritters
Götz von Berlichingen, 1. Fortsetzung: Die Ersthand’, Waffen- und Kostümkunde 24 (1982): 17–33;
and Günther Quasigroch, ‘Die Handprosthesen des fränkischen Reichsritters Götz von Berlichingen,
2. Fortsetzung: Die Zweithand’, Waffen- und Kostümkunde 25 (1983): 103–20.
39 Goethe’s friend, the Swiss engraver Christian von Mechel (1737–1815) published engravings
of the hand and its ‘sehr merkwürdigen Mechanismus’ on the occasion of the Congress of Vienna
in 1815. Christian von Mechel, Die eiserne Hand des tapfern deutsches Ritters Götz von Berlichingen
(Berlin: Drucker, 1815). These engravings became the most widely circulated and reproduced images
of an iron hand over the next century.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Emotional Attachments 143

church at Balbronn near Strasbourg in 1908 entailed opening the tomb of the local
nobleman Hans von Mittelhausen, who died in 1564, just two years after Götz.
From the dust of his bones, Mittelhausen’s metallic left hand greeted its discoverers
after 250 years in the crypt.40 Evocative tales aside, several hands—for understandable
morphological reasons—have come down to us in armour collections. Armouries
remain the most likely repository for pre-modern iron hands, and one can under-
stand collectors’ logic of contextualizing them amidst military metalwork of the
same era.41 But such decisions may also have engendered a misconception about
their origins, making iron hands a product of chivalric culture. Certainly, as
Berlichingen and Mittelhausen show, aristocratic warriors did indeed acquire these
replacement parts. But it seems just as likely that artisans and lower-rank warriors
would have been in a position to procure them from fellow craftsmen. Iron prostheses,
it would seem, travelled across classes.
A mechanical hand with particularly strong provenance supports this conclusion.
In 1476, the Swiss artillery master Ulrich Wyss’s hand was blown off, and—in a
process similar to the Buti veterans—he sought aid from the city council of
Fribourg. Wyss had lost his hand at Morat, a lakeside town adjacent to Fribourg,
site of a fierce battle in which confederated Swiss forces resisted the relentless
advance of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy (r. 1467–77). One of Fribourg’s
council members was the metalworker, locksmith, and clockmaker Ulrich Wagner
(d. 1485), originally from Munich. In the mid-1460s, he had graced the city’s
cathedral with a wrought-iron choir enclosure, and in 1480 he fashioned a new
clock for one of the town’s main gates, named the Clock-Jack Gate (Porte du
Jacquemart) for the automaton that chimed the hours.42 Recognizing Wyss’s military
skills as indispensable while Fribourg faced the Burgundian threat, the council
contracted Wagner to fashion a hand for Wyss. It is now part of the collection of
the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Fribourg (Fig. 8.2).43 The mutuality of the artisanal
community seems self-evident here: the manual craft of one metalworker refashioned
the body of another.
Notably, all of the extant hands—to differing degrees—feature movable digits.
Some fingers move all together, others bend in pairs, and still others flex individually.

40 R. Forrer, ‘Die eisner Hand von Balbronn (Elsass)’, Zeitschrift für historische Waffenkunde 7.1
(1915–17): 102–7; 103.
41 See, for instance, the auction catalogue for the collection of the early twentieth-century collector
Karl Gimbel, Rudolf Lepke’s Kunst-Auctions-Haus, Waffen- und Kunst-Sammlung Karl Gimbel
(Baden-Baden, 1904), 12, item 111, and table VII.
42 Marianne Rolle, ‘Ulrich Wagner’, Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse, <http://www.hls-dhs-dss.
ch/textes/d/D18796.php>; on the late medieval jaquemart, see E. R. Truitt, Medieval Robots:
Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 147.
43 Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Fribourg, MAHF inv. 7611. Raoul Blanchard, ‘Ulrich Wagner: Eiserne
Kunsthand des Büchsenmeisters, 1476’, Blätter des Museum für Kunst und Geschichte Freiburg 2000–2
[unpaginated, 4 pages]. The key passage noting the commission reads: ‘Item a maistre Ulrich Wagner
maistre facteur des reloges pour une main quil a fait a Ulrich maistre des boitez ordonne par
Messeigneurs en breff [en lieu(?)] de celle quil persist en service de la ville en fesant les keygel xj flor.,
vz, xxij lb’, Staatsarchiv Freiburg, Seckelmeisterrechnung 148b [2. Semseter 1476] f. 64. I have made
some changes to Blanchard’s transcription based on his published photograph of the passage from the
manuscript.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

144 John Gagné

Fig. 8.2. The iron hand fashioned by the clockmaker Ulrich Wagner for the artillery master
Ulrich Wyss in 1476 in Fribourg, Switzerland. Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Fribourg. Inv. 7611.

Thumbs, wrists, and elbows too vary in their capacities to replicate natural workings.
Movement relies upon hinges, gears, and mechanisms imported from the metal-crafts
discussed earlier. The will to motion suggests that wearers demanded functionality
and not just an ersatz limb. In other words, it was not just the hand itself that
counted, but its purport. Sixteenth-century voices themselves attest to that fact in
the following section.
Designs differed, as one might expect, according to specific injuries. Some surviving
artefacts are hands only, but the majority of them include either a metallic forearm
or, instead, flanges that could be bound to the body by tightly buckling a series
of leather ligatures. For devices replacing the whole arm and elbow, eyelets in the
arm sockets allow them to lace securely to a harness or other garment. When metal
stands in for human bone and flesh, its weight must be tempered to achieve a
manageable balance. To that end, makers often perforated the forearm to lighten
the device; one hand, almost whimsically, features floriated punch patterns. The
Museo Stibbert in Florence, home to four iron hands, catalogues their current
weight as 580, 620, 840, and 1,840 grams respectively, the last measurement
­representing an entire arm.44 All are heavier than the average human hand (565
grams) but only marginally. Ulrich Wyss’s hand in Fribourg weighs only 340 grams.
How wearers responded to those differences—not to mention other qualities like
temperature, sound, or facility of ligature—cannot be known.
Verisimilitude enlivens these objects. The makers of even rudimentary specimens
paid attention to the natural curl of digits, and to the representation of knuckles
and fingernails. One particularly fine hand in the Poldi-Pezzoli Museum, Milan,
even echoes in its naturalistic design the silver hand-and-arm reliquaries that
encased saintly metacarpals, saluting worshippers across Europe. But unlike those
holy vessels, iron hands had labours still to perform. All of them appear capable of

44 Putti, ‘Historical Prostheses’, 314, 317–18.

 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 25/11/17, SPi

Emotional Attachments 145

Fig. 8.3. The mechanical hand devised by the petit Lorrain, in a hand-coloured illustration in
the Wellcome Collection. From Instrumenta Chyrurgiae et Icones Anathomicae, 1564.

gripping tools or other substances in a fist. While in many hands the gears have
now rusted, decayed, or broken, the grip often relied upon a ratchet that cranked
the fingers into an ever-tighter fist. The grasp could be released by pressing a
button. Ambroise Paré highlighted the workings in his well-known interior view of
the petit Lorrain’s hand (Fig. 8.3). (An undated reconstruction of it can be seen at
the Musée de l’Histoire de la Médecine, Paris.) It describes cogs that permitted
each finger to curl individually and lock in position with each crank. The mechan-
ism terminated in a ‘button at the base of the large [internal] trigger, which—if
one pushes it—allows the hand to open’.45 Flexion of individual fingers, however,
appears to have been rather rare; the petit Lorrain’s digits, unusually, ply incrementally
thanks to articulated scales like those on armoured gauntlets. Paré’s design for a full
arm also featured a spiral clock-spring in the elbow, ‘which must be of tempered
steel, and three feet in length, or more’.46 Surviving models, too, permit elbows to
assume a variety of postures.47 Just as artisans had used similar gears and clockwork
elements to animate mechanical birds, animals, and other automata in courtly
settings in earlier centuries, now that same knowledge brought a certain naturalism

45 Paré, Dix livres de la chirurgie, 580.   46 Paré, Dix livres de la chirurgie, 580–1.
47 Putti, ‘Historical Prostheses’, 314–16.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

146 John Gagné

to artificial human appendages.48 That fusion of the mechanical and the biological
fashioned bionic bodies that were, in fact, not just naturalistic but preternatural.
The quest for verisimilitude thus enabled a notably early chapter in the history of
human–machine interfaces.

W earers : A ffect and P erseverance

Little evidence of the emotions experienced by those who needed prostheses in

the Renaissance exists. Nor do we know whether there were appropriate discursive
or literary outlets through which to express such sentiments. But neither should
we foreclose the insights that our fragmentary evidence can provide. It may be
true, as one scholar has it, that in his memoir Götz von Berlichingen ‘does not
describe any kind of relationship with his iron-hand’.49 If the Renaissance prosthetic
were indeed a ‘feeling thing’, the traces of any emotional work that it elicited from
its wearers do not resemble those of recent centuries. In addition, the notion that
war and its consequences (especially physical and mental trauma) have universal
effects upon participants is a fallacy, one that demands the historicization of
experience.50
This section thus proposes two arguments. First, our best glimpse of emotional
states comes in descriptions of the abyss of dismemberment: namely, deciding
whether to accede to amputation (if such an option even presented itself ), and
what to do in its wake. The fear of death met the ontological question ‘Who will
I be then?’ Second, the artificial part helped to answer that unsettled question
of being. Unlike modern prosthetics, imagined to be transformative objects,
Renaissance prostheses were purposive objects. Rather than seeing the new limb as
the expression of the aleatory quality of life (a random act wounded me and triggered
an unforeseen series of personal changes in which I was transformed), Renaissance
wearers found continuity in the new hand, employing it to bridge the two shores of
a life interrupted (my purpose in life seemed imperilled, but this tool has permitted
me to persevere).51 In particular, it confirmed and re-enabled men’s professional
habitus by allowing them to resume their erstwhile work. This schematic vision
could surely be nuanced, but it at least articulates a field of historical play in which
to see the object’s role in constructing subjectivities.

48 On courtly automata in the fifteenth century, see Battisti, L’Antirinascimento, 261–5, and Truitt,
Medieval Robots, especially 116–40 on automata in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Hesdin.
49 Harari, Ultimate Experience, 68.
50 Yuval Harari, ‘Armchairs, Coffee, and Authority: Eye-Witnesses and Flesh-Witnesses Speak about
War, 1100–2000’, Journal of Military History 74.1 (2010): 53–78.
51 On the transformative dimensions of technology in contact with bodies in contemporary
culture, see Anne Balsamo, ‘Forms of Technological Embodiment’, Body & Society 1 (1995): 215–37;
on technology that ‘sparks the medical imagination and drives the political economy of hope’, see
Mary-Jo Del Vecchio Good, ‘The Medical Imaginary and the Biotechnical Embrace’, in Subjectivity:
Ethnographic Investigations, ed. João Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2007), 362–80; 366–7.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Emotional Attachments 147

One of the most telling personal accounts of the fear of dismemberment in the
sixteenth century is also one of the best known; it appears in the Commentaries of
the Gascon nobleman Blaise de Monluc (1502–77). Dictating his memoir in the
1570s, Monluc recalled assaulting a fortress in central Italy in 1527. Clothed in
mail with a sword, shield, and helmet, he threw himself into the fray as
innumerable shots rained down on me, and one shot passed through my shield into
my arm, four fingers’ distance from my hand, and another [hit me] higher up, at the
joint between the shoulder and the arm, breaking all the bones. The shield fell from
my hand and I lost feeling in my arm. Wanting to pull myself back through the entry,
I was so aggressively set upon by the enemies that I fell down a hole. […] I broke my
arm again in two places, beneath the wound and near the elbow. When [my men]
pulled me out, I said that I had left my arm in the city, so one of my servants took my
arm, which was hanging like a scarf over my rear, and placed it against the other,
which soothed me a bit.52
Monluc’s men took him back to camp, where two of his captain’s surgeons exam-
ined him and counselled the amputation of his arm. An imprisoned surgeon
who observed this consultation, however, warned him against it. He told Monluc
‘that I ought not even consider it, telling me that I wasn’t even middle aged and that
I would forever miss my arm, that I would pine for death a hundred times a day,
and he begged me not to submit to it’.53 This was Monluc’s abyss of dismemberment:
to decide upon the fate of his endangered limb in the face of polarized medical
advice framed in passionate language. His captain apparently partook of this dilemma
and found neither option preferable. The captain remarked: ‘I too regretted [the
idea] of having it amputated, knowing that my heart would suffer if he should die;
and if he lived without his arm, I would always rue his condition.’54 Ultimately,
Monluc wagered that his arm would heal, which apparently it did, but he described
the eight to nine weeks of his early recovery as ‘the greatest pain one can feel in this
world’.55 The prospect of dismemberment, then, could haunt surgeons, patients,
and friends alike. Indeed, Paré warned fellow surgeons that a bad amputation
could kill, and even a relatively successful one had to guard against leaving the
bone exposed, ‘which will prohibit [amputees] from using an artificial limb’.56 He
also described patients suffering from the bewildering sensations of phantom pains,
in which the amputee imagined himself still to possess the missing extremity.57

52 Blaise de Monluc, Commentaires et lettres, vol. I, ed. Alphonse de Ruble (Paris: Jules Renouard,
1864), 79–80.
53 Blaise de Monluc, Commentaires et lettres, 83.
54 Blaise de Monluc, Commentaires et lettres, 84. Monluc attributes these words to his captain,
Odet de Foix, sieur de Lautrec (1485–1528).
55 Blaise de Monluc, Commentaires et lettres, 85.
56 Paré, Dix livres de la chirurgie, 114v–115r.
57 Paré, Dix livres de la chirurgie, 116v. See also the compelling and puzzling study, Douglas B. Price
and Neil J. Twombly, The Phantom Limb Phenomenon: A Medical, Folkloric, and Historical Study. Texts
and Translations of the 10th to the 20th Century; Accounts of the Miraculous Restoration of Lost Body Parts
(Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1978), which argues that stories of miraculous limb
reattachments are expressions of the ‘phantom limb’ phenomenon expressed in miraculous rather than
medical language. The authors hold Paré to be the first to describe the phenomenon in familiar terms,
in 1551. See xv.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

148 John Gagné

To disaggregate the living body in order to save it: the paradox of amputation
elicited articulations of affect rare in pre-modern warfare.
Götz von Berlichingen, by contrast, did not share Monluc’s dilemma (or at least
he did not describe it), since he had no choice in the matter. Enemy cannon fire
propelled his own sword into the gap between his glove and his armour, ‘so that the
arm was shattered at front and back, and when I looked at it, the hand was just
barely hanging by the skin’.58 With his hand gone, Götz prayed to God to end his
life, for
I was ruined as a warrior. But then I recalled a fellow who had been one of my father’s
good old friends […] named Kochle […] who also had just one hand and could still
fight as well as anyone else against enemies in the field, and I appealed to God and
thought: even if I had twelve hands and lacked the support of God’s grace, all would
be in vain, but if I just had the slightest aid, even perhaps an iron hand (es were gleich
ein eissene hand ), or whatever it might be, so then with God’s help I could be just as
good in the field as any other man.59
The emotional nadir of Götz’s dismemberment came when he feared that his life as
a warrior had been terminated. It pushed him to articulate the centrality of the
soldierly persona to his self-valuation. Only in recollecting Kochle’s successful
rehabilitation and his return to full participation in the profession of arms could
Götz project an imaginable future for himself, one that confirmed his established
vocation. For its part, the iron hand functioned as the key material agent of God’s
grace in Götz’s vision of recovery. The Buti bombardiers, at least in Bembo’s History,
wished for a similar return to the trade they had always known, as gunners.
Götz von Berlichingen’s emergence from his abyss relied upon a prosthesis to
ratify his professional status quo ante. The false limb, from this perspective, was an
object with purposive powers: it re-established subjectivities that had been beset by
dismemberment. Indeed, the better part of the scant testimony related to artificial
limbs in this period praised the devices for re-enabling men in their habitual work.
In his treatise, De humani corporis turpitudinibus cognoscendis et curandis (On Knowing
and Treating the Deformities of the Body, 1600) the physician Giovanni Tommaso
Minadoi (1540–1615) outlined two cases of iron hands, using the first to suggest
their virtuosic performance of simple dexterous tasks, and the second to show
them affirmatively bridging past and present:
Men have dreamed up remedies for deformities with great machines; they put iron
hands (ferreas manus) in the place of natural flesh, cut away and amputated. Indeed,
I know a certain nobleman who—by chance in a plot had both hands cut off and was
thus living without hands—obtained iron hands from a certain artisan (a quodam
artifice) that fitted so snugly, attached with such skill, and had so many counter-
weights and ligatures, that with them he could doff his cap and put it back on, open
and close his purse, and write his own name with a pen. I know another fellow whose
hand had been hit by a bolt from a gun and was amputated, and who likewise with

58 Götz von Berlichingen, The Autobiography of Götz von Berlichingen, ed. H. S. M. Stuart (London:
Gerald Duckworth, 1956), 25.
59 von Berlichingen, Autobiography, 26.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Emotional Attachments 149

great diligence provided himself with an iron hand so that he could do many things
with it, things he once also did with his hand of flesh.60
This last man worked as a sailor in Venice; apparently his wounds did not restrict his
employment to the salt office or Sea Customs Post like the veterans we met earlier.
These narratives—affirmative rather than transformative—invested prostheses
with the quality not primarily of wonder, as one might expect, but of utility. Iron
hands were tools, albeit intimately embodied ones. With those tools, men found
integrity and renewed purpose in the same way as the state often imagined the men
themselves as tools or as salvaged labour. In a small but significant way, these arti-
ficial limbs act as nexus points in the histories of labour and technology, in which
perceived human insufficiencies are imagined to find beneficial optimization
through arts or sciences. As noted earlier, what makes it a particularly compelling
confluence is that it involved not the standard human manipulation of machines,
but rather the mechanization of humans. Moreover, social and emotional econ-
omies crossed that same nexus point. The grief and pain of dismemberment
brought consolation from friends, companions, or even remembered acquaint-
ances. We can imagine that the iron hand functioned as a token of those affections,
as well as a material trace of the social bonds that led to its acquisition. One of the
many unanswered questions about these objects is: how were they paid for? They
might have been purchased outright, while at least some of our cases—such as the
Council of Fribourg asking Wagner to fabricate a hand for Wyss—suggest they
were gifts, tokens of esteem for services rendered.61 The lines between charity for
the wounded, gifts between craftsmen, and medical consumerism seem to con-
verge in the early modern prosthetic.

C onclusion : O n the A bsence of Women

One historian, referring to Götz, has reasoned: ‘one-armed knights were not a
common phenomenon’.62 This chapter questions that assumption by pointing to
dozens of surviving prostheses and to several references to iron hands across
Renaissance Europe. Even if we accepted that few knights (masters of bladecraft)
found themselves deprived of a limb, it is nonetheless evident that gunners (masters
of ballistics) were constantly at risk.63 Fighters and craftspeople of lower social

60 Giovanni Tommaso Minadoi, De humani corporis turpitudinibus cognoscendis et curandis (Pavia,

1600), fol. 95v.
61 On gifts, see Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison, WI: University
of Wisconsin Press, 2000), especially 48–51 regarding gifts related to healing; Gadi Algazi, ‘Introduction:
Doing Things with Gifts’, in Negotiating the Gift: Pre-Modern Figurations of Exchange, ed. Gadi Algazi,
Valentin Groebner, and Bernhard Jussen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 9–27.
62 Yuval Harari, Renaissance Military Memoirs: War, History, and Identity, 1450–1600 (Woodbridge:
Boydell, 2004), 49.
63 Even at leisure, those who worked in proximity to gunpowder were in danger of harm. See a
letter of 9 June 1573 to Duke Francesco de’ Medici, describing how some Neapolitan mariners burned
their hands and faces when gunpowder in a festive mock battle exploded. Archivio di Stato di Firenze,
Mediceo del Principato 4153, fol. 135. MAP Doc ID 18502.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

150 John Gagné

rank, this chapter proposes, must be figured in histories of prosthetic science,

especially since the urban artisan milieu was the seedbed of the technologies to
fabricate such devices. Thus communities of technique met communities of affect,
since the worlds of skill and of sociability overlapped substantially in the military-
industrial sphere of pre-modernity. We must also figure these objects in gift
economies that include both the succour of charity and the empowerment of
shared knowledge.
Part of the reason this chapter has highlighted the masculine networks involved
in producing iron hands has been to sharpen the apparently gendered quality of
prosthetic technology and medicine. Were there no women with artificial limbs?
We know that women equally partook of the artisanal epistemologies of manual
craft, albeit usually in spheres outside the military metalwork investigated here.64
We know that women and children by the thousands joined armies as camp
­followers throughout this period. Jan Wellensz de Cock’s woodcut (c.1500) on the
same subject suggests how one might imagine, in the words of one observer, ‘a
countless multitude of women, kitchen help, and useless rascals’ (Fig. 8.4).65 We
also know that women lost hands by means of violence; ‘as she valiantly fought off
a Frenchman who had attacked her’, during the French invasion of Naples in

Fig. 8.4. Jan Wellensz de Cock (1490–1527), Camp Followers, c.1500 (?). Amsterdam,
Rijksmuseum, Rijksprentenkabinet.

64 Monica Chojnacka, Working Women of Early Modern Venice (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2001).
65 Sanudo, Diarii, vol. IX, 321. At least two men in Cock’s image are missing legs.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Emotional Attachments 151

1495, a noblewoman of the Laudati family ‘had her hands cut off ’.66 It would be
difficult to parse the sex of extant Renaissance prostheses. Perhaps some of them
did belong to women, but even comparative measurements of dimensions and
mass could only yield speculative answers.
So close to speculation already, let us take one further step. If we recognize the
world of artisanal metalwork (clocks, guns, locks, and so forth)—and especially its
contribution to the military enterprise from the fourteenth century forward—as a
masculine one, then this chapter’s invocation of that milieu also connects suggest-
ively to the history of mechanism as read by feminist scholars. In those readings,
the rise of machine metaphors to articulate epistemologies of order in Western
science was inherently gendered. Principles of knowledge based upon ‘manual
manipulation, technology, and experiment’ were also part of a world view that
enunciated ‘a conceptual power structure’ positing science’s object to be nature-as-
woman.67 Before natural philosophers of the seventeenth century could elaborate
those concepts theoretically, polymaths and artisans like Giovanni Fontana,
Bartholomäus Freysleben, and Ambroise Paré (and others who left no writings at
all) had to invent them practically. While that narrative of artisanal anticipation
has in fact stimulated histories of science for over twenty years, perhaps the projec-
tion of mechanistic principles into elemental contact with the human body by way
of metal prostheses from the fifteenth century onward can reveal deeper histories
of the process by which mechanism came to find its gender.
I should render that last proposal concrete by way of example. In 1514, the
Swiss artist Urs Graf (1485–1528) opened his sketchbook. He had been fighting
as a mercenary in Italy, capturing in pen-and-ink drawings scenes of soldier life,
and added to those pages an arrestingly enigmatic drawing (Fig. 8.5). Standing on
a promontory overlooking a lakeside village, a woman bereft of three limbs casts
her gaze down to the ground. Missing both arms, she wears what might be a
wooden peg in place of her right leg, visible beneath her hiked-up skirts. Her left
foot is shoeless. We know essentially nothing of this subject; Graf offered no clues.
Did he depict a real woman? If so, where did he encounter her? How might her
body have been so afflicted? Scholars have presumed that she was a camp follower,
possibly a prostitute, but these are suppositions.68 If, in fact, Graf ’s subject were a
camp follower in the Italian Wars, or a woman maimed by other violent means, she
can remind us of otherwise obliterated subaltern histories. Might she have had the
occasion to intersect with the craftsman communities examined in this chapter?
Would she, unable to mount one arm on her frame without another, have even
found any value in prostheses? We have seen in this chapter how prosthetic

66 Paolo Giovio, La prima parte dell’historie del suo tempo (Florence, 1551), 166.
67 The classic articulation of this thesis appears in Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women,
Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (London: Harper & Row, 1980), especially 216–35; 216. On the
dangers of using pre-modern automata to forecast the modern, see Adelheid Voskuhl, Androids in the
Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 15–27.
68 Margarete Pfister-Burkhalter, ‘Geleitwort’, in Urs Graf, Federzeichnungen (Leipzig: Insel Verlag,
1960), 40–3; J. R. Hale, ‘The Soldier in German Graphic Art of the Renaissance’, Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 17.1 (1986): 85–114; 100.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

152 John Gagné

Fig. 8.5. Urs Graf, Armless Woman with Wooden Leg, 1514. Basel, Kupferstichkabinett, Inv.
U.I. 58.

technologies flourished in environments where men found overlapping advantage

in objects that encapsulated mastery of techniques, bodies, and emotions. But
Graf ’s armless woman incarnates those people excluded from that mechanically
oriented knowledge community, for whom none of these things offered relief.
By way of concluding, let me point out how these prosthetic objects throw
up two conundrums for the study of ‘feelings’ and of ‘things’. In the first case,
they illustrate the historian’s difficulty in approaching the individual’s emotional
expressions regarding dismemberment. The pre-modern false limb, I have suggested,
might be most usefully imagined as an object that rebuilt the human subject both
physically and emotionally; it did so by activating and materializing affective
bonds between men who shared time, work, and knowledge together. We can
apprehend these communities, it seems, even more clearly than the individuals
within them. The iron hand functioned both as a relic of those relationships and a
stimulus to fresh affect: with friends, city, or God. In the second case—and here
we shift from ‘feeling’ as emotion to its other meaning as physical sensation—the
prosthetic poses the thorny problem of how to conceptualize the history of sensation
when craft could replace nature as the maker of the human body. Unlike other
implements that extended sensation (eyeglasses, canes), the iron hand was a reparative
tool. It stood in for a missing component of the body, and yet could not feel.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Emotional Attachments 153

Prevailing medical theories of sensation from Galen to Vesalius understood the

capacity of sense as an effect of the movements of the soul. The prosthetic simulacrum
was a profoundly unfeeling thing when seen through the filter of classical theory,
soulless and instrumental. Indeed, its refined metal workings articulated an
intersecting coeval view, one that valorized the human body’s own mechanical
qualities.69 These problems—of human sensory limits and of the optimal metaphors
to conceive embodiment between soul and machine—inhered in the prosthetic.
Feeling and unfeeling all at once, the iron hand pointed back to its wearer, as if to
ask: are we one and the same?

69 On Galen and Vesalius’ interrelated views of the human hand, see Nancy Siraisi, ‘Vesalius and
the Reading of Galen’s Teleology’, Renaissance Quarterly 50.11 (1997): 1–37; 4–10.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 25/11/17, SPi

9
Materializing Maternal Emotions
Birth, Celebration, and Renunciation in
England, c.1688–1830

Sally Holloway

On 28 December 1757, just three days after Christmas, Margaret Kelbe from
Witney in Oxfordshire brought her infant girl Sarah to the Foundling Hospital in
London, with the hope of providing her with a better life. Margaret had spent the
previous days carefully selecting a pink ribbon to leave with Sarah, painstakingly
writing her name, place of birth, and the date, ‘Dec ye 26 1757’, onto it in black ink
(Fig. 9.1). When Sarah was a mere two days old, Margaret made the seventy-mile
journey from Oxfordshire to the Foundling Hospital in London. On her arrival at
the ‘Receiving Lodge’, the door would have been immediately closed and locked,
and a bell rung ‘to give notice to one of the Nurses to take the Child’. After Sarah
had passed her inspection by the chief Receiving Nurse, Margaret would have
handed the ribbon to a clerk in case she was ever in a position to return.1
Tokens such as Margaret Kelbe’s ribbon were carefully saved in the hospital’s
billet books as each child was numbered and registered, beginning when it opened
its doors in 1741 until the end of General Reception in 1760. Mothers clearly
understood the vital role played by tokens in reclaiming their infants, asking that
items be ‘properly reposited’ in hopes of ‘Recalling’ children to their ‘Longing
arms’.2 Although they were no longer required after 1760, tokens continued to be
left until 1804, as the assumption that the hospital required an identifying item
had become widespread. While some mothers brought items such as rings and
thimbles, others left printed and personalized textiles, which are the subject of this

I am grateful to Joanne Begiato, Alice Dolan, John Styles, and Amanda Vickery for reading ver-
sions of this chapter, and to John in particular for initially encouraging me to delve into the
foundling archives.
1 Sarah Kelbe, 28 December 1757, foundling no. 6,846, London Metropolitan Archives (subsequently
LMA), A/FH/A/9/1/80. Thomas Bernard, An Account of the Hospital for the Maintenance and Education
of Exposed and Deserted Young Children (London, 1759), 35–7. ‘Any remarkable Token, or Writing,
brought with the Child, is to be marked with the Number of the Child, and inclosed in its Billet’, 37. The
Foundling Hospital continues today as the children’s charity Coram: <http://www.coram.org.uk>.
2 Note left with foundling no. 12,645 on 3 May 1759, a two-day-old boy named James Mayday.
A similar note left with Ann Mears, foundling no. 12,668 in the same billet book described bequeathing
‘a token that It may be feached out againe’, LMA, A/FH/A/9/1/141.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Materializing Maternal Emotions 155

Fig. 9.1. Pink ribbon with ‘Sarah the Daughter of Margit Kelbe Wittney Oxford sheere
Dec ye 26 1757’ written in ink, left as a token with foundling no. 6,846. London
Metropolitan Archives, A/FH/A/9/1/80. © Coram.

chapter. The images and fabrics selected encapsulate the mother’s emotions, identity,
taste, social standing, and personal connection with her child. Billets remained
strictly private once a child was admitted, as they provided ‘the only Means which
can enable the Governors to know the Children in case they should be enquired
for’. They were therefore kept ‘with great Secrecy and Care, and are never opened
but by Order of the General Committee’.3 If mothers did not bring a token, a
small sample of cotton or linen was cut from the mother’s gown or the child’s frock
and carefully preserved in the hospital’s billet books. The vast foundling archive
contains tokens for around 5,000 infants, and fabric samples for more than
10,000.4 Compared to the pincushions and silk cot sets studied elsewhere in this
chapter, the archive provides a rare glimpse into the emotions of predominantly
lower-ranking women through the material world.

3 Bernard, An Account of the Hospital, 38.

4 These figures only include infants accepted between 1741 and the end of General Reception in
March 1760, in billet books A/FH/A/9/1/1–178. John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in
Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 333; John Styles,
‘Objects of Emotion: The London Foundling Hospital Tokens, 1741–60’, in Writing Material Culture
History, ed. Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 165–71; 166–7.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

156 Sally Holloway

This chapter analyses the material expression of emotion during the birth and
renunciation of a child, chiefly through textiles. These transformative moments in
women’s lives were defined by the creation, purchase, display, and exchange of
objects. The chapter argues that the selection and personalization of these items
provided women with a crucial means of articulating their emotions, creating an
intricate symbolic vocabulary of maternal feeling. It is arranged into two sections,
first analysing items such as ribbons, cockades, and quilts commonly created for
infants and left with foundlings, and second investigating the symbols, from crowns
to broken hearts, selected by women to encapsulate their emotions.
In attempting to access the full spectrum of maternal emotions, this chapter
draws upon a wide array of primary sources. Material objects include printed
textiles, ribbons, cockades, and fragments of samplers preserved in the Foundling
Hospital billet books at the London Metropolitan Archives. In addition, there are
delicately crafted hearts, pincushions, and quilts in the collections of the Foundling
Museum, Museum of Childhood, Museum of London, and Victoria & Albert
Museum in London, and the Quilt Museum and Castle Museum in York. The
imagery and emotional significance of these items is interpreted using a varied
­collection of supporting sources, including paintings, biblical and moral tracts,
fables, letters, poems, and court records. The chapter also draws upon dictionaries
of symbols in phrase, fable, and art. While the chapter cannot claim to study every
object associated with birth or babies, it focuses on a select number of representa-
tive items with particular emotional or symbolic significance. The chapter notes
when foundling textiles were clearly intended as tokens by mothers, usually when
the list of clothing recorded on a billet was left blank, as the mother’s identifying
token was deemed sufficient evidence. Nonetheless, some infants had both tokens
and a completed list, making the emotional intent of certain items less clear.5
This study is situated within a broad historiographical context, drawing upon
themes of material culture, gender, the life cycle, and the emotions. Studies of
eighteenth-century material culture continue to grow apace, exploring the material
dimensions of consumption, gender, and memory.6 Textiles have featured heavily
in this new field, chiefly as clothing, quilts, and furnishings.7 As Sue Prichard has
argued, the emotive power of textiles is exemplified by the myth that military
quilts were made from the clothes of dead comrades, as the quilts were objects of

5 For example, John Hansell, foundling no. 2,988, left on 14 December 1756, LMA, A/FH/A/9/1/37.
6 Notable collections include Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan, eds., Women and Material
Culture, 1660–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); John Styles and Amanda Vickery, eds.,
Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America 1700–1830 (New Haven, CT, and
London: Yale University Press, 2007); Paula Findlen, ed., Early Modern Things: Objects and their
Histories, 1500–1800 (London: Routledge, 2012); Hannah Greig, Jane Hamlett, and Leonie Hannan,
eds., Gender and Material Culture in Britain since 1600 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); and
Jennifer G. Germann and Heidi A. Strobel, eds., Materializing Gender in Eighteenth-Century Europe
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2016).
7 For example, see Sue Prichard, ed., Quilts 1700–2010: Hidden Histories, Untold Stories (London:
Victoria & Albert Museum, 2010); David M. Mitchell, ‘“My purple will be too sad for that melancholy
room”: Furnishings for Interiors in London and Paris, 1660–1735’, Textile History 40.1 (2009): 3–28;
and Styles, Dress of the People.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Materializing Maternal Emotions 157

emotion that garnered legends over time.8 John Styles’s seminal research into the
Foundling Hospital textiles and subsequent exhibition ‘Threads of Feeling’ at the
London Foundling Museum and Colonial Williamsburg have revealed the rich
opportunities presented by this vast collection.9 By drawing upon the foundling
collections and related textiles as primary source material, this chapter seeks to create
what Giorgio Riello has termed a ‘History of things’ by finding ‘deeper personal
meanings in individual objects’.10
The personal and emotional meanings of textiles created immediately before
and after the birth of a child were frequently encoded in symbols. The language of
sign and symbol is evident in only a small proportion of the foundling textiles,
reinforcing their purpose in conveying emotional meaning. The material expres-
sion of emotion through symbols would have been particularly valuable to the
mothers of foundlings, many of whom were illiterate. In her study of sixteenth-
century courtship rituals, Diana O’Hara has argued that ‘Inscriptions, love motifs,
symbolic designs and imagery’ created a symbolic repertoire which raised ordinary
objects such as decorated boxes to an ‘amatory level’.11 Rozsika Parker has revealed
how needlewomen in the seventeenth century commonly chose to depict biblical
heroines in the tales of Esther and Ahasuerus, David and Bathsheba, and Judith
and Holofernes to prove ‘women’s potential for heroic action’ as ‘a declaration in
favour of their sex’.12 For the mothers of foundlings during the eighteenth century,
‘emblematic items’ such as hearts could provide a material outlet for the ‘most
direct expressions of raw maternal emotion’.13 The material vocabulary of emotion
was often a symbolic language, enabling women to convey love, hope, or sorrow
through widely recognized maternal motifs in English culture.
While the emotional implications of material culture have repeatedly been
touched upon by historians, they have rarely been explicitly addressed in depth or
detail. Emotions are thus everywhere and nowhere in histories of material culture.
As Chapter 1 has argued, significant work has been undertaken in anthropology,
archaeology, and psychology. Recent work by historians has begun to redress the
balance. A special issue of Textile on ‘Emotional Textiles’ sought to draw out the
varied emotional meanings of textiles from linen to lace. In her study of a single
linen sheet created in the early seventeenth century, Antonia Brodie argued that
initials and dates embroidered onto the sheet from c.1786 to 1900 reflected ‘strong
family ties inherent in a farming community’, helping to foster a ‘sense of continuity

8 Sue Prichard, ‘Introduction to the Themes and Ambitions of the Exhibition and Conference’,
Quilts Conference, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 11 June 2010.
9 John Styles, Threads of Feeling (London: Foundling Museum, 2010), passim.
10 Giorgio Riello, ‘Things That Shape History: Material Culture and Historical Narratives’, in
History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources, ed. Karen Harvey
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 24–46; 25.
11 Diana O’Hara, Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor England
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 83.
12 Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London and
New York: I. B. Taurus, [1984] 2010), 96–102; 99, 102. Further popular Old Testament tales were
Rebecca and Eleazar, Jael and Sisera, Ruth and Naomi, David and Abigail, Miriam and Moses, Solomon
and Sheba, Susanna and the Elders, Jephthah’s Daughter, Abraham and Hagar, and the Sacrifice of Isaac.
13 Styles, ‘Objects of Emotion’, 168.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

158 Sally Holloway

and connection’.14 Tove Engelhardt Mathiassen’s analysis of early modern Danish

christening garments considered the colour red and metallic threads as ways for
parents to protect babies from evil and bring them good fortune.15 This chapter
seeks to advance the burgeoning field by discovering how anxiety, hope, love, loss,
and sorrow were materialized by women during rituals surrounding birth and
renunciation in eighteenth-century England.
Attempting to access the affective properties of material objects can be a difficult
task. We are often reliant on written snippets by the mothers of foundlings or their
scribes, who repeatedly left notes imploring, ‘pray take grate care of this child’.16
Others encoded their feelings using symbols, exemplified by one coin left as a token
in 1759 engraved with an eye, an ant, and a leaf to spell out ‘I want relief ’ (‘[eye]
w[ant] re[leaf ]’) above an infant in a cot. The objects analysed in this chapter were
imbued with an overwhelming range of emotions. While some mothers may have
been consumed by sorrow, others might have been relieved to leave infants that they
were unable to care for.17 Records reveal that one mother in 1759 was so desperate
to have her child accepted that she ‘run away’ as soon as attendants took the infant,
and ‘received no Certificate of its delivery’. Closer examination revealed that the girl
had twice been refused as she was thirteen months old, but the woman had already
‘unlocked the Dore made off and Left the child’.18 While this episode was unusual,
the tokens left by mothers evoke a wide spectrum of emotions, including maternal
love, sorrow, relief, and hope for the future.
The birth of a child was traditionally celebrated with the giving of presents to
the infant, as dramatized in the fairy tale The Sleeping Beauty (translated from
French into English in 1729), where ‘the princess had seven fairies for her godmothers’,
who gave her beauty, wit, grace, and skill in dancing and music.19 Expectant
mothers acquired gifts such as caps, gowns, cot covers, curtains, and pillows for
their children, while also assembling childbed linen for the birth. On 12 October
1699, Lady Penelope Mordaunt worried that she was advanced in her pregnancy
but unprepared for her coming child, writing to her husband that she had sent for
‘blankets and things’ for it. When pregnant again on 22 October 1700, she asked
her husband to send up two little pillows and a cradle quilt.20 Assistance was

14 Antonia Brodie, ‘Marking and Memory: An Embroidered Sheet in the Collection of the Victoria
and Albert Museum’, in ‘Emotional Textiles’, ed. Alice Dolan and Sally Holloway, special issue of
Textile 14.2 (2016): 160–75; 172.
15 Tove Engelhardt Mathiassen, ‘Protective Strategies and Emotions Invested in Early Modern
Danish Christening Garments’, in ‘Emotional Textiles’, ed. Dolan and Holloway, 208–25.
16 Foundling no. 10,315, baptized Elizabeth Brown, 1 November 1758, LMA, A/FH/A/9/1/115.
17 Foundling no. 37 was recorded as being ‘stupified with Opium’ on 17 April 1741, while no. 77
was ‘almost starvd’ on 8 May 1741, LMA, A/FH/A/9/1/1.
18 Foundling no. 12,547, infant boy, 25 April 1759, LMA, A/FH/A/9/1/140.
19 The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood. A Tale (Nottingham, 1796), 2–4. The tale has diverse origins,
and was first published in French in the romance Perceforest (1528), then as Day 5, Tale 5 of
Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone (1636) and Charles Perrault’s ‘La Belle au bois dormant’ in Histoires
ou contes du temps passé (1697), which introduced the giving of gifts. Perrault’s version was translated
into English in 1729 in Robert Sambler’s Histories, or Tales of Past Times.
20 Lady Penelope to Sir John Mordaunt, CR 1368 Vol. 1/21, 12 October 1699, and Vol. 1/29,
22 October 1700, Warwickshire County Record Office.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Materializing Maternal Emotions 159

available to defray the costs of childbirth; the British Lying-In Hospital for Married
Women (established in 1749) provided linen for its patients, while texts such as
Instructions for Cutting out Apparel for the Poor (1789) supplied charitable institu-
tions with instructions for cutting out bedgowns, shirts, caps, sheets, and nappies
for ‘that expensive period’.21 The assembly of such textiles was used as evidence in
infanticide cases that a mother intended to keep her child. During the trial of the
servant Martha Rickets in 1729, witnesses ‘depos’d that the Prisoner had made
some Provision of Linen for the Child’, while during the trial of Mary Taylor in
1731, ‘the Child-Bed Linen was produced in Court, which was taken out of the
Prisoner’s Drawers’. Both women were found not guilty, as the linen provided
incontrovertible evidence that they had been preparing to welcome their children
into the world.22
Warm woollen blankets were commonly left with foundlings, made from
sturdy materials such as linsey-woolsey or flannel. Blankets were often decoratively
embroidered or hemmed in coloured wools, creating a material embodiment of a
mother’s affection for her child. The hours dedicated to embroidery may have been
invested in the later stages of pregnancy, or the days or weeks prior to visiting
the Foundling Hospital. The practice finds a parallel in women’s embroidered
courtship gifts, used to demonstrate duty, to evince love, and publicly lay claim
to a suitor.23 On 12 May 1759, a two-week-old girl was left with a piece of white
flannel blanket edged with a zig-zag pattern in blue worsted thread, while on 20
July 1759, a six-week-old girl was bequeathed a white blanket embroidered with
the initials ‘M.d’ in pink.24 Families on modest incomes opted for practical linen
covers which were easy to wash, while wealthy parents were able to commission
luxurious silk cot sets.25 Linen quilts were commonly decorated with natural
motifs such as leaves and flowers. One linen cot quilt created c.1700–10 by an
unknown maker is bordered with sixteen medallions depicting exotic creatures,
including a mermaid, a merman, and a camel.26 It is possible from the numerous
maritime motifs that the family may have been involved in trade or exploration
overseas. The three-masted ship may also have been used to anticipate the child’s
future adventures, while a lion represents bravery, the Resurrection, and royalism.

21 An Account of the British Lying-In Hospital, for Married Women, in Brownlow-Street, Long-Acre
(London, 1771), 10, 21; Instructions for Cutting out Apparel for the Poor (London, 1789), vii, 73–85.
22 Trials of Martha Rickets, 21 May 1729, ref. t17290521-43, and Mary Taylor, 15 January 1731,
ref. t17310115-22, for infanticide, Old Bailey Online (hereafter OBO). Many thanks to John Styles
for discussing this point with me.
23 Sally Holloway, ‘Romantic Love in Words and Objects during Courtship and Adultery c.1730
to 1830’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of London, 2013), 69–73.
24 Foundling nos. 12,744, A/FH/A/9/1/142, and 13,471, A/FH/A/9/1/149. For further examples,
see foundling no. 11,285, a male infant admitted on 22 January 1759 with a piece of white flannel
embroidered with the letters ‘MR’ and hemmed in red worsted thread, A/FH/A/9/1/126, and found-
ling no. 13,624, a female infant admitted on 7 August 1759 with a piece of red linsey-woolsey blanket
hemmed with purple and blue worsted thread, A/FH/A/9/1/151.
25 Clare Browne, ‘Making and Using Quilts in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Quilts, ed. Prichard,
24–47; 34–37.
26 Quilt Museum, York. For a similar example, see the quilted embroidered linen coverlet from
1703 in the V&A, no. 1564-1902.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

160 Sally Holloway

By purchasing and embroidering whatever textiles they could afford, from worsted
to silk, mothers sanctified these materials as the apotheosis of maternal emotion, and
an outpouring of joy at the safe arrival of a child.
While linen, pillows, and blankets were largely practical items, mothers also
purchased adornments such as ribbons and cockades for their infants. Ribbons
were characteristically feminine objects left with foundlings, like the pink ribbon
used to identify Sarah Kelbe in Fig. 9.1. Gillian Clark’s sample of fifty-seven
clothing lists from 148 billets has revealed that 100 per cent of foundlings wear-
ing caps decorated with ribbons were female.27 Ribbons were highly versatile gifts
as they could be cut in half, tied in knots, or used to hang objects such as engraved
coins around a person’s neck. Necklaces fashioned from ribbons provided a means
of connecting mothers with their absent children, as they situated tokens next
to the skin, dangling them tantalizingly close to the heart. On 25 June 1756, a
foundling named John Todd from Kensington was given away with a long strip of
pink penny ribbon, threaded through a silver penny, and knotted at the end.28
His mother may have worn the ribbon around her neck on her way to the
­hospital, and kept an identical talisman herself. Two years later, a five-day-old
infant named Hannah Mugeridge wore a black ribbon threaded through a silver
threepence around her wrist.29 Other women personalized coins by cutting them
in half, as a symbol of cleavage and the moment when mother and child would
be reunited.
While ribbons were typically female objects, cockades were exclusively male.
Such associations enabled mothers to use ribbons and topknots to distinguish
female infants, and occasionally cockades to distinguish male infants. Nonetheless,
the humble cockade was not as widespread as the ribbon.30 As a case study of three
billet books between March 1741 and June 1749 reveals, ninety-five girls were
recorded wearing knots or ribbons around their heads when left at the hospital,
compared to only two boys wearing cockades. The most popular colour for knots
was white, followed by blue and pink, as the presence of ribbons rather than their
colour denoted that infants were female. The two cockades were both blue, sported
by an eight-week-old boy on the left side of his head, and a six-week-old boy to
adorn his cap.31 Cockades were definitively male objects, retaining their military
associations as a trimming on soldiers’ hats.32 Cockades also provided a symbol of
allegiance during political elections and civil unrest, with black cockades representing

27 Gillian Clark, ‘Infant Clothing in the Eighteenth Century: A New Insight’, Costume 28.1
(1994): 47–59; 50.
28 Foundling no. 1,780, 25 June 1756, LMA, A/FH/A/9/1/21.
29 Foundling no. 8,056, 10 April 1758, LMA, A/FH/A/9/1/92. The ribbon and threepence have
not been preserved alongside Hannah’s billet.
30 Similar arguments are made in Clark, ‘Infant Clothing’, 56, and Styles, Threads of Feeling, 48–9.
31 Five boys had ribbons tied around an arm or wrist, or pinned to their breast. These billet books
were selected as clothing inventories were usually completed to distinguish foundlings, as it had not
yet become customary to bring tokens. Based on LMA books A/FH/A/9/1/1, A/FH/A/9/1/4, and
A/FH/A/9/1/6.
32 C. Willett Cunnington and Phillis Cunnington, Handbook of English Costume in the Eighteenth
Century, rev. edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 85, 88, 235.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Materializing Maternal Emotions 161

the Hanoverians and white the Jacobites during the 1745 rising, and declaring
support for the Protestant Association during the Gordon Riots in 1780. Such
items could be crafted by hand, or purchased from shops for around threepence,
or two shillings for a more elaborate version.33 By adorning their infants with
cockades or topknots, mothers could make a small personal investment in their
child before parting with them at the hospital.
Women renouncing their children also created highly personalized mementoes
recording an infant’s name, date and place of birth alongside their own names. The
naming of a child was especially poignant for the mothers of foundlings, as it
allowed them to briefly claim a child as their own. Notes left at the hospital reveal
that they were either unaware that infants would be renamed after admission
or determined to make an exception, repeatedly requesting that they be baptized
again by the same name. Mothers expressed their devotion by creating embroi-
dered textiles featuring their child’s name, creating a permanent material record
indelibly linking it to its previous life. Scraps of linen left with children such as
Ann Adams, foundling no. 2,545, on 22 October 1756 recorded her date of birth
and the name chosen by her mother, just as in cotton bedcovers and quilts. Even
when they did not have the time, money, or skill for an elaborate creation, mothers
bequeathed items such as ribbons roughly marked with a family’s initial, and
symbols such as the cross to represent the hope that their child would be protected
by God.34 When Philip Hollond’s mother gave him to the hospital on 1 May 1758,
she left a bracelet of fuchsia ribbon with his name embroidered onto the centre in
red cross stitch (Fig. 9.2). She also wrote him a hopeful prayer for his future
happiness, reading;
Go gentle Babe! Any future hours be spent
In Vertuous purity and calm content.
Life’s sunshine Bless thee: and no anxious care
Sit on thy Brow, and draw the falling tear.
Thy countrey’s Grateful servant may’st thou prove
And all thy Life be Happiness and Love.35
The prayer may have been inspired by the story of Moses in Exodus, whose mother
‘took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put

33 Old Bailey trials record both thieves stealing ribbon to make cockades, and browsing cockade
patterns in store. In 1790, two women were tried at the Old Bailey for stealing three yards of ribbon
worth twopence a yard from a haberdashery shop to make a cockade. In 1797, a man was charged
with stealing thirty-two yards of silk ribbon worth fifteen shillings from a shop, which the owner was
making into cockades. Stolen cockades were valued at threepence for a black silk example, to two
shillings for a laced cockade. See theft trials of Mary Davis and Hannah Wynne, 24 April 1790,
t17900424-45; Mary Worth, 8 December 1773, t17731208-48; William Glinn, 6 December 1780,
t17801206-53; Daniel Woodward, 12 July 1797, t17970712-47; Mary Ann Gayford, 26 October
1826, t18261026-164, OBO.
34 Foundling no. 3,289, infant girl named Mary after her mother, admitted with a pink ribbon
marked with the letter ‘S’ in ink, 27 January 1757, LMA, A/FH/A/9/1/40. Foundling no. 7,921,
infant boy admitted with leather with embroidered cross symbols, 1 April 1758, A/FH/A/9/1/91.
35 Philip Hollond, Foundling no. 8,338, 1 May 1758, A/FH/A/9/1/95.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

162 Sally Holloway

Fig. 9.2. Embroidered fuchsia ribbon left as a token with Philip Hollond, foundling
no. 8,338, on 1 May 1758. London Metropolitan Archives, A/FH/A/9/1/95. © Coram.

the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink’.36 He was found
by Pharaoh’s daughter, who opened the ark and saw that ‘the babe wept’, like the
‘falling tear’ in this poem. It repeats the theme of renunciation but is full of hope,
as Moses went on to lead the people of Israel to the promised land of Canaan.
The items selected by mothers to convey their emotions varied according to
social rank. Accomplished gentlewomen, and their friends and family, would have
crafted items such as pincushions when expecting a child. Such objects became
increasingly popular from the late 1760s. Pincushions were practical, as pins could
be used in needlework and lace-making, to fasten adult and children’s clothing,
and to educate young girls. They were also decorative, with pins arranged into
hopeful phrases such as ‘Luck in a Lad’ (1768), ‘God Bless the Babe and May It
Live and A Deal of Comfort May It Give’ (1787), ‘Long live the dear child’ (1794),
and ‘you’re welcome here My Little Dear’ (1819).37 Joanne Begiato has highlighted
the anxiety and apprehension inherent in this language, which helped to bond
families as they negotiated the uncertain process of pregnancy.38 Presents were
­customarily given after a baby had arrived, as there was a superstition that if
given before childbirth, they could increase the mother’s pain, signified by sayings
such as ‘More pins more pain’. Pincushions played a parallel role as mourning
­souvenirs, demonstrating their popularity in marking stages of the life cycle.39
The rectangular layette pincushion in Fig. 9.3 features the motto ‘Health to the

36 Exodus 2:3, Authorized King James Version (subsequently KJV).

37 ‘Luck in a Lad’, 1768, in Eleanor D. Longman and Sophy Loch, Pins and Pincushions (London:
Longmans, Green and Co., 1911), Plate XXXV; ‘God Bless the Babe’, layette pincushion, England,
1788, Museum of Childhood, MISC.95-1985; ‘Long live the dear child’, white silk pincushion dec-
orated with five hearts, created for the novelist Frances Burney’s son Alexander, 1794, Longman and
Loch, Pins and Pincushions, 175; ‘you’re welcome here My Little Dear’, 1819, York Castle Museum.
38 Joanne Begiato, ‘“Breeding” a “Little Stranger”: Managing Uncertainty in Pregnancy in Later
Georgian England’, in Perceptions of Pregnancy from the Seventeenth to Twentieth Century, ed. Jennifer
Evans and Ciara Meehan (London: Routledge, 2017), 13–33.
39 See pincushions naming the ‘martyrs’ who died in the 1745 Jacobite Rising, and mourning the
Duke of York in 1827, in Longman and Loch, Pins and Pincushions, 170–1, 178–9.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Materializing Maternal Emotions 163

Fig. 9.3. Ivory cotton pincushion, Britain, 1784, 11.7 cm (H) × 16 cm (W) × 5.3 cm (D).
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, B.3-2009.

Little Stranger’, reflecting anxieties about infant mortality, alongside the date and
the initials of both parents ‘MH’ and ‘TH’. The ivory fabric epitomizes the purity
of a new-born child, like the falling snowflake and the white dove released by
Noah. It features a design of two voided hearts, an enclosed crown, two budding
flowers, and a palm tree. The creation of pincushions provided a way for women
to channel their love, anticipation, and expectation into a physical object while
awaiting the birth of a child. Each pin bears a women’s touch, as it was pushed
individually into a precise space without tearing the fabric. The survival of so many
of these pale, fragile objects with both fabric and pins intact suggests that the
cushions were carefully preserved to provide a lasting record of an infant’s arrival.
One of the largest handmade items celebrating the birth of a child was a quilt,
which was a highly personalized gift, providing a unique opportunity for female
emotional expression. Quilts were typically handed down between generations due
to their intricate craftsmanship and emotional value, but could also be recycled
and recovered to provide the wadding for a new creation. They had both practical
and symbolic functions, as they increased a mother’s comfort during childbirth, and
sewing the name and date of birth of an infant onto a quilt created a permanent
reminder of them in the home. This was significant as high mortality rates meant
that children’s lives were fragile, especially in the Foundling Hospital, where
61 per cent of children admitted during General Reception died before the age of
apprenticeship.40 Bedcovers rejoiced at the birth of a child by recording an infant’s
name and date of birth alongside symbolic images of crowns, coronets, and sprigs
of flowers.41 The crown provides a unifying motif for the pincushions, quilts, and
samplers analysed in this chapter, also appearing in tokens left with foundlings. On
6 February 1747, a male infant only a fortnight old was left with a monochrome
illustration of a crown and sceptre framed by a curtain. His name, ‘Henry Talbot’,

40 London Lives database, ‘Historical Background: Associational Charities’, <http://www.londonlives.

org/static/AssociationalCharities.jsp>, accessed 15 May 2017.
41 See, for example, the patchwork quilt created to mark the birth of Henry Iane Haines in 1786,
England, T.20-1938, V&A.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

164 Sally Holloway

was written in ink on the back, before the image was carefully folded into four
sections and sealed with red wax. The sceptre is topped with a fleur-de-lys, the
emblem of French kings, symbolizing purity, prosperity, and glory. The regal image
of the crown denotes absolute authority and everlasting life, enabling mothers to
consecrate the lives of their vulnerable young infants.42
The second part of this chapter focuses more closely upon the symbols harnessed
by women to articulate their emotions. Distinctive icons from crowns to snowflakes
were specifically chosen by mothers to embody their feelings for a child, enabling
them to create a lasting material record of an infant’s arrival. While tokens left at
the Foundling Hospital were intended to identify infants, this did not mean
symbols were selected at random. As this chapter will show, the small proportion
of textile tokens utilizing symbolic motifs—such as birds (Fig. 9.4), butterflies
(Fig. 9.5), acorns (Fig. 9.6), blossoming flowers, fruits, and trees—tie into wider
themes of the material culture of maternity, reinforcing their emotional purpose
for mothers.
The emblem of the tree provided an icon of humanity, with mighty oak trees
crafted as strong and healing in folklore. The acorns they nourished acted as
symbols of fecundity, prosperity, and spiritual growth.43 Textiles employed during
birth and renunciation harnessed the powerful symbolism of acorns to wish infants
a prosperous and healthy future. On 22 July 1758, Thomas Jones Jr was left at the
Foundling Hospital with a print of an acorn in the hope he would grow into a
strong adult (Fig. 9.6). At the end of our period, an ivory pincushion decorated
with acorns, roses, thistles, and shamrocks between 1830 and 1850 implored God

Fig. 9.4. Blue and pink bird printed on white calico, left with an infant boy who was one
day old on 20 July 1759, foundling no. 13,476, 6.3 cm (W) × 7 cm (H). London Metropolitan
Archives, A/FH/A/9/1/149. © Coram.

42 Jack Tresidder, ed., The Complete Dictionary of Symbols in Myth, Art and Literature (London:
Duncan Baird, 2004), 132, 187. See also the token with hand-stitched purple crown left with found-
ling no. 11,262 on 20 January 1759, LMA, A/FH/A/9/1/126.
43 John Ayto, ed., Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 17th edn (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 2007), 988–9, 1407; Tresidder, Complete Dictionary of Symbols, 12.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Materializing Maternal Emotions 165

Fig. 9.5. Polychrome butterfly print left as a token with foundling no. 9,018 on 23 June
1758, when he was three days old, son of William and Saron Turnear [sic] of Saint Mary,
Whitechapel, 3.6 cm (W) × 4 cm (H). London Metropolitan Archives, A/FH/A/9/1/102.
© Coram.

Fig. 9.6. Monochrome acorn print left as a token with Thomas Jones Jr, foundling
no. 9,324, on 22 July 1758, when he was seven days old, 3.5 cm (W) × 4 cm (H). London
Metropolitan Archives, A/FH/A/9/1/105. © Coram.

to ‘Bless and Protect’ a new-born child.44 The symbolism of ‘insignificant’ acorns

was crafted in fables, where they became ‘so large and stately a tree, with branches
of such prodigious strength’.45 After weathering the ‘seeming scorn’ of other larger
trees, the mighty oak reigned ‘Unrival’d on the verdant plain’.46 Harnessing the
acorn as a symbol enabled women to represent their love, hope, and faith in a
healthy and thriving future for their offspring.
Images printed onto cotton and linen were first imported from India in the late
seventeenth century, before the boom in British printed textiles in the second half

44 Pincushion, 1830–50, V&A Museum of Childhood, MISC. 238–1988.

45 Fable XI, ‘The Atheist and the Acorn’, in Dodsley’s select Fables of Esop and other fabulists (Dublin,
1763), 52.
46 Fable XI, ‘The Oak and other Trees’, in Elizabeth Fell, Fables, Odes, and Miscellaneous Poems
(London, 1771), 28–30.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

166 Sally Holloway

of the eighteenth century.47 The widespread availability of printed designs made

cutting out symbols a wholly new way of communicating individual emotions.
From mid-century, the mothers of foundlings repeatedly utilized printed flowers
as tokens to both identify their infants and convey their emotions. Flowers were
associated with gay and blooming childhood, presented as the ‘epitome’ of life
itself.48 Printed flowers and blossoming branches are often found on frocks and
shirts worn by babies and young children.49 The gradual shift towards printed
pre-made goods reflects the commercialization of commemoration in society
more broadly.50 Poor to middling mothers could anticipate or commemorate a
birth using ceramic keepsakes of cradles, complete with curved rockers enabling
them to be played with. The cradles came printed with standard messages such
as ‘The Gift Is Small But Love Is All’, which was widespread on posy rings,
­samplers, and pincushions. Their purpose as material vehicles for emotion could
be enhanced with small motifs representing childhood, including the alphabet
and blossoming flowers.51
Colourful winged creatures such as birds and butterflies were frequently chosen
to embody a mother’s hope that her infant would enjoy a carefree future. Butterflies
possessed many of the same symbolic properties as acorns, blossoming from ‘humble’
caterpillars into ‘beautiful’ creatures. A butterfly’s triumphant emergence from the
chrysalis represented rebirth and resurrection, mirroring a mother’s hopes for her
disadvantaged child.52 As the butterfly remarked to the disdainful ant in Dodsley’s
select Fables (1763), ‘Let me advise you never to despise any one for his condition,
as there are none so mean but they may one day change their fortune.’53 Butterflies
can commonly be found in samplers created by young girls, providing a symbol of
youthful innocence. Butterflies in art encapsulated the transitory and fragile nature
of childhood, with Thomas Gainsborough depicting his two daughters chasing
a butterfly c.1756. As the younger sister darts towards a butterfly sitting atop a

47 Styles, Dress of the People, passim. While printing on all-cotton fabric was banned for the
home market between 1720 and 1774, printed cottons could still be exported, while printing on
linen and mixed fabrics remained legal. See Browne, ‘Making and Using Quilts’, 45, and Giorgio
Riello, Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), 110–34.
48 ‘Ode to a Faded Rose’ in Fell, Fables, 119.
49 Foundling no. 9,454 on 4 August 1758, no. 9,484 on 5 August 1758, no. 10,831 on 19
November 1758, and no. 12,645 on 3 May 1759 were all bequeathed printed flowers as tokens, LMA
A/FH/A/9/1/106, A/FH/A/9/1/122, and A/FH/A/9/1/141. See baby’s linen shirt with floral printed
cotton cuffs, 1770, MISC.188-1982, and block-printed cotton frock with blossoming tree branches,
1775–99, T.100-1924, V&A.
50 As Marius Kwint has argued, the collecting of souvenirs such as fans and snuffboxes by the upper
and upper-middle classes during the Grand Tour became ‘the dominant template for all subsequent
tourism and its popularisation’. The trend continued into the early nineteenth century, with ‘sophisticated
images’ reproduced on a bewildering array of items from sewing boxes to book jackets. See Marius
Kwint, ‘Material Memories’, Tate: The Art Magazine 15 (1998): 47–9. Thanks to John Styles for discussing
this point with me.
51 For example, see Staffordshire slipware cradle (1725) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
13.27.3, and Staffordshire earthenware cradle (1700–10) in the V&A, C.305-1921.
52 Tresidder, Complete Dictionary of Symbols, 80.
53 Fable XXXIX, ‘The Ant and the Caterpillar’, in Dodsley’s select Fables, 71.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Materializing Maternal Emotions 167

thistle, she is oblivious to the danger it poses.54 Portraits of young girls also depicted
them with birds perched in hand.55 Birds signified ‘both the human and the divine
spirit’ due to their ‘lightness and rapidity, the soaring freedom of their flight,
and their mediation between earth and sky’.56 They were thought to be carefree
creatures, which could pass through life leaving ‘no track behind them’, just as
mothers hoped that parting with their children would provide them with a better
life.57 In March 1758, one mother left her baby girl with a paper sketch of a bird
swirling from the ink, while the mother of foundling no. 13,476 sought out a
colourful blue and pink bird printed onto calico to wish her child an untroubled
future (Fig. 9.4).
While birds were synonymous with a carefree life, snowflakes were traditionally
associated with childhood as each snowflake was unique, beautiful, natural, and
made by God. Falling snowflakes were pure, like children, as they were not tarnished
by earthly sin, and transient, like childhood, as they would eventually melt. Their
purity was evoked in the Bible when the Lord said to Isaiah, ‘though your sins be
as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow’.58 Silver snowflakes made from pins were
lovingly arranged onto pincushions to welcome new-born children, celebrating
their immaculate beauty.59 The motif was also used by the vicar’s wife Jane Johnson
(1706–59), who, as an expression of childhood innocence, created delicate paper
cut-outs of snowflakes, flowers, and the sun as part of her nursery library in the
1740s.60 Snowflakes were employed as a symbol of purity in classical texts, and
were used to create an innocent and youthful picture of Cupid when Psyche first
saw him:
Soft as the cygnet’s down his wings,
And as the falling snow-flake fair,
Each light elastic feather springs,
And dances in the balmy air.61
The symbol of the snowflake encapsulated the fragility of a child’s uncorrupted
youth. As John Locke warned in his famous treatise Some Thoughts Concerning
Education (1693), the ‘tender mind’ of children was vulnerable to corruption by
tales of spirits, goblins, and ‘Bloody-bones’ stories.62 The fable of ‘The Flake of Snow
and the Dunghill’ saw the ‘virgin purity’ of a snowflake descending from heaven
polluted by the ‘vileness’ of mud and dung.63 The snowflake thus represented

54 I am grateful to Joanne Begiato for directing me to this painting. For butterflies in samplers, see
examples by Mary Mattax (1742), T.319-1960, Sarah Brignell (1780), T.46-1970, and Jane Bailey
(1830), T.321-1960, in the V&A.
55 See portrait miniature of Miss Elizabeth Weld by Bernard Lens, Great Britain, c.1720, watercolour
on ivory, V&A, P.65-1987.
56 Tresidder, Complete Dictionary of Symbols, 71.
57 Fable XXI, ‘Industry and Sloth’, in Dodsley’s select Fables, 57.
58 Isaiah 2:18, KJV.    59 Pincushion, eighteenth century, York Castle Museum.
60 Susan Whyman, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009), 167.
61 Apuleius, Cupid & Psyche, a mythological tale from ‘The golden ass of Apuleius’ (London, 1799), 28.
62 John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (London: J. Wright, 1725), no. 138, 206.
63 Fable III, ‘The Flake of Snow and the Dunghill’, in Fell, Fables, 7–8.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

168 Sally Holloway

a mother’s desire to safeguard the purity of her infants, and protect them against
corruption and sin.
A plethora of textile hearts tumbles from the foundling archives, symbolizing
the undying love of mothers renouncing their infants. As Fay Bound Alberti has
argued, early modern physicians placed the heart at ‘the centre of an individual’s
emotional and psychological life’. In medical treatises, hearts ‘grieved and sank
(often fatally) by being uplifted and defeated by their owner’s emotional lives’.64
The heart was located as the essence of divine and emotional love in the Bible, for
‘the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance,
but the LORD looketh on the heart’.65 To bequeath an infant a textile heart was
to place metaphorically a mother’s heart in their possession. The rich collection of
surviving hearts includes a blue ‘paper hart’ threaded onto a pink ribbon bequeathed
to the foundling John Hansell as a token in 1756,66 and a heart of yellow silk left
as a token with the foundling Mary Deske in 1757.67 The following year, found-
ling no. 10,563 had a vivid red heart carefully cut from a felted woollen cloth and
pinned to her cap.68
The heart on the cross provides the most explicitly religious interpretation of the
heart in the foundling billet books, which is absent from wider birth rituals. Unlike
the Catholic sacred heart, such hearts provided symbolic markers of emotion
‘without the messy business of blood and guts’, and were never depicted burning,
bleeding, or weeping.69 An intricate red heart left as a token with an unknown
infant hints at its mother’s suffering, and is painstakingly pinned to a white cross
(Fig. 9.7). The tiny object provides a permanent reminder of a mother’s touch as
she prepared to renounce her infant, through coiled embellishments delicately
attached by hand. The hole in the centre of the heart provides an emotive material
reminder of absence. A heart on the cross could also represent a mother’s death; the
foundling Robert Cutler was admitted on 1 March 1751 with a hand-cut paper
heart as a token, onto which is glued a ribbon in a doleful black cross.70
While Protestant hearts in England did not burn, they could easily be broken.
As during the breakdown of romantic relationships, the breaking of the heart
represented the final stage of sorrow.71 On 7 May 1759 an infant named Sarah
Thomas was left at the hospital when she was just two days old. Her mother left
her with half of a white textile heart, which was roughly cut with scissors, as a
token (Fig. 9.8). The centre of the broken heart is marked from top to bottom by
a simple vertical running stitch, suggesting that it may have been cut from the edge

64 Fay Bound Alberti, Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, and Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010), 161.
65 Samuel 1:16, KJV.    66 Foundling no. 2,988, 14 December 1756, LMA, A/FH/A/9/1/37.
67 Foundling no. 4,403, 7 May 1757, A/FH/A/9/1/54.
68 Foundling no. 10,563, 22 November 1758, A/FH/A/9/1/118. For a further example, see
foundling no. 2,481, a girl left a paper heart threaded onto a green ribbon as a token, 11 October
1756, A/FH/A/9/1/30.
69 On the symbolism of the heart, see Emily Jo Sargent, ‘The Sacred Heart: Christian Symbolism’,
in The Heart, ed. James Peto (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 102–14; 112.
70 Foundling no. 704, 1 March 1751, LMA, A/FH/A/9/1/9.
71 Holloway, ‘Romantic Love’, 206–11.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Materializing Maternal Emotions 169

Fig. 9.7. Red textile heart on a cross left as a token with an unknown infant. Displayed in
exhibition ‘Fate, Hope & Charity’ at the London Foundling Museum in 2013. © Coram.

Fig. 9.8. Half of a white heart left as a token with foundling no. 12,685, Sarah Thomas,
when she was two days old on 7 May 1759. London Metropolitan Archives, A/FH/A/9/1/141.
© Coram.

of a blanket or gown. Sarah’s mother would have kept the other half in case she was
ever in a position to reclaim her. The pure white of the fabric symbolized the child’s
innocence, while the heart cut in half represented cleavage and the breaking of a
mother’s heart, but also the moment when mother and child would be reunited.
The imagery analysed in this chapter is powerfully brought together in the
fragment of a sampler left with Thomas Harris as a token on 6 December 1759
(Fig. 9.9). Samplers provided a means for young girls to develop their needlework
skills through repeating numbers, letters, symbols, moral verses, and biblical pas-
sages such as the Lord’s Prayer. Sampler making was taught in orphanages and
charity schools, where girls learned basic needlework skills to prepare them for
employment as housewives, seamstresses, weavers, or domestic servants. Genteel
young women often went on to create more elaborate pictorial samplers using
expensive silk threads. A select number survive that were exchanged as tokens of
friendship, used to commemorate national events, or to mark births, marriages,
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

170 Sally Holloway

Fig. 9.9. Sampler left with Thomas Harris as a token when he was fourteen days old,
6 December 1759, foundling no. 14,695, 10 cm (W) × 16.2 cm (H). London Metropolitan
Archives, A/FH/A/9/1/161. © Coram.

and deaths within a family.72 Might Thomas’s mother have created this sampler to
commemorate his birth? Embroidered using simple cross stitch and tent stitch,
the Second Commandment, ‘THOU shalt not make unto thee any graven image’,
is still visible.73 The phrase is surrounded by a line of pink, blue, white, and green
hearts to connote love, alternating pink and white fruits hanging from green stems
denoting fruitfulness or blossoming, three-leaf clovers, and regal pink, gold, and
white crowns. Unusually, the sampler has a frilled edging, like the frilled sampler

72 On samplers, see Parker, Subversive Stitch; Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses:
Women, Art and Ideology (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, [1981] 2013), especially Chapter 2,
65–7; Clare Woodthorpe Browne and Jennifer Wearden, Samplers: From the Victoria & Albert Museum
(London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1999); Carol Humphrey, Quaker School Girl Samplers from
Ackworth (Guildford: Needleprint, 2006); Joy Jarrett et al., Stitched in Adversity: Samplers of the Poor
(Witney: Witney Antiques, 2006); Joy Jarrett et al., Changing Styles—The Eighteenth Century: One
Hundred Years of Sampler Making (Witney: Witney Antiques, 2007); Leena A. Rana, ‘Stories behind
the Stitches: Schoolgirl Samplers of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Textile 12.1 (2014):
158–9.
73 Browne notes that the eighteenth century saw ‘a diminishing range of stitches in the young girl’s
repertoire—tent stitch and cross stitch were her usual choice’ in ‘Samplers in the Museum’s Collection’,
Browne and Weardon, Samplers, 10.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Materializing Maternal Emotions 171

pockets and pillows created by children in orphanages.74 The band design, coarse
unbleached linen ground, simple technique, and large unworked spaces suggest
that the sampler was probably created when Thomas’s mother was at school.75 This
token left at the hospital in 1759 therefore connects Thomas’s childhood with that
of his mother. In physically cutting away a section of a sampler crafted by her own
hand during her youth, Thomas’s mother cleaved a part of her own identity to leave
with her son at the hospital.
To conclude, this chapter aims to have demonstrated the powerful emotional
role played by women’s creation, selection, and embroidering of textiles during
rituals surrounding the birth and renunciation of infants. The textiles analysed are
imbued with a wide range of emotions, including anxiety, expectation, faith, joy,
love, and sorrow. Symbols such as birds, butterflies, and acorns bespeak the power
of hope for the mothers of foundlings, who harnessed the material world to wish
their infants carefree and prosperous futures. Certain naturalistic symbols such as
trees and flowers were shared across rituals of birth and renunciation. Others were
more specific to the mothers of foundlings, such as the tragic images of the heart
broken, divided, and on the cross. These symbols provided an embodiment of
women’s emotions at a key point in the life cycle, creating a distinctive symbolic
vocabulary of maternal feeling.
The objects selected by mothers changed over time, with the introduction of
pincushions to birth rituals in the 1760s, and colour images printed onto cotton
and linen in the second half of the century. The rise of the souvenir also led to the
emergence of new commercial objects used to commemorate events in the life cycle.
Objects varied according to social rank, with ceramic cradles playing a similar role
for plebeian mothers as pincushions for their elite counterparts. The prevalence of
natural imagery reflects the wider eighteenth-century vogue for botanical motifs.
While mothers occasionally harnessed motifs such as the heart on the cross, the
symbols they selected are largely secular. Mothers’ hearts are also devoid of Catholic
motifs of the heart weeping or aflame.
Women’s personalization of textile tokens added another layer to their emotional
meaning. Mothers articulated their emotions as they carefully inked, pinned, and
embroidered each object by hand. Acts such as cutting a textile heart in half created
a physical cleavage in the object itself that was mirrored in a mother’s separation
from her child. For mothers such as Margaret Kelbe, whose case was used to open
this chapter, the act of writing her daughter Sarah’s name onto a ribbon in ink may
have provided a small way to memorialize her love while beginning to prepare to
part with her child. These objects testify that text alone cannot convey the full
depth of women’s emotional experiences.

74 Jarrett et al., Stitched in Adversity, passim.

75 I am indebted to Bridget Long for discussing this sampler with me.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Pa rt I I I
M ov i n g T h i n g s
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

10
Dirk Hartog’s Sea Chest
An Affective Archaeology of VOC
Objects in Australia

Susan Broomhall

In 1988, a simple hand-blown glass tumbler created in Middelburg during the

early seventeenth century, engraved with floral motifs and a building with towers
and turrets with flagstaffs, was recovered intact from the treacherous waters of the
mid-Western Australian coast. It was one small object among many recovered from
the Dutch East India vessel, Zuytdorp, which had been wrecked on the coast in
1712. In this chapter, I chart the affective power and significance that Dutch East
India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) objects such as
the Zuytdorp tumbler have held from the seventeenth century to the present,
because of their physical form and their location and assemblage with other objects
on the Australian coast.
In doing so, I am interested in how these objects continue to articulate varied
emotions through their materiality, location, and assemblage in new historical
and sociocultural contexts. My analysis connects to recent work on material cul-
ture stemming from archaeological, anthropological, and philosophical fields, in
particular that which explores the role of objects as agents. This attributes a power
to objects, what Jane Bennett describes as thing-power, defined as ‘the curious ability
of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle’.1
Recent scholarship has moved away from the ‘object biography’ approach because,
it is argued, this continues to reify and to separate the object from relationship
with the subject.2 Objects, in the more recent literature, are no longer seen solely
as representations of social relations, but as also able to create these as they act on
peoples and operate in relation to them.3 Objects do not simply do things but, in
Bennett’s theory of vital materialism, humans and objects are co-constitutive.

1 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010), 6.
2 See Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditisation as Process’, in The Social
Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986), 64–91.
3 See David Miller, ‘Materiality: An Introduction’, in Materiality, ed. David Miller (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2005), 1–50; 19.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

176 Susan Broomhall

Daniel Miller has argued likewise that ‘the processes of objectification that create
our sense of self as subjects and the institutions that constitute society . . . are always
appropriations of the materiality by which they are constituted’.4 In this frame-
work, emotions are generated in the relationship between people and things, much
as sociologist Sara Ahmed has conceptualized ‘affective economics’ in which ‘feel-
ings do not reside in subjects or objects but are produced as effects of circulation’.5
Archaeologists Oliver J. T. Harris and Tim Flohr Sørensen, in trying to understand
the relationship of material culture to emotions in past societies without textual
records, adopt the terminology of ‘affective fields’ but describe similarly ‘networks
of people and things through which emotions are generated’.6 I argue in this chap-
ter that VOC objects make and shape people, their emotional relationships to each
other and to things, just as much as they have been made, placed, and used by
people over time.
Further, objects and people not only operate in relation to each other, but also
in particular spaces and in specific historical contexts. Thus, the analysis here aims
to understand how objects create, reflect, and sustain emotions through their
material forms, use, and placement with other objects, in specific spaces and over
time. By materiality and use, I consider how the changing physical form of VOC
objects and what they are made or expected to do shape affective states. Objects’
assemblage or relationship with other things and subjects, in particular places,
also give some things and some people specific emotional and social meanings.
E. H. Gombrich argues that we must be attentive to the frame that ‘seamlessly
conveys to us the appropriate mode by which we should encounter that which it
frames’.7 Through assemblage, I analyse how relationships to other objects give
VOC artefacts both particular meaning and specific affective resonances. As a
whole, this study of affective archaeology, that is, the study of the historically
changing affective activity generated by VOC objects, explores what these emo-
tional fields or economies achieve or effect as social and cultural practices.8 I argue
that they function to define the boundaries of social communities, create identities
and a sense of belonging and place.
The place of objects in VOC interactions with Australian people and landscapes
has largely remained the preserve of maritime archaeologists and curators preserv-
ing and examining artefacts to investigate shipwreck events.9 Viewed from the

4 Miller, ‘Materiality: An Introduction’, 37.

5 Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2006); Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 8.
6 Oliver J. T. Harris and Tim Flohr Sørensen, ‘Rethinking Emotion and Material Culture’,
Archaeological Dialogues 17.2 (2010): 145–63; 153.
7 E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order (1979), cited in Miller, ‘Materiality: An Introduction’, 5.
8 I am influenced here by Ahmed, who is interested in ‘tracking how words for feeling, and objects
of feeling, circulate and generate effects’, Cultural Politics, 14.
9 See, for example, Jeremy N. Green, Treasures from the ‘Vergulde Draeck’ (Gilt Dragon) (Perth:
Western Australian Museum, 1974); Graeme Henderson, Maritime Archaeology in Australia (Perth:
Western Australian Museum, 1974); Jeremy N. Green, The Loss of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie
Jacht ‘Vergulde Draeck’, Western Australia 1656: An Historical Background and Excavation Report with
an Appendix on Similar Loss of the Fluit ‘Lastdrager’ (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1977);
Jeremy N. Green, The Loss of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie Retourschip Batavia, Western
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Dirk Hartog’s Sea Chest 177

perspective of affective archaeology, however, such objects may yield more about
the relations—past and present—between European and Australian peoples and
landscapes, particularly about the function and power of emotions in these inter-
actions. Historical and anthropological scholars have carefully studied the power
relations inherent in the shaping of peoples, lands, and spaces in the Australasian
region by colonial, settler, and missionary ideologies and practices as well as the
role of objects in such exchanges, and these offer important strategies for consider-
ing how artefacts and emotions may be fruitfully embedded likewise into analysis
of VOC interactions and the changing affective life of its material culture. I have
examined some of the distinctive functions and power of emotions surrounding
VOC objects for indigenous and Company communities elsewhere.10 What
follows in this chapter, I argue, is varied narratives about the emotional and social
power of these objects to situate first the VOC, then the Dutch nation, as a global
power, to demonstrate the frailty of human capacity, to celebrate the ambition and
achievement of individual discoverers, and most recently to allow a new vision of
Australia and its communities to emerge.

P r ide a n d P ew t e r : D i r k H a rto g ’ s P l at e

In late October 1616, the crew of the Dutch East India Company vessel Eendracht
travelling from the Cape of Good Hope to the Batavia colony using Brouwer’s

Australia 1629: An Excavation Report and Catalogue of Artefacts (Oxford: British Archaeological
Reports, 1989). Eisler explores how indigenous objects were perceived, circulated, and returned to
European collections from VOC global voyages in William Eisler, The Furthest Shore: Images of Terra
Australis from the Middle Ages to Captain Cook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), espe-
cially chapter 11, ‘Art and the Dutch Trading Companies’, and chapter 12, ‘The Great Southland and
the Republic of Letters: Nicolaas Witsen and his Kunstkammer’.
10 See my ‘Emotional Encounters: Indigenous Peoples in the Dutch East India Company’s
Interactions with the South Lands’, Australian Historical Studies 45.3 (2014): 350–67; ‘“Quite indif-
ferent to these things”: The Role of Emotions and Conversion in the Dutch East India Company’s
Interactions with the South Lands’, Journal of Religious History 39.4 (2015): 524–44; ‘Dishes, Coins
and Pipes: The Epistemological and Emotional Power of VOC Material Culture in Australia’, in The
Global Lives of Things: Materials, Material Culture and Commodities in the First Global Age, ed. Anne
Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (London: Routledge, 2015), 145–61; ‘Shipwrecks, Sorrow, Shame, and
The Great Southland: The Use of Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Dutch East India Company
Communicative Ritual’, in Emotion, Ritual and Power in Europe 1200–1920: Family, State and Church,
ed. Merridee Bailey and Katie Barclay (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 83–102; ‘Fire, Smoke
and Ashes: Communications of Power and Emotions by Dutch East India Company Crews on the
Australian Continent’, in Fire Stories, ed. Grace Moore (Open Access: Punctum Books, forthcoming);
Gender, Emotions and the Dutch East India Company (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forth-
coming). See also Jane Lydon and Tracy Ireland, eds., Object Lessons: Archaeology and Heritage in
Australia (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2005); Bruce Buchan, ‘Traffick of Empire:
Trade, Treaty and Terra Nullius in Australia and North America’, History Compass 5.2 (2007): 396–405;
Tiffany Shellam, Shaking Hands on the Fringe: Negotiating the Aboriginal World at King George’s Sound
(Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 2009); Andrew May and Patricia Grimshaw, eds.,
Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples and Cultural Exchange (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2010);
Penny Edmonds and Tracey Banivanua Mar, eds., Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race,
Place and Identity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Tiffany Shellam, ‘Tropes of Friendship,
Undercurrents of Fear: Alternative Emotions on the “Friendly Frontier”’, Westerly 57.2 (2012): 16–31.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

178 Susan Broomhall

route, spied an unfamiliar piece of coastline. After surveying the area, skipper Dirk
Hartog called for a large pewter plate to be flattened in readiness to be engraved
with the following message:
A.D. 1616, on the 25th of October there arrived here the ship den Eendragt, of
Amsterdam; supercargo Gillis Miebais, of Liege; skipper Dirck Hartog, of Amsterdam;
she set sail again for Bantam, on the 27th do.; subcargo Jan Steyn, upper-steersman
Pieter Ledocker van Bil.11
The plate was nailed to a post on the northern edge of what is now Dirk Hartog
Island, near Shark Bay on the mid-western coast of Australia. In doing so, a sturdy
plate on which dinner had perhaps been served the previous night, was beaten and
engraved into the deeply emotional colonial politics of Australia.
Objects were vital to how the Company marked its presence in and claims to
Australian spaces.12 The 1622 instructions for one of the earliest voyages intended
to explore the unknown continent expected commanders in all
places, lands and islands . . . [to] take formal possession, and in sign thereof, besides,
erect a stone column in such places as shall be taken possession of the said column
recording in bold, legible characters the year, the month, the day of the week and the
date, the persons by whom and the hour of the day when such possession has been
taken on behalf of the States-General above mentioned.13

11 <http://museum.wa.gov.au/research/research-areas/maritime-archaeology/batavia-cape-
inscription/cape-inscription/hartog>, accessed 13 May 2017.
12 A standard analysis of VOC interaction with Australia emphasizes economic interests in the
VOC interactions with the Australian landscape and peoples to the exclusion or in some cases denial
of settler and religious motivations. However, instructions and practices pursued by the Company in
the first half of the seventeenth century directed crews to take possession of territories, mark and name
them, and held open the possibility of settlement in these lands. See my ‘Dishes, Coins and Pipes’ for
these arguments. For pre-existing literature, R. H. Major, Early Voyages to Terra Australis, now called
Australia: a collection of documents, and extracts from early manuscript maps … from the beginning of the
sixteenth century to the time of Captain Cook (London: Hakluyt, 1859); George Collingridge, The dis-
covery of Australia: a critical, documentary and historic investigation concerning the priority of discovery in
Australasia by Europeans before the arrival of Lieut. James Cook, in the ‘Endeavour’, in the year 1770
(Sydney: Hayes, 1895); J. E. Heere, The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606–1765
(London: Luzac, 1899); more recently, Hugh Edwards, Islands of Angry Ghosts (London: Hodder &
Stoughton, 1966); Hugh Edwards, The Wreck on the Half-Moon Reef (Sydney: Angus & Robertson,
1975); Günter Schilder, Australia Unveiled: The Share of the Dutch Navigators in the Discovery of
Australia (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1976); J. Peter Sigmond and L. H. Zuiderbaan,
Dutch Discoveries of Australia: Shipwrecks, Treasures and Early Voyages off the West Coast (Adelaide:
Rigby, 1979); Graeme Henderson, Unfinished Voyages: Western Australian Shipwrecks, 1622–1850
(Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, [1980] 2007); William Eisler and Bernard Smith,
eds., Terra Australis: The Furthest Shore. Catalogue of an Exhibition held 27 July–9 October 1988, Art
Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney: International Cultural Corporation of Australia, 1988); Robert
Clancy, The Mapping of Terra Australis (Sydney: Universal Press, 1995); Günter Schilder, ‘New
Holland: The Dutch Discoveries’, in Terra Australis to Australia, ed. Glyndwr Williams and Alan Frost
(Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988); Nonja Peters, The Dutch Down Under 1606–2006
(Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 2006); Lindsey Shaw and Wendy Wilkins, eds.,
Dutch Connections: 400 Years of Australian–Dutch Maritime Links 1606–2006 (Sydney: Australian
National Maritime Museum, 2006).
13 This voyage did not proceed but the instructions were reissued to Jan Carstenszoon in 1623.
Heere, The Part Borne by the Dutch, 20.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Dirk Hartog’s Sea Chest 179

Such instructions were reiterated in all the early voyages until Tasman’s second
expedition of 1644, after which the central managerial committee of the VOC
based in the Netherlands, the Heeren, directed the Company’s efforts more firmly
towards known trading prospects and repressed what had been the more explicit
aim of territorial claims pursued by Governors-General and the Councillors within
the Indian Ocean region.14 Accordingly, early expeditions complied with such
instructions, affixing objects signifying possession and potential settlement claims,
such as wooden tablets, to trees and flags in the earth in the absence of more per-
manent and hardy materials, as well as naming landscapes and features, according
to their instructions, to bring honour and glory to the Company.
Hartog’s plate remained in situ until February 1697, when fellow Company
captain Willem de Vlamingh found it lying in the sand at the foot of the then
rotting pole during his explorations of the ‘Land of the Eendracht’.15 In his journal
Vlamingh wrote excitedly, ‘From this I learnt that I was truly in the Bay of Dirk
Hartog, of which I have often heard tell.’16 He brought the dish to the Netherlands,
where it could bear witness to the Company’s mastery over the known globe.
Vlamingh’s find was also duly reported back through the Company archives. The
Governor-General and Councillors in Batavia reported to the Heeren the location
and precise details of what Vlamingh had found:
fastened to a pole, which though half-rotten stood still erect, a common pewter dish
of medium size, which had been flattened and nailed to the pole aforesaid, where they
found it still hanging; the said dish bearing the following words engraved on it, still
distinctly legible.17
That the dish had its words ‘still distinctly legible’ kept the Dutch claim to the
continent alive. This had stood the test of time, as had the plate itself. Vlamingh’s
find reasserted Dutch supremacy in this still widely unknown land. Indeed the
Governor and Councillors invited the Heeren to marvel, as they did, as to its
preservation, despite the hostile conditions it had faced.
This old dish which skipper Willem de Vlamingh brought us, has now likewise been
handed to the Commander in order to be delivered to Your Worships, who with us
will no doubt stand amazed that the same has for so long a series of years been pre-
served in spite of its being exposed to the influence of sky, rain and sun.
The response to Vlamingh’s discovery of Hartog’s plate was marked by pride and
excitement, perhaps even wonder at the Company’s success at establishing such a
long-held presence in these hostile conditions. Likewise, the removal of the object
itself back to the Netherlands, where it remains today, cemented its place in the
annals of VOC seafaring exploits.

14 Heere, The Part Borne by the Dutch, xv–xvi.

15 See Phillip Playford for evidence of this term in Dutch documentation, Voyage of Discovery to Terra
Australis by Willem de Vlamingh in 1696–7 (Perth: Western Australia Museum, 1998), 17, 73 fn. 11.
16 Playford, Voyage of Discovery, 97.   17 Heere, The Part Borne by the Dutch, 84.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

180 Susan Broomhall

This was not the end of Company possessive plates, however. Vlamingh might
have removed what was then a testament to the longevity of VOC supremacy but
he did so replacing it with another:
In the same spot they have again erected a new pole with a flattened pewter dish nailed
to it in commemoration of their visit, having first had the following inscription
engraved on the dish . . .
‘A.D. 1697, on the 4th of Febr. there arrived here the ship de Geelvinck, skipper
Willem de Vlaming, of Vlieland; assistant Joannes van Bremen, of Copenhaguen;
upper-steersman Michiel Blom, of Bremen; the hooker de Nijptang, skipper Gerrit
Collart, of Amsterdam; assistant Theodorus Heermans, of do.; upper-steersman Gerrit
Gerrits, of Bremen; the galiot ’t Weseltje, master Cornelis de Vlaming, of Vlieland;
steersman Coert Gerrits, of Bremen; the whole of our flotilla sailed from here on the
12th do., in order to explore the South-land with destination for Batavia.’18
The meaning of this new plate has been debated by modern scholars, variously
interpreted as a renewed act of claim, as a continuing participation in a correspond-
ence that began with Hartog, or as a celebratory memorial.19 Eric Ketelaar suggests
the last interpretation, arguing that the plate’s material form, pewter, signified its
intended difference, and permanence, from the wooden tablets that Vlamingh had
erected on two previous occasions during his global voyage.20 It is possible, of
course, that Vlamingh had not thought of using an ordinary plate in such a way
until he saw the success of Hartog’s original. Nonetheless, his decision to mirror the
strikingly impermeable form of the pewter object that he had found on the island
echoed an act that was intended to celebrate the longstanding nature of VOC
achievement and to renew its claim in the region. Vlamingh’s plate on its native pole
of Rottnest Island pine lasted still longer at the site, next documented by the crew
of the French corvette Naturaliste in 1801. The hybrid native–VOC object remained
in situ until 1818, when Louis de Freycinet on the Uranie removed it to France.
After a circuitous route, the plate was presented to the Commonwealth of Australia
in 1947 and now appears in the WA Museum Shipwreck Galleries in Fremantle.

D e t r i t u s a n d D e s o l at i o n : C o mpa n y F i n d s

Another range of VOC objects, however, engaged later crews in new affective
relationships and responses, as they were strewn on the Western Australian coast
through shipwrecks.21 These generated different emotional responses in those who

18 Heere, The Part Borne by the Dutch, 84.

19 J. Peter Sigmond, ‘Two Pewter Plates’, in In het Kielzog. Maritiem-historische studies aangeboden
aan Jaap R. Bruijn bij zijn vertrek als hoogleraar zeegeschiedenis aan de Universiteit Leiden, ed. Leo
Akveld, Frank Broeze, Femme Gaastra et al. (Amsterdam: De Bataafse Leeuw, 2003), 245–56; J. Peter
Sigmond, ‘Cultural Heritage On a Piece Of Pewter’, in Dutch Connections, ed. Shaw and Wilkins,
72–85.
20 Eric Ketelaar, ‘Exploration of the Archived World: From Dr Vlamingh’s Plate to Digital
Realities’, Archives and Manuscripts 36.2 (2008): 13–33; 18.
21 For further analysis of the Company’s affective experiences and discussion of shipwreck on
Australian coasts, see my ‘Fire, Smoke and Ashes’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Dirk Hartog’s Sea Chest 181

discovered them: fears about the lack of control of the Company over the unfamiliar
environment, but also determination not to share the terrifying fate of those who
had come before them.
When the Vergulde Draeck went missing en route to Batavia in 1656, two VOC
vessels were sent to search for the sixty-eight survivors who had been left on the
Australian shore while their nominated search party sought help in Indonesia. In
their exploration during early 1658, the crew of the Waekende Boei found evidence
of a wrecked Dutch vessel strewn up and down the coast just north of present-day
Perth. These discoveries provoked fears about the fate of those who had been left
with little material of significance to support them during their plight. Captain
Samuel Volkersen’s valuation of the remaining artefacts uncovered plainly sug-
gested their uselessness: ‘a heavy beam, a piece of the oak planking, a piece of the
outer planking, a small keg, buckets, thwarts of the boat, pieces of chests, staves,
and similar rubbish’.22 Later, the boat crew also found ‘a forward knight-head, a
block and something else of little value’.23 Volkersen’s commentary upon the
nature and utility of the artefacts his crews had recovered hinted at despair about
the possible fate of the survivors.
But there was also some hope. Volkersen observed that ‘it is noteworthy that a
number of pieces of planking had been put in a circle with their ends upwards’.24
This discovery of what appeared to be a human arrangement of items was further
investigated by upper steersman Abraham Leeman. He described in some detail in
his journal this set of upright planks, which the crew clearly took to be a sign from
the earlier Dutch mariners: ‘a beam which had lain athwart in the vessel [had been]
put upright in the ground and round about 12 to 13 similar planks also stuck in
the sand’.25 On 21 March 1658, Leeman described how they ‘pulled out the
timbers and dug 4 to 5 feet deep into the ground, thrusting our cutlasses as
deep as we could into the sand but found nothing’. They located further planks,
casks, pieces of grating from the ornamental taffrail from the stern of the ship,
and pulley blocks, but there was no sign of humans or habitation near. Hopes
were dashed. As Volkersen concluded, they had ‘observed many signs of the
wrecked ship den draeck, but no footprints nor any place where people had
lived’.26 Volkersen returned to Batavia none the wiser as to their fate, in frustration
and disappointment.
The discovery of earlier European arrivals could also have other emotional and
practical outcomes. In 1727, the VOC vessel Zeewijk ran aground on the treacher-
ous reefs of the Houtman Abrolhos Archipelago. As the surviving crew began to
explore surrounding islands, they were able to report back discoveries of European
items. This was the same area in which the Batavia was known to have been

22 Henderson, Unfinished Voyages, 41.

23 James A. Henderson, Marooned: The Wreck of the Vergulde Draeck and the Abandonment and
Escape from the Southland of Abraham Leeman in 1658 (Perth: St George Books, 1982), 104.
24 Henderson, Unfinished Voyages, 41.
25 Leeman’s journal is translated in C. de Heer, ‘My Shield and My Faith’, Westerly 1 (1963):
33–46; 35.
26 Henderson, Marooned, 96.   
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

182 Susan Broomhall

wrecked almost 100 years before, in 1629, and potentially the last resting place of
other vessels known to be missing. The Zeewijk crew discovered, as second steers-
man Adriaan Van der Graeff in his meticulous journal reported, ‘a filled hand-
grenade, also old rope and ship’s skin, these belonging to a ship or ships which the
same fate had struck here’.27 Months later, the crew were still living in the area
whilst constructing a small vessel, the Sloepie, from the remaining timbers and
salvage of their own wrecked vessel. They continued to find items from a previous
wreck, including ‘a piece of a ship, finding the figurehead under some overhanging
rocks. Of which they could discern that it had been the figure of a woman.’28
All these items as well as evidence of human habitation in the area before were
carefully marked by the skipper Jan Steyns on his improvised charts. These listed at
least seven different locations on the surrounding islands where they had ‘found
beams and planks from another ship’, a ‘well dug by other sailors’, ‘found a pair of
sailmakers’ scissors’, ‘cut knees from wreckage’, ‘found bones of a cat’s head and
wheel of a gun’, and ‘found beams of the other ship and bolts’.29 Steyns’s meticulous
description and mapping of each located item bore witness to their complex
significance for the stranded crew. These were signs that familiar mariners had been
here before, markers of a prior claim to the region, but also signs of the destructive
power of the new land and its waters and reefs in which they now found themselves,
and also perhaps a reminder of the terrible fate that had awaited the Batavia’s
passengers and crew. That the artefacts were understood as VOC remnants would
be made clear in the letter of 31 October 1728 from the Governor-General and
Councillors to the Heeren in Amsterdam that reported on the fate of the Zeewijk
and its discoveries:
The situation of the islands on whose outermost reef the ship Zeewijk has run aground,
is shown by the annexed small chart. They lie out of sight of the South-land, and are
partly overgrown with brushwood, edible vegetables, etc. . . . here have been discovered
not only a number of wells dug by human hands, but also certain vestiges of a Dutch
ship, presumably also lost on the reef aforesaid.30
Did they imagine that these items came from the ill-fated vessel Batavia almost
100 years earlier? Accounts of the mutiny had been published in the Netherlands.
Did these objects strike fear and despair into their hearts, and inspire them to
maintain rigorous discipline so as not to suffer the same disastrous fate of anarchy
and massacre? Steyns and Van der Graeff ’s records of the ten-month stay on Gun
Island are notable for their careful attention to rationing and harsh discipline at all
times. This was essential to maintain good order as they waited for assistance from
Batavia, although, in the end, it would be the little sloop—built from their own
detritus—in which eighty-two of the original 208 crew were able to sail back to
European civilization in Indonesia.
European responses to and practices for finding older European objects reflected
explicitly and implicitly the fear, loss, grief, and concerns about the unfamiliar
environment and its potential threat to them. Affective responses to these VOC

27 Edwards, Wreck on the Half-Moon Reef, 101.   28 Edwards, Wreck on the Half-Moon Reef, 122.
29 Edwards, Wreck on the Half-Moon Reef, 131.    30 Heere, The Part Borne by the Dutch, 91.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Dirk Hartog’s Sea Chest 183

objects were governed by a range of factors—the physical condition of these now

old items, damaged by the violence of shipwreck and worn by the harsh environ-
ment in which they lay. Their assemblage among a random mix of other washed-
up artefacts of everyday shipboard life indicated the risks and failures borne by
Company crews in their expeditions, and made clear that whole vessels had foun-
dered on the coast, not that passing crews had simply discarded a few items while
successfully visiting the coast. The purpose to which these objects were now put
also produced mixed emotions. The strange use of Vergulde Draeck timbers as some
sort of building blocks did not reveal any discoverable meaning or habitation,
instead reinforcing the mariners’ failure to succeed in discovering the fate of the
survivors and those people’s own apparent failure to survive. By contrast, the Zeewijk
crew’s systematic cataloguing and charting of such items in accordance with VOC
procedures and reporting perhaps provided a measure of comfort that such items
could still perform a future positive function—making known a prior claim to
VOC habitation and possession of these lands on their return to Batavia and
settling the superior officers into a familiar set of operations which gave them an
important identity and purpose to undertake for the greater Company. The experi-
ence of locating VOC objects in distinct assemblages and environments produced
for Volkersen and Steyns, the captains of the VOC vessels that identified these
broken remains in wholly untriumphant circumstances, contrasting emotions, and
certainly determined very different responses.

C a r pe t s o f Si lv e r : T h e Hu n t e r - G at h e r e r s

Cumulative evidence in support of wreck site locations was built upon the progressive
discovery of early modern coins and other VOC artefacts in the known vicinities.31
These led to a series of organized search missions during the twentieth century,
funded by individuals, newspapers, and finally government authorities through
the development of the WA Museum maritime and archaeological department. In
these contexts, VOC objects, in their often hazardous locations, and assembled
with other evidence suggesting a Company shipwreck, generated excitement and
wonder but also exposed greed and competitiveness in an environment of consid-
erable challenges and dangers.
It is hard to overlook the tone of thrilling adventure that is consistently presented
through both contemporary reports and the historical narrative of these finds.
Excitement and pride among the personnel involved in such discoveries were
coupled with awe and wonder at the survival of these precious artefacts now
hundreds of years hidden from sight. The Daily News-sponsored expedition of
November 1954 to locate definitively the Zuytdorp wreck site successfully uncovered
a wide range of VOC artefacts such as smashed bottles, barrel braces, a cairn of
stones, clay pipes fragments, and a brass plate from a musket butt inland from the
wreck site.32 On first discovering the items, geologist Phillip Playford and local

31 See, for example, Henderson, Marooned, 136–62, on searches for the Vergulde Draeck.
32 Phillip Playford, Carpet of Silver: The Wreck of the Zuytdorp (Nedlands: University of Western
Australia Press, 1996), 120–1.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

184 Susan Broomhall

stockman Tom Pepper rushed through the dense scrubland to inform the others in
their party. Jim Cruthers, in his article for the Daily News, remembered:
We looked at Phil Playford, shocked. Trickles of blood ran down the calves of his legs
and into his boots. . . . His bare legs were scratched and raw. But Playford was elated.
He leant over the pommel of the saddle and shouted excitedly: ‘We found where
they’ve been. Over there—over there in that gully.’ To find them in such thick, rugged
scrub country 242 years later was little short of a miracle.33
Miraculous finds, these remnants of shipboard life suggested that at least a portion
of the crew had survived for some time on the mainland, creating the possibility of
imagining the experiences of the survivors in the hostile land. Likewise, the exam-
ination of the physical condition of artefacts exhilarated discoverers when they
enabled the objects to be connected to a specific historical narrative. Skin-diver
and author James A. Henderson, who was among the four divers first investigating
what was revealed to be the Vergulde Draeck wreck in 1963, recalled the excitement
of identifying the first cannon:
we brushed and washed the dull surface. It was a thrilling moment when the letters
VOC emerged, and one of sheer delight when the letter ‘A’ could be seen clearly above
that. We knew that the Amsterdam Chamber operated the Vergulde Draeck.34
Materiality mattered to the meanings and emotional power of these objects as they
became immediately embedded by their still visible identifications in the wider
narrative of the Company and its relationship to Australia.
The greed of looters and the frustrations at vandalism of the sites have been a
constant concern regarding the VOC objects within the archaeological and cura-
torial domain. Zuytdorp artefacts were known to have been removed from the site
as early as the 1930s in anticipation of museum investigations understood to be
commencing at the site.35 Indeed, even the 1954 expedition to the site had gener-
ated concerns about the use of artefacts by the search party itself with planks and
woodwork from the vessel used to build a table and bench at the campsite.
Cruthers’s notes, tendered as evidence before the 1994 Select Committee into
VOC artefacts and wreck sites, recalled the conflicting views among the personnel.
Playford, for example, was strongly opposed to such use: ‘It upset Phil more than
a little to think that wood which might find a place in museums in many parts of
the world was being splashed with tea and smeared with fat and butter.’36 The
discovery in 1963 of the Batavia wreck site on Beacon Island, where artefacts and
human remains were located caused what the Museum describes as a ‘considerable
frenzy of digging’.37 In the same years, the Vergulde Draeck wreck had been blasted

33 Jim Cruthers, ‘History in the Finding—Bushmen’s Hoard Takes Us Back 242 Years’, Daily News,
10 December 1954, cited in Playford, Carpet of Silver, 122.
34 Henderson, Marooned, 166.
35 See Tom Pepper and the carved stern figure, Playford, Carpet of Silver, 84–5.
36 Cited in Playford, Carpet of Silver, 118–19.
37 <http://museum.wa.gov.au/research/research-areas/maritime-archaeology/batavia-cape-
inscription/batavia/beacon-island-burials>, accessed 13 May 2017.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Dirk Hartog’s Sea Chest 185

with explosives to loosen the silver coins for private sale.38 The public outcry that
met these events caused the state government to enact a first legally flawed attempt
at protective legislation through the 1964 Museum Act, protection that was only
finally secured by the Commonwealth 1976 Historic Shipwrecks Act.39
Yet, even afterwards, actual capacity to enforce the laws proved a significant
challenge. The Zuytdorp site with its famed ‘carpet of silver’ on the sea floor, includ-
ing masses of stacked coins from the vessel’s chests, was to suffer from continued
looting.40 Ian Crawford, supervisor of the WA Museum, and Jeremy Green, curator
of maritime archaeology, highlighted in an internal Museum document in the late
1970s the ‘disturbing element’ that the wreck site had been noticeably tampered
with and coins removed, and expressed how ‘disappointing’ it was that the site had
not been fully protected.41 However, even the installation of a part-time watchman
in the 1980s could not protect the WA Museum base caravan from being set alight,
nor further looting, with an almost complete removal of the ‘carpet of silver’
between its assessment in 1978 and a survey in 1986.42 The Commonwealth
Historic Shipwrecks Amnesty declared in 1993–4 would later enable the Museum
to build further knowledge about artefacts returned from such sites.43
Moreover, the suggested treachery of the Zuytdorp wreck site—which only unwill-
ingly gave up its secrets—and the tone of drama were not captured solely by the
journalists sponsoring such recovery expeditions. The drama and danger of the exca-
vation weave a palpable thread through the staff journals and subsequent historiciz-
ing of the Museum’s archaeological work. Michael McCarthy, leader of the diving
team during the late 1980s, worried about the hazardous conditions in which the
team worked. In his journal of the 1987–8 dives on the Zuytdorp, McCarthy cele-
brated the recovery of ‘three full bags of material—coins, brass, firearm side plates, a
shot dispenser, a comb, wood, glass and ceramics’ but also expressed concern that
there was ‘a very fine line between brilliant success and savage recrimination to be
borne in the case of death or injury at this site. . . . Such are the responsibilities which
bear heavily [on me].’44 The WA Museum website likewise describes the hazardous
and challenging conditions of its staff’s work to recover such VOC treasures for the
community. In regards to the Batavia wreck site, the website emphasizes that:
It is not an ideal site to carry out detailed and exacting archaeological recording. The site
is extremely exposed and often dangerous to work. The weather and sea conditions are
impossible to predict with any certainty, therefore there was never any guarantee that on
the following day one would be able to work on the site. In fact, the ratio of days when
one could dive to days when it was impossible to dive was quite high (1:3). However, a
considerable amount of archaeology was possible in spite of these difficulties.45

38 Henderson, Marooned, 169.

39 Further discussion of these events is included in Henderson, Marooned, 168–70.
40 Covered in detail in Playford, Carpet of Silver, chapter 5.
41 Playford, Carpet of Silver, 173.    42 Playford, Carpet of Silver, 179.
43 <http://museum.wa.gov.au/research/research-areas/maritime-archaeology/batavia-cape-
inscription/batavia/beacon-island-burials>, accessed 13 May 2017.
44 Cited in Playford, Carpet of Silver, 190–1.
45 <http://museum.wa.gov.au/research/research-areas/maritime-archaeology/batavia-cape-
inscription/batavia/wreck-site-discovery>, accessed 13 May 2017.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

186 Susan Broomhall

Cyclones occurring during the excavation and diving season, south-west swell, and
the remote location all impeded sustained work on these sites.46
The strong emotions thus generated by working to recover VOC artefacts in
these remote and challenging locations were not experienced by amateur and pro-
fessional archaeologists alone. Philip Pendal, chair of the Select Committee of the
WA Legislative Assembly, convened in 1994 to determine the primary and second-
ary discoverers of the artefacts and wreck sites of the Tryall, the Batavia, the
Vergulde Draeck, the Zuytdorp, and the Zeewijk, was moved to write lyrically in that
Committee’s report:
For my part, experiences like walking in the footsteps of Weibbe Hayes and his 17th
century colleagues on the Abrolhos Islands, standing at the foot of the majestic and
largely untouched Zuytdorp Cliffs or gazing through brilliantly clear waters to the site
of the 1629 Batavia wreck, have had a deep and inexplicable impact. I know my
colleagues whom I have mentioned above feel likewise.47
Modern discovery and recovery contexts evoke questions about whom such VOC
objects should serve, stimulating a variety of emotional responses that range from
wonder, excitement, and greed to fear of loss, deep concern, and even despair. The
sheer value of the materials as precious metals determined their loss to looters but
until the latter half of the twentieth century, state and federal governments did not
‘care’ enough about these objects as significant markers of their history, community,
or identity, to warrant effective protection. A shift in the emotional engagement
with these artefacts, partly through increased professional research and publicity
about it, finally caused the enactment of legislation and amnesties to allow the
return of items that could enhance the professional and wider community’s know-
ledge of their historic and material experiences and those of their crews. Their
contextual value as historic artefacts, their identifying symbols and marks and
altered physical forms, interpretation through their location in specific locales,
and their arrangement with other items created for a range of individuals who had
unique opportunities to be involved deeply emotional, personal encounters. These
same aspects have provided professional archaeologists and other experts with the
tools to develop theories regarding the often traumatic experiences of those crews.

C o mmu n ic at i o n C o n dui t s : M o de r n M at e r i a l
D i a l o g ue s a b o u t M em o r ie s , Hi s to r ie s ,
I n di v idu a l s , C o mmu n i t ie s

VOC objects continue to have deeply felt emotional resonances for populations
in Australia as well as overseas. In the WA Museum Shipwreck Galleries at
Fremantle and Geraldton, VOC objects are now proudly placed on display as

46 <http://museum.wa.gov.au/research/research-areas/maritime-archaeology/batavia-cape-
inscription/batavia/wreck-excavation>, accessed 13 May 2017.
47 Select Committee on Ancient Shipwrecks Report, Presented by: Hon. P. G. Pendal, MLA, Laid on the
Table of the Legislative Assembly on 17 August 1994, Western Australia Legislative Assembly, 1994, ii.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Dirk Hartog’s Sea Chest 187

part of a long narrative of European interaction with the coast. Curators inter-
pret and position these objects to inform and entertain, in response to what
affective meanings these objects hold for communities as well as themselves as
individuals, and using framing techniques to generate powerful emotions in
museum gallery environments. In some cases, those providing interpretation
within the museum either are themselves or are colleagues of the archaeologists
who recovered these artefacts. But affective and social meanings of these objects
are also made in the responses of viewers and visitors to these interpretations, to
the materiality of the objects themselves, through personal experiences with
them prior to their placement in the museum, via their knowledge or experience
of the locations in which they were found, and also with their own sense of place
within Australian and local communities.
A massive, reconstructed hull portion of the Batavia, excavated from its resting
place on Morning Reef after hundreds of years underwater, is now housed in a
purpose-built, darkened, and conditioned chamber of the Shipwreck Galleries at
Fremantle. This location acts, in the sense of Gombrich’s frames, to create a tone
of heightened emotional engagement with these artefacts: anticipation generated
by special sealed entrances to the space, and respect for the material precarious-
ness of the artefact that requires such special conditions. Shipwreck artefacts are
housed in both Geraldton and Fremantle in spaces termed galleries, suggestive of
their aesthetic and cultural value, unlike the museum’s other display and inter-
pretation facilities around the state. In the same space can also be found a recon-
struction of the monumental sandstone portico façade, ninety-seven blocks
weighing over 36 tonnes, carried as ballast upon the Batavia and intended to form
a grand entrance to the city of that name.48 The original now stands rebuilt in
Geraldton. Its impressive, awe-inspiring monumentality conveys volubly and
dramatically the scale of the VOC’s operations across the Indian Ocean and the
colonizing ambitions and use of objects in the Company’s spaces. These large-scale,
compelling objects were never intended for Australian shores but they have
become a source of pride: in the historic, if accidental, place of this coast in the
global trade of the period, and in the professional skills of the state’s maritime
archaeologists in recovering them.
But objects not on display, and of a far more modest scale, can hold deep affective
meanings for curators also, thrilling in quite a different way for what their materi-
ality can reveal. Ian MacLeod, Executive Director of the Fremantle Museums,
revealed his excitement generated by analysis of the physical state of a VOC coin.
A concreted schilling from the Zuytdorp, he observes, is able to reveal its assem-
blage during its time underwater through ‘the red brown rust of the corroded
cannon and cannon balls covering the coin and the coralline algae and bryozoans
[which] have colonised the coin’. Its specific location on a shallow seabed in
Western Australia subjected to ‘our intense sunlight’ through the waves has produced

48 Intended for either the Land Port or the Waterport at the Castle at Batavia, <http://
museum.wa.gov.au/research/collections/maritime-archaeology/maritime-shipwrecks/batavia>,
accessed 13 May 2017.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

188 Susan Broomhall

purple patches.49 Surface section images of the coin under a scanning electron
microscope show lighter and darker phases of the silver and copper alloy which
struck MacLeod ‘with a wave of delight and pleasure’. The light and dark reflecting
the different phases, for him, ‘symbolise the patterns of energy bouncing back from
the massive cliffs and pulling the wreck to pieces’ and ‘the hope and the fear of the
Zuytdorp survivors’.50 The scientific analysis of the coin produces both key infor-
mation about the experiences of this artefact and emotional effects for its interpreters
as they use the data to imagine the fate of the VOC’s human cargo in violent
and hostile environmental conditions as the undiscovered fate of the Zuytdorp
survivors now becomes part of Western Australia’s historical narrative.
The WA Museum presents answers and information through its interpretive
signage, using scientific techniques to present a view both of Australia’s past and of
the physical and social environment of its western coast, and the role of these
objects within these. In the hands of contemporary artists, the same artefacts
articulate different social and emotional meanings, particularly about the commu-
nities, relationships, and experiences of local people today, as much or perhaps
more so than what the objects might have meant to others in the past. In 2012, a
creative exhibition, Still Life/Our Life, was held in Kalbarri as part of the Zest
Festival, a five-year regional celebration of Dutch shipwrecks and interactions on
the mid-west coast. The exhibition invited local artists to draw inspiration from
seventeenth-century Dutch still life images, artefacts from local shipwrecks held in
the Geraldton Shipwreck Galleries collection, and the location of the wrecks them-
selves in their region as a springboard to produce, in the words of Alec Coles, CEO
of the WA Museum, ‘profoundly moving’ creative works.51 As Art Advisor to the
exhibition, Catherine Czerw has observed, the artists referenced materials of the
early modern past through their use of ‘pigment and canvas, ink and paper, stitch
and fabric, glass, porcelain and precious metals’, ‘style and compositional arrange-
ments found in typical Dutch Master paintings’, or ‘European traditions of art
production such as etching, trompe l’oeil and needle and thread’ in an exhibition
which provided ‘an emotional as well as physical space’ to enjoy, contemplate, and
reflect on the pleasure of art and on Kalbarri’s connections with Dutch history as
‘authentic reflections of the contemporary life of their time’.52 The artists’ stories
in the exhibition responded to two distinct histories on their coast: that of the
shipwrecked VOC mariners and that of the discoverers of their wrecked vessels and
their objects, which formed, for many, a more immediate affective genealogy of
memory.53 They also engaged directly with VOC artefacts through their physical

49 Ian MacLeod, ‘A Zuytdorp Schilling: Early Modern Messages, Modern Emotions’, in Far from
Home: Adventures, Treks, Exiles, Migrations. The Zest Festival, September 2013, ed. Susan Broomhall
and Rebecca Millar (Nedlands: UniPrint, 2013), 32–3; 33.
50 MacLeod, ‘Zuytdorp Schilling’, 32.
51 Alec Coles, ‘The Power of Objects’, in Still Life/Our Life: Emotions across Time, Art and Place. The
Zest Festival, June 2012, ed. Susan Broomhall and Rebecca Millar (Nedlands: UniPrint, 2012), xiii.
52 Catherine Czerw, ‘Still Life/Our Life: The Enduring Pleasure of Art’, in Still Life/Our Life, ed.
Broomhall and Millar, 6.
53 See Susan Broomhall, ‘Still Life/Our Life: Stories of Connection and Difference’, in Still Life/
Our Life, ed. Broomhall and Millar, 5.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Dirk Hartog’s Sea Chest 189

form, as objects in a familiar local environment, and as items with which some had
personal experiences.
The experience of the survivors, mingled with her own connection to artefact
recovery and the location of Kalbarri, underpin Yvonne Whitehead’s piece,
Entwined, a mixed-media artwork of kiln-formed glass and hebel block. Glass
inscribed with references to the Dutch represented the element of water and the
hebel block the coastal limestone. Carved in and around the hebel was an octopus:
‘my metaphor for both the shipwreck survivors clinging precariously on to life and
the township of Kalbarri today, surrounded by National Park hanging tentatively
to the coastal fringe’.54 In 1967 Whitehead was on holiday in the region as a
12-year-old, when she met one of the divers at the Zuytdorp site who ‘was kind
enough to show us a few silver coins that he had recovered. Most of the coins were
battered and buckled and a few were misshapen.’ Through her work, Whitehead
imagines the violence of the environment imposing upon both the materiality and
social meaning of the artefacts in particularly emotional terms: ‘The ocean
unleashed its fury the day of that shipwreck; the survivors watched in dark despair
as their lives were smashed against the rocks. Ironically, not even the precious cargo
of silver they carried could be of any use to them, in this poverty stricken alien
landscape that they now faced.’
The power of greed and fear of discovery guides Rose Holdaway’s The Woman
under the Bed (acrylic on canvas, 152.5 × 91.2 cm). This powerful image depicts
the figurehead from the stern of the Zuytdorp, an artefact first found in 1927 by
Tom Pepper and, in 1939—when Pepper and his wife Lurlie understood a salvage
team from the museum was planned—hidden in a bed sheet under their bed for
nine years at Gie Gie Outcamp on Murchison House Station, then moved to the
home of Tom’s sister at Moonyoonooka. It now sits in the Geraldton collection on
loan. Holdaway’s art recalls Dutch tronies and her depiction of jewellery and an old
food jar containing dead moths ‘provide the Pronk and Vanitas sensibility’. She
connects the story of the Zuytdorp artefacts ‘with its treasures and subsequent
thefts and trickery, range of characters and human emotion’ to biblical references,
in particular, the Gospel of Matthew 6:18–21, which begins ‘Do not store up for
yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves
break and steal.’55
It was the intact physical form of the beautifully engraved Dutch glass tumbler
pulled from the forbidding surf at the Zuytdorp Cliffs that inspired Marianne
Penberthy in her installation, a still life now breathing. The survival of that fragile
tumbler, its continued material form that, in Penberthy’s words, ‘had survived the
constant pounding of the ocean for nearly 300 years’, had sparked her desire to cre-
ate. Penberthy was on site in 1988 when museum divers recovered the undamaged
glass, providing a personal engagement with this historic moment as well as its

54 Yvonne Whitehead, ‘Life on the Coral Coast: Entwined’, in Still Life/Our Life, ed. Broomhall
and Millar, 48.
55 Rose Holdaway, ‘Life on the Coral Coast: The Woman under the Bed’, in Still Life/Our Life, ed.
Broomhall and Millar, 34.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

190 Susan Broomhall

physical presence: ‘The divers would only allow us to view the glass for a few seconds
as they lifted it from its container of seawater for lengthy exposure to oxygen or
sunlight would turn the clear glass cloudy. Although momentary, the memory of
glimpsing this fragile domestic object . . . was astonishing.’ Her installation exhibited
silk goblets with personal images and stories attached but fading: ‘The glass seemed
to represent the spirit of survival, but also of something being reborn, a still life now
breathing, or a watery image rising slowly from the subconscious depths and out
into the light.’ Place and environment hold affective power in this work:
I remember dreaming of far away landscapes in my early school days in Queensland.
Geography lessons at school included studies of the West Australian coastline
with strange named places, like Houtman’s Abrolhos, Dampier Archipelago, Dirk
Hartog . . . These strange offshore shapes, and intricate coastline maps seemed exotic
from school in coastal Queensland.
Like the Dutch survivors, the environment and these events drew her to live in the
region, forming a strong emotive connection to these objects: ‘There is a sense of
excitement as the Zuytdorp story breathes again but also a sense of sadness and loss
as I view the remnants of lives long gone and the events, both mine and others,
which will in time, fade off into the blue depths.’56
Assemblages of objects in place, both native and shipwrecked, as Helen Clarke
experiences them and the locations herself, create something shared between
European and Australian cultures in her Collection, a fine art etching with aquatint
(80 × 60 cm). Clarke’s inspiration came from her connection with the area of
Shark Bay since her teenage years, when her family spent ‘magical holidays’ on
Dirk Hartog Island: ‘We climbed the cliff at Cape Inscription to see the post where
Dirck Hartog had placed his plate . . . I remember wondering how the coast must
have looked to the intrepid Dutch explorers centuries earlier.’ Clarke’s collections
of ‘treasures’ which include ‘seed pods, rocks, skeletal remains of animals, shells
and bits of rust . . . [which] have deeper meaning to me’, and ‘pieces of the amazing
bright yellow and red eucalypt, Illyarrie, that grows along the coast from Mt
Lesueur to Shark Bay’, are coupled with Dirk Hartog’s plate, which Clarke had
once seen in replica in the WA Museum in Perth.57
VOC objects allow curators and artists respectively, according to their different
processes, to imagine the emotional and physical experiences of survivors, by their
placement in the landscape, their state of decay, and evidence of use. However,
their feelings about these objects are also guided and conditioned by connections
and experiences of the places and objects themselves. In these contexts, VOC
objects, through their materiality, assemblage, and placement in environments,
become conversation conduits and resources for artists and curators to communi-
cate new messages about themselves, their communities, their memories, and their
interpretations of the past, present, and the future.

56 Marianne Penberthy, ‘Life on the Coral Coast: A Still Life Now Breathing’, in Still Life/Our Life,
ed. Broomhall and Millar, 42.
57 Helen Clarke, ‘Life on the Coral Coast: Collection’, in Still Life/Our Life, ed. Broomhall and
Millar, 32.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Dirk Hartog’s Sea Chest 191

Affec t i v e A s s emb l a g e : P e o p l e ,
P l a ce s , a n d T h i n g s

This chapter has argued that VOC objects’ materiality, placement in particular
sites and locations, and arrangement in conjunction with other items have pro-
found consequences for the affective responses that they generate, and that these
emotional engagements both change over time in specific social contexts and are
unique to individuals in particular positions of power and privilege. As can be seen
through the examples discussed here, VOC artefacts have taken on immense social
and emotional power at different points in their existence to date, often generating
more capacity to shape people and their relationships to each other in the unex-
pected situations of their deposit on the Australian coast than in their intended
uses in the past. They have, at various times, borne witness to the pride, glory, and
longevity of Company reach across the globe, warned of the dangers of internal
corporate disunity, provoked fears of failure and despair about the fate of others,
risen anew to provide thrills and excitement for specific individuals, and offered the
prospect of quick money, personal connections, and new narratives about Australian
communities on the coast in both historical and modern global contexts.
In that process, these objects have provided meanings for the VOC as a commu-
nity with shared aims, experiences, and affective expressions, and more recently
offered the Dutch nation evidence of the power of their reach during the early
modern period. From a position outside the mainstream Australian sense of its
past, these same objects have now become part of the early historical narrative of
European interaction with Australian lands and peoples, creating new past stories
and present identities for communities and individuals. As Christopher Pinney
suggests, objects are ‘part of an aesthetic, figural domain that can constitute history,
and they exist in a temporality that is not necessarily coterminous with more con-
ventional political temporalities’.58 Thus are VOC objects at once concreted into
proud past narratives operating at the national level for both Australia and the
Netherlands but emerging as opportunities to write powerful new affective and
intimate histories about lives and experiences in this region.

58 Christopher Pinney, ‘Things Happen: Or, From Which Moment Does That Object Come?’, in
Materiality, ed. Miller, 256–72; 266.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

11
Romancing the Stone
(E)motion and the Affective History
of the Stone of Scone

Alicia Marchant

‘Things have a life of their own,’ the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent.
‘It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls.’1

In 1950 the stone moved. Taken in the dead of night on Christmas Eve from
underneath the Coronation Chair at Westminster Abbey by four young Scottish
university students, the Stone of Scone was an itinerant for four months. For most
of this time the stone was housed in the back of a car, where its 152-kilogram load
wore out the upholstery,2 but even there it was awe-inspiring; one of the students
remarked: ‘there’s a bit of Bannockburn on the back seat’.3 But in this absurd situ
the stone was not easily hidden from police, and so it was frequently rolled out of
the car, dragged around on a blanket, and left in various forests and fields around
Britain for later collection. Covered with ‘rotting grass’ and ‘bramble’, soil and
rubbish (including a makeshift scrap-metal crown), there were moments in its
disguising when the stone was merely a stone again.4 However, the burden of con-
tinual movement and devotion took its toll; one student said in despair that like
the ‘Flying Dutchman . . . condemned to yaw the seas for the love of a woman, [we
are the] Flying bloody Scotsmen, condemned to yaw the roads for love of a Stone’.5
By April the students—and arguably the stone as well—had had enough. Having
been held in a stable, ‘dry and constant atmosphere’6 for more than 700 years, the
stone, it was pointed out to the students, was no longer used to elemental weathering
and might start to disintegrate and fracture. Recognizing that the value of the

An earlier version of this paper was written in conjunction with Professor Susan Broomhall and
presented at ‘Feeling Things: A Symposium on Objects and Emotions in History’ at the University of
Melbourne in March 2013.
1 Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (London: Picador, 1978), 9.
2 Ian R. Hamilton, No Stone Unturned: The Story of the Stone of Destiny (London: Victor Gollancz,
1952), 104.
3 Hamilton, No Stone Unturned, 91. Bannockburn was the site of a much-celebrated Scottish victory
in 1314, when Robert the Bruce decisively defeated a strong English contingent led by Edward II.
4 Hamilton, No Stone Unturned, 94.   5 Hamilton, No Stone Unturned, 103.
6 Hamilton, No Stone Unturned, 151.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Romancing the Stone 193

stone lay in the wholeness of its form, rather than its parts, and not wanting to risk
having to ‘shovel it into paper pokes’7 to move it around, the stone was covered
with a Saltire Flag for its protection, and left on the exposed high altar at the
ruined Abbey of Arbroath, the site of Scotland’s declaration of independence in
1320. From here it was promptly returned to Westminster Abbey.
The Stone of Scone’s movement around the United Kingdom from late
December 1950 to April 1951 was one episode in an extraordinarily colourful
and rich history; there have been many attempts to steal the stone; it has been
broken, cracked and chipped, blown up by Suffragettes, declared a fake, and is
the subject of at least one symphony. Yet, the stone’s colourful existence is not
matched by its appearance: it is a plain, uncomplicated, squarely cut, solid, rect-
angular lump of red sandstone, with two round handles fitted at either end. It is
not ornate or decorative; rather, it is heavy and unwieldy. And yet this piece of
rock is a highly contested object with multiple, parallel histories and various
names to match its varying historic and mythical origins.8 The earliest recorded
name was the ‘Pharaoh’s Stone’ from the Liber Extravagans, written sometime
between 1304 and 1306, a nod to the stone’s supposed ancient Egyptian ori-
gins.9 Before this point, in both Scottish and English contemporary medieval
records, the stone is known through descriptive labels as ‘the stone of the Scottish
Kings’ or the ‘royal seat of stone’.10 In the Vita Edwardi Secundi, an English
chronicle written around 1329, the stone is referred to simply as the ‘stone of
famous memory amongst the Scots’.11 In the Scottish tradition the stone is com-
monly known as the Stone of Scone and the Stone of Destiny, and in the English
tradition the stone is referred to as the Coronation Stone.12 From the late six-
teenth century, in the British tradition the stone was commonly referred to as
Jacob’s Pillow. The alternative names provided for this highly contested object
seek to cement the stone’s place within particular national ideologies, and refute
its place in others. They entrench this ‘famous’ stone within the national, cultural,

7 Hamilton, No Stone Unturned, 151.

8 For a comprehensive discussion of the various names for the stone, see Nick Aitchison, Scotland’s
Stone of Destiny: Myth, History and Nationhood (Stroud: Tempus, 2000), 11–18.
9 D. Brown and A. B. Scott, ‘Liber Extravagans’, in Scotichronicon by Walter Bower, in Latin and
English, Book IX, vol. 5, ed. D. E. R. Watt, with Brian Scott (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1990), 54–127. The Liber has been dated to between 1296 and 1306, although it is most likely
from 1304 to 1306. For further discussion of the Pharaoh’s stone, see Dauvit Broun, The Irish Identity
of the Kingdom of the Scots in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer,
1999), 120.
10 See Aitchison, Scotland’s Stone of Destiny, 11–18. For instance, the stone is referred to as the ‘stone
which the Scottish Kings were accustomed to use as a throne’ (‘lapide quo Reges Scotorum . . . solebant
uti pro throno’), Willelmi Rishanger: chronica et annales, ed. Henry Thomas Riley (London: PRO,
1865), 163.
11 ‘Lapis ille apud Scotos celebris memorie’, Vita Edwardi Secundi: The Life of Edward the Second,
ed. Wendy R. Childs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 224.
12 The name ‘the Stone of Scone’ appears in several chronicles, including the Chronicle of Lanercost
for the year 1327. ‘Lapidem . . . de Scone’ (Stone of Scone) in Chronicon de Lanercost M.CC.I–M.CCC.
XLVI e Codice Cottoniano Nunc Primum Typus Mandatum, ed. Joseph Stevenson (Edinburgh: Impressum,
1839), 261.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

194 Alicia Marchant

and political memories and ideologies of two neighbouring nations that have a
long and complicated history of violent conflict and struggle.
How did this stone come to represent, signify, and even unify nations? What
does it mean for the stone to be called ‘a bit of Bannockburn’ and why was it the
target of the English Suffragettes? And critically, how have emotions attached to
the stone over time? In this chapter, I consider the stone’s significance within the
context of material culture and emotions, tracing the long, affective history of
the Stone of Scone. In so doing, I will also engage with critical debates about the
role of objects as agents that can and do produce specific affective states. Jane Bennett
observes ‘the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce
effects dramatic and subtle’.13 Objects are no longer viewed as representations of
social relations, but also as creators of such relations; objects do things. Analysis of
objects helps us to examine how power is practised about and through them, not
just as an abstract. In response to the challenge of articulating the relationship
between emotions and objects of the past in instances where there are no written
source materials, Oliver T. J. Harris and Tim Flohr Sørensen propose analysis of
the networks, the ‘affective fields’, through which emotion is generated.14
Anthropologist David Miller suggests that the relationship between people and
material cultures should be considered as a ‘process of objectification’, in which
senses of self, institutions, and things are created.15 So a question worth asking
then is: what affective states does the stone produce and how?
This particular stone, however, while ordinary in its appearance, is no ordinary
‘thing’: it possesses the ability to transform men and women into kings and queens.
Since time immemorial the stone was key in the inauguration of Scottish monarchs
at the Palace of Scone, in the Highlands. Unlike in other European traditions,
it was the act of being seated (elevatio and sublimare) on the stone rather than
through crowning or anointment that made Scottish monarchs.16 It was due to its
monarch-making abilities that the stone was a focal point during times of invasion
into Scotland. In 1296 the English king Edward I took the stone from the Palace
of Scone and transported it to Westminster Abbey in London, where the stone
was encased in a specially constructed gilded oak chair kept in St Edward’s
Shrine at the Abbey. From its place under the chair, the stone was fully incorp-
orated into the English coronation. First used at the coronation of Edward II on
25 February 1308, the stone remains to this day an essential element of the
British coronation ritual.

13 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010), 6.
14 Oliver J. T. Harris and Tim Flohr Sørensen, ‘Rethinking Emotion and Material Culture’,
Archaeological Dialogues 17.2 (2010): 145–63; 153.
15 Daniel Miller, ed., Materiality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 37.
16 Indeed, it would appear that crowning was an innovation adopted in the reign of Alexander II
(1214–49), with its first use at an enthronement ritual occurring at the inauguration of his son,
Alexander III in July 1249. See A. A. M. Duncan, ‘Before Coronation: Making a King at Scone in the
Thirteenth Century’, in The Stone of Destiny: Artefact and Icon, ed. Richard Welander, David J. Breeze,
and Thomas Owen Clancy (Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 2003), 151–2.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Romancing the Stone 195

While the stone’s potent agency renders its materiality extraordinary, it retains
all the principal qualities of stone: quintessentially heavy, inanimate, and durable,
but able to be shaped, broken, and weathered. The materiality of stone is a para-
dox that simultaneously suggests permanence and the destructive passage of time.
Indeed much about the stone is paradoxical; crucially, despite stone’s propensity
for inertia and inactivity, the stone’s documented history is quite preposterously
one of movement, both temporal and spatial, but also emotional. This stone
‘thing’ has the ability to move people. As I will discuss, the stone is embedded in
numerous interwoven historical narratives that locate its mythical origins in the
biblical-era Middle East, and document its movement to Scotland, sometimes via
Ireland and Spain. Its subsequent history is one of motion (or attempted motion)
between centres of English and Scottish power. Whatever its temporal-spatial
location, the stone’s centripetal affective force draws people towards it, to view
and touch it, and to participate in monarchical rituals and performances. In this
chapter I am interested in what the motion of the stone adds to the ways in which
the stone generates emotions; how does the stone move in time and space, and
what does the movement do in the creation of affective states? How does it accrue
emotional value?

A rolling stone gathers no moss.

—Proverbial
In the church of this abbey [Scone] was preſerved the famous chair, whoſe
bottom was the fatal ſtone, the palladium of the Scottiſh monarchy; the ſtone,
which had firſt ſerved Jacob for his pillow, was afterwards tranſported into
Spain, where it was uſed as a ſeat of juſtice by Gethalus, contemporary with
Moſes. It afterwards found its way to Dunſtnaffage in Argyleſhire, continued
there as a coronation chair till the reign of Kenneth II, who to ſecure his
empire removed it to Scone. Here it remained, and in it every Scottiſh monarch
was inaugurated till the year 1296, where Edward I, to the mortification of
North-Britain, tranſlated it to Weſtminſter Abbey; and with it, according to
antient prophecy, the empire of Scotland.17

In 1772 noted Welsh-born antiquarian Thomas Pennant (1726–98) travelled to

Scotland to survey its monuments, antiquities, and natural features. For Scone,
Pennant provides a narrative that focuses on the history and significance of the
stone, despite the important fact that the stone was not actually at the site at the
time of his visit, nor had it been for nearly 500 years. Pennant’s description of
Scone is dominated by the movement of the stone, its presence and then absence
at various places in its history, and crucially, comments upon the connection

17 Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides, 1772, vol. II (London: B. White,
1776), 116.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

196 Alicia Marchant

between the stone’s location and empire. This ‘palladium’ or object of protection of
the Scottish monarch, Pennant comments, is a thing of national significance and a
marker of power that, when transferred to Westminster, takes with it the power and
authority of the Scottish monarch. The sequence of movement of the stone that
Pennant provides from the Middle East (Jacob)–Spain–Argyll–Scone–London is
an interwoven mix of numerous origin myths of both Scottish and English trad-
ition, united here to create a British myth. It is a myth reinforced by Pennant’s
account of the ‘mortification’, the feelings of shame and embarrassment at the loss
of the stone, which is mourned not by the Scots, we are told, but by the people ‘of
North-Britain’. In other words, the people who live to the north, but are wholly
connected to South-Britain.
Multiple historical accounts describe the stone’s movement between the important
centres of Europe (and beyond): the Middle East, Egypt, Ireland, Scone, and
eventually London and then Edinburgh. How this history of the stone’s movement
came to occur is confusing, complicated, and sometimes contradictory. Many
accounts start with Scota, the daughter of the Pharaoh, who carries the stone with
her to Scotland; however, the detail often changes. Hector Boece, writing the
Scotorum Historiae in 1537, states that the Greek Gaythelius married Scota in
Egypt at the time of the Exodus, and they together went to Spain where they ruled
using the stone as a throne. In Fordun’s version in his Chronica Gentis Scottorum,
written in the second half of the fourteenth century, the stone was used by the
Spanish kings, and given by a king to his son, Simón Brecc.18 Simón took the
stone with an army to Ireland, which he conquered, and placed the stone at Tara.
One of Simón’s descendants, Fergus, took the stone to Scone, sometimes via Iona.
In other versions, the stone is found by either Milo—the mythical king of the
Scots who lived in Spain—or by Moses in Palestine, each of whom gives the stone
to a son, who travels to Ireland first, and then on to Scotland.19
The stone makes an appearance too in the Old Testament when it is used by
the patriarch Jacob as a pillow, marking this stone as not only extraordinary, but
also divine. It is with this useful stone under his head that Jacob dreams of a
ladder that reaches up to heaven, with angels ascending and descending, after
which God makes an appearance, telling Jacob that ‘the land whereupon thou
liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed’. So Jacob takes the stone along with
him on his journey (Genesis 28:10–22), and it is assumed that this stone plays
a role in the establishment of later empires. The point at which the Stone of
Jacob came to be associated with the Stone of Scone is difficult to decipher,
although it first appears in the chronicle of William of Rishanger, written in the
later thirteenth century.
The association with Jacob and God aligns the stone with kingship traditions of
the divine right of kings, which stipulated that a king’s power was received from
God, and that in return the king upheld Christian law within his realm, and God,

18 John of Fordun’s Chronicle of the Scottish Nation, ed. W. F. Skene, trans. F. J. H. Skene (Edinburgh:
Edmonston and Douglas, 1872), 23–4.
19 For an overview of these narratives, see Aitchison, Scotland’s Stone of Destiny, 11–18.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Romancing the Stone 197

through divine providence, ensured victory for the legitimate monarch over his
enemies. The enthronement and coronation rituals of medieval and early modern
Europe served to reinforce these notions, and in so doing created a sense of the
stone as having been placed on earth by God.
Whatever its beginning, the stone was at some point, and through some means,
placed at Scone, where it was used in the rituals of kingship at this site, and it was
from here that the stone was transferred from Scottish soil to English. In 1296,
the English king Edward I, who was in Scotland to subdue and overcome the
Scots, personally oversaw the seizure of the stone from its placement at Scone,
diverting his party especially for the task. The chronicler Guisborough records of
the stone’s seizure:
In returning by Scone [Edward] ordered that stone in which . . . the kings of Scots were
accustomed to be placed at their coronation, to be taken and carried to London . . . in
recognition that the kingdom [of the Scots] had been conquered and resigned.20
After its possession by the English, the stone was housed for a length of time
at Edinburgh Castle, until at least 1297, and from there it was transported to
Westminster, along with other looted Scottish regalia, including the crown, jewel-
lery, sceptre, ring, and robes. Amongst the items were also some relics, including a
portion of the true Cross, known as the ‘Black Rood’. The stone was to remain
stationary at Westminster until 1996 (although it was secretly secured for a time
elsewhere during the London Blitz in the Second World War), at which point the
stone was returned to Scotland, where it is currently housed in the Crown Room
at Edinburgh Castle.
The perplexing framework of historical and mythical narratives documenting
the movement of the stone over time and its placement at various locations, as well
as the attempted unravelling and comprehending of these narratives by modern
scholars which have resulted in numerous, sometimes conspiratorial examinations,
indicate the great affection and reverence in which the stone has been held for
centuries.
Since the seventeenth century, the stone’s ‘stoneness’ was an area of interest
alongside its mythical and historical adventures. Henry Keepe published his
Monumenta Westmonasteriensia in 1682 in which he narrates that the Coronation
Chair and stone:
appears extremely ancient both in its fashion and materials . . . [U]nder [the] Seat . . . lies
that so much famed stone whereupon the Patriarch Jacob is said to have reposed his
head in the Plain of Luza. It is of a blewish steel-like colour, mix’d with some eyes of
red, triangular rather than any other form, and being broken resembles a Peble.21
Keepe’s narrative focuses on the form of the stone, providing a detailed physical
description. In 1760, Richard Pococke travelled to Scone, where he linked the

20 The Chronicle of Walter of Guisborough: Previously Edited as the Chronicle of Walter of Hemingford
or Hemingburgh, ed. Harry Rothwell (London: Royal Historical Society, 1957), 281.
21 Henry Keepe, Monumenta Westmonasteriensia, or an Historical Account of the Original, Increase, and
Present State of St. Peter’s or the Abby Church of Westminster (London: C. Wilkinson, 1682), 142–3.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

198 Alicia Marchant

stone to the local geological formations, stating that it ‘seems to be of some of the
common Granite of Scotland’.22 Such notions were quite controversial not only
because it was a common and not extraordinary stone, but because they contra-
dicted the stone’s historical projection into the more ancient histories of humanity
which ­directed its movement. However, these parallel interpretations of the stone
continued over the course of the early modern era, with multiple studies to deter-
mine where and at what point this particular piece of stone was designated, exca-
vated, found whole, or cut from a larger bedrock and exactly from where. In 1996,
after the stone was returned to Scotland, the first comprehensive analysis of the
stone’s geological formation and physical structuring, and the human action that
had occurred on the rock (including its shaping and the addition of the iron rings)
was undertaken. As Warwick Rodwell has commented of this study, ‘the Stone was
treated objectively, like any other artefact of archaeological interest, and the evi-
dence it yielded was meticulously reported without regard for its legendary history
or previous hypotheses’.23 The stone was measured, weighed, and sketched; sam-
ples were taken and chemically analysed. The resultant scholarship has concluded
that the stone’s lithology is similar in structure to the sandstone found in the areas
around Perth, and is possibly linked to Quarry Mill.24
These studies of the rock’s lithology speak to a desire for the stone to have a
narrative beginning, an exact point of fabrication, and a precise moment when its
shape was chiselled out or came from a larger monolith; it makes a difference to
know when this stone was first loved, treasured, and admired. Although advances
have been made in identifying the possible geological location of its origin, this
rock will not come to the dating party: ironically, the stone’s material form com-
bined with its decided plainness and its lack of decoration makes it difficult to
date its fabrication. The rock’s simple form, as scholars have long observed, dis-
qualifies it from being a Pictish stone, as these were invariably more decorated.25
So it is possibly more modern, but how and why are questions which are still
being asked.
Crucially, though, these different approaches to the history of the Stone of
Scone, combined with its natural earth form and its human monarch-making
agency, suspend the stone liminally between myth and history, the divine and
chthonic, the forged and natural, the human and elemental, the inert and moving,
and the living and lifeless. This stone is both a naturally produced thing and a
human forged thing that humans need for various ritual performances, and it is to
this that I now turn.

22 See also Aitchison, Scotland’s Stone of Destiny, 42–3.

23 Warwick Rodwell, The Coronation Chair and the Stone of Scone: History, Archaeology and
Conservation (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2013), 12.
24 N. J. Fortey, E. R. Phillips, A. A. McMilan, and M. A. E. Browne, ‘A Geological Perspective on
the Stone of Destiny’, Scottish Journal of Geology 34.2 (1998): 145–52.
25 David J. Breeze, ‘The Stone of Destiny: Its Origin, History and Authenticity’, in The Stone of
Destiny, ed. Welander et al., 3–10; 5.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Romancing the Stone 199

II

What could be less human than cold, unmoving stone?

What could be less lithic than itinerant, adaptive humanity?26

Humans need this rock; its history is interwoven with that of humanity, because
this stone is linked to rituals of power, authority, and nation. The stone transforms
humans from ordinary to extraordinary. However, nothing is ever simple about
it; in reality, historians have no real idea how the stone was used in Scottish
enthronement rituals before 1296, and indeed (controversially) whether it played
any role at all.27 Scholars have cited a lack of contemporary sources that discuss
its use and, indeed, point to a range of later interpolations that raise considerable
doubts. The stone makes an appearance at the enthronement of Alexander III in
1249, but, as Nick Aitchison suggests, before this date there are no historical records
of the stone.28 In his analysis of Alexander’s enthronement, Dauvit Broun has
pointed out that many of the features of the ceremony at Scone were innovations
that sought to align the king with other European kingship regalia and rituals,
and thus reinforce the notion of Alexander as a king of an independent nation
worthy of international recognition.29 It is entirely possible, then, that the stone
may have been first used by people at that time, although it is not entirely clear.
But then, every tradition has to start from somewhere. The stone was becoming
an important marker of nation, one which was provided with a long historical
and mythical trajectory, which established an ancient Scottish royal genealogy
that could be traced to Ireland. The stone was thus evidence of this genealogy, and
a crucial aspect of a narrative constructed in reverse, which provided legitimacy
and authority.
What we can say with a degree of certainty about the Stone of Scone is that it
has been written about subsequently in chronicles and histories of the late medieval
and early modern era as though it were definitely and unquestionably an essential
feature of Scottish enthronement rituals, and had been since time immemorial.
Walter of Guisborough, an English chronicler of the fourteenth century, described
the stone at Scone in the following manner:
In the monastery of Scone, is kept a very big stone in the church of God, next to the
high altar, concave and made into a round chair on which future kings were placed
according to custom as the place of coronation.30

26 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Stories of Stone’, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 1
(2010): 56–63; 56.
27 ‘It became apparent in discussions I had at the conference with Paul Binski and George
Henderson, that there was some doubt that the Stone in reality played any part in royal inaugurations
before its removal to Westminster in 1296.’ Dauvit Broun, ‘The Origin of the Stone of Scone as a
National Icon’, in The Stone of Destiny, ed. Welander et al., 183–97; 183.
28 Aitchison, Scotland’s Stone of Destiny, 9.
29 Broun, ‘The Origin of the Stone of Scone as a National Icon’, 184.
30 The Chronicle of Walter of Guisborough, 239.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

200 Alicia Marchant

While we are not certain as to the exact ritual practices of kingship that were
performed during such a ceremony, it was enacted so as to generate feelings of majesty
and awe, and to construct legitimacy and power.31 For the ceremony in 1249, the
stone was enclosed in an oaken bench-throne and placed in the open in Scone
Abbey kirkyard.32 In 1292, for the enthronement of John Balliol, it was performed
in the Abbey Church. Here at Scone, the stone must surely have evoked a range
of emotions for the Scots, among them devotion, love, fraternity, and pride in
their self-determination, their right to choose their own leader, and to assert their
independence and their identity.
By 1296, the stone’s place in the ritual performances of the Scottish monarch
was deemed significant enough for Edward I to divert specifically to take the stone,
along with all other symbols of Scottish nationhood and power that he could
locate. This unsympathetic action was intended to disempower and undermine the
Scottish monarch through the removal of an important piece of material history.
The stone’s incorporation into the English coronation ritual was ensured with the
crafting of a chair between 1297 and 1300 to enclose the stone underneath. This
subordinate repositioning of the stone under the bottom of a newly crowned
monarch was a potent sign of English hegemony over Scotland.
The role and function of the stone in medieval and early modern coronation
rituals is, however, not frequently discussed in English documents. One such
record is provided by the English chronicler Thomas Walsingham (d. 1422), who
in his discussion of the coronation of Henry IV in 1399 provides an overview of
the important ritual elements of the English coronation, including the stone. After
the king was publicly paraded, Walsingham narrates:
The king was brought in, and the kingly seat was placed over the stone, which is called
‘the royal stone of the kingdom of Scotland’.33
Afterwards the king took an oath. While Walsingham makes it clear that the stone
was only one element in the ritual of the coronation, it is nonetheless an important
one. The stone was part of the performance of kingship. Key to this particular part
of the performance was the connection between the king’s body and the stone
itself—the king is placed upon it, and through this physical association with the
stone the monarch becomes a monarch.
These ritual performances place value, significance, and ownership on the Stone
of Scone, in a performance that seeks to generate emotions: awe, wonderment, even
fear, at the power of kingship and majesty. Recent work by Monique Scheer, draw-
ing upon Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, emphasizes the bodily and experiential

31 What we do know about the rituals, as Duncan explains, is that ‘before 1331, there was no
unctio (anointing), no coronatio, and writers could find only elevatio, craecio, or unspecified and unin-
formative verbs like erigere (set or raise up), sublimare (raise on high) or constituere (put in place) for
what went on’. See ‘Before Coronation’, 139.
32 Duncan, ‘Before Coronation’, 160.
33 My translation. ‘Introducto Rege, et incathedrato sede regali super lapidem, qui dicitur “Regale
regni Scotiae” ’, Johannis de Trokelowe et Henrici de Blaneforde, monachorum S. Albani, necnon quorun-
dam anonymorum, chronica et annales, regnantibus Henricio Tertio, Edwardo Primo, Edwardo Secundo,
Ricardi Secundo, et Henrico Quarto, ed. Henry Thomas Riley (London: Longman, Green, Reader &
Dyer,1866), 294.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Romancing the Stone 201

practice of emotions, suggesting that emotions emerge ‘from bodily dispositions

conditioned by a social context, which always has cultural and historical specificity’.34
For Scheer the ‘practice’ of emotions involves ‘the self (as body and mind), language,
material artefacts, the environment, and other people’. Scheer’s concept of emotions-
as-practice highlights not only the sorts of methods through which emotions are
produced, but also the emotional processes and practices as themselves critical
aspects of human experience. This concept has powerful resonance when consider-
ing the affective history of the Stone of Scone, providing a theoretical framework to
examine the ways in which emotions are performed and produced through the
enthroning or coronation rituals, and the remembering, reminiscing, recalling, and
engaging with past traditions and practices that these rituals acknowledge.
It is telling that the stone’s absence from Scone did not impact the location at
which Scottish kings were enthroned for nearly 100 years after it had been moved
to Westminster. Scone remained a sacred place, associated with past kingship and
heroics. Robert I (the Bruce) was inaugurated at Scone in 1306, as was his son
David II (d. 1371) and the next three kings.35 Due in part to the rise of urban
centres such as at Stirling, Perth, and Edinburgh, the centre of monarchical power
transferred to these locations, and so did the inauguration ceremonies. However,
the coronation of James IV on 26 June 1488 saw a return to Scone after an absence
of sixty-four years.
While Scone remained a significant centre, the manner in which the service of
inauguration of Scottish kings was conducted was greatly affected by the absence
of the stone. In order to adapt to the stone’s loss, Robert the Bruce petitioned the
Pope to allow him the right to be anointed and crowned, and was successful.
Although the Stone of Scone remained an object of great symbolic significance and
an important focal point for Scottish independence from England, it was no longer
the key king-making object that it once had been. Moreover, after 1603 the stone’s
location at Westminster was considerably less contentious due to the fact that it
was a Scottish king on the English throne. The accession of James VI of Scotland
to the English throne in 1603 saw a greater emphasis on the stone and its role in
the coronation of British kings.

III

The Stone swelled under her heart.36

It is not without irony that the stone’s movement between centres of British power
(Scone–London–Edinburgh) is driven by a desire for it to be stationary: the stone’s

34 Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a
History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51.2 (2012):
193–220; 193.
35 David II (d. 1371) inaugurated at Scone, 24 November 1331; Edward (d. 1364) inaugurated at
Scone, 24 September 1332; Robert II (d. 1390) inaugurated at Scone, c.26 February 1371; James I
(d. 1437), inaugurated at Scone, May 1424.
36 Ted Hughes, ‘Emily Brontë’, Remains of Elmet (1979), in Ted Hughes: Collected Poems, ed. Paul
Keegan (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), 486.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

202 Alicia Marchant

multiple affective pulls—pride, wonderment, anger, mourning, loss, envy, nostalgia,

sentiment—actively work to keep this stone inert, motionless, and in one secure
place, and simultaneously work for its movement elsewhere. At Westminster, the
stone was encased, secured, and anchored in one spot by a handmade wooden
chair, constructed between 1297 and 1300. In the construction of this chair, a
measurement was slightly off; rather than redoing the wooden oak chair, it was
decided that the stone itself would be modified, and a small section was chipped
off to make the stone fit.37
The stone and the chair that encased it were the subject of great antiquarian and
heritage interest in the early modern era, within both English and European
circles. William Camden, the aforementioned Henry Keepe, as well as continental
antiquaries, like Lupold von Wedel, travelled to London in the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries, providing numerous descriptions of the stone in situ
at Westminster. Justus Zinzerling, a Thuringian-born doctor of law from Basel,
wrote a popular travel guide published in 1610. His complete narrative for the
Westminster visitor reads:
Westminster Abbey: here you must observe the two monuments of Elizabeth and
Mary Stuart. A printed book of the monuments is sold by the verger. The poor are fed
here every Sunday; while the sermon is being delivered, the food is laid out on an
oblong wooden table. One of the curiosities is the stone on which Abraham rested;
the chair or throne bears an inscription. The exterior of Whitehall Palace is not very
magnificent.38
Although Zinzerling wrongly states that it was Abraham’s pillow, not Jacob’s, he
does allude to several affective relationships centred on the stone at Westminster.
The stone is, as Zinzerling states, a ‘curiosity’, a valuable artefact worthy of viewing
and engagement at an intellectual level. Zinzerling also alludes to the notion of the
stone as a commodity, with a profitable industry set up at Westminster that
included the sale of tourist information, as well as donations for the church. The
verger, it would appear, was not only responsible for the church, but was also the
main source of information for the tourist, both free and for sale. Westminster
was making money out of the stone’s presence. In the 1753, Westminster formally
produced a guidebook to the abbey, known as ‘The Verger’s Guide’, which was
regularly updated.39
The stone’s affective pull, and the awe and majesty that surrounded it, were
actively harnessed and used as a strategy to attract people. The stone’s position at
Westminster held both intellectual and economic value, and in turn a series of
affective relationships centred upon it. Although Zinzerling’s account is of the
early seventeenth century, the people of London reportedly felt an affinity with the
stone soon after its arrival from Scotland. On the accession of Edward III in 1327,
the 15-year-old king returned several items that had been taken from Edinburgh

37 Rodwell, The Coronation Chair and the Stone of Scone, 108.

38 Jodocus Sincerus, ‘Itinerarium Galliae &c, Lugduni (Lyons), 16mo’, in England As Seen by
Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James the First (London: J. R. Smith, 1865), 132.
39 Rodwell, The Coronation Chair and the Stone of Scone, 5.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Romancing the Stone 203

Castle by his grandfather, Edward I, including the piece of Christ’s Cross, known
as the Black Rood. It did not, however, include the Stone of Scone; this is because,
says the mid-fourteenth-century Chronicle of Lanercost:
the people of London would by no means whatsoever allow to be taken away from
them the Stone of Scone, whereon the Kings of Scotland used to be set at their
coronation at Scone.40
It is clear that the ‘people of London’ had become somewhat attached to the stone:
there were riots and agitation outside Westminster, possibly instigated by the abbot
of Westminster, William of Curtlington, who was vocal in his criticism of any
proposal of its return. It would appear, then, that the stone’s affective economy,
rather than the threat of prolonged warfare, or any other sense of obligation to the
Scottish people, was the primary reason that the Stone of Scone was not returned
to Scotland.
The stone was stuck firm at Westminster. This attempt at formal repatriation in
1328 described by the Lanercost chronicler was one of several attempts by the Scots
made over the course of 700 years to unstick the stone from Westminster, and to
return it to Scotland. The earliest attempt was made by Robert the Bruce in 1324
in a meeting held at York, where the Scots ‘demanded that the royal stone should
be restored to them, which the elder King Edward had long taken from Scotland
and placed at Westminster by the tomb of St Edward’.41 This was refused because,
according to the Vita Edwardi Secundi, although the demand to return the stone
was just, the terms were ‘highly damaging to us, and so they will return to their
own country without a result’.42 The demands that Robert the Bruce made along
with the stone’s return were for complete independence, and so the stone remained
firmly entrenched at Westminster.
Symbolically anchored at Westminster, the stone exerted a centripetal affective
pull as an object of affection that held symbolic significance. In June 1914, with
headlines like ‘British Nation Shocked’, information about the blowing up of the
Coronation Chair and the Stone of Scone circulated in newspapers around
the world:
Westminster Abbey became the scene of a militant outrage yesterday. Shortly before
6 o’clock in the evening a bomb exploded in Edward the Confessor’s chapel, close to
the Coronation Chair. A small part of the top of the back . . . was blown away and the
famous Stone of Destiny was slightly splintered.43
The bomb was apparently draped over the back of the chair in a Dorothy bag with
bicycle bells filled with explosives, and was timed to explode as Parliament was
debating how best to deal with the ‘Militant sisterhood’ within the Suffragette
movement.44 For feminist networks like the Suffragettes, the stone represented the
heart of male-dominated government in Britain.

40 Chronicon de Lanercost, 260.    41 Vita Edwardi Secundi, 225.

42 Vita Edwardi Secundi, 227.   43 The Times, 12 June 1914.
44 Rodwell, The Coronation Chair and the Stone of Scone, 180.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

204 Alicia Marchant

The stone’s expedition around Britain in 1951–2 was one of the few times that
the stone was dislodged from the chair at Westminster. Memoirs, documentaries,
and films document the stone’s journey in full detail. What the students found as
they were transporting the stone is that the weight of the stone became too great in
terms of both the stone’s physical heft and also its value, significance, and expect-
ations. As mentioned earlier, the students drew a likeness between their ­predicament
and that of the Flying Dutchman. The burden of this stone is not simply due to its
152-kilogram monolithic weight, but because it carries an affective load, an
accrued emotional ‘sticky-ness’. When interviewed in 2008, more than fifty years
later, Hamilton said:
‘Am I proud? You bet I am’, he says. ‘I felt I was holding Scotland’s soul when I touched
it for the first time.’45
Hamilton’s feeling of awe and pride was generated through touch. He had an
instant sense of the stone’s history and value, and what it represented for Scotland:
independence, like that felt at the celebrated Scottish win at the Battle of
Bannockburn in June 1312, when the Scots, led by Robert the Bruce, achieved a
crushing victory over Edward II.
In English circles, reaction to the stone’s adventures included disapproval and
‘feelings of deep tragedy’.46 In 1951, immediately after the movement of the
stone around Britain and its eventual return to Westminster, Wallace Connon‘s
popular book entitled The Stone of Destiny, or the Stone that Binds the
Commonwealth was published. Its premise is evident from the title: the stone
belongs to ‘our Island’ and works to unite the whole nation, generating collective
emotions and good feelings of unity, hope, and celebration, rather than anger,
shame, mourning, and frustration at the stone’s placement elsewhere on the
island.47 The Stone of Scone not only came to represent the majesty of the mon-
arch and the nation, but generated emotions that bound the people of the nation
together collectively.
In July 1996, British Prime Minister John Major announced that ‘the Stone of
Destiny is the most ancient symbol of Scottish kingship’, and would be returned
to Scotland, stating:
The Stone of Destiny holds a special place in the heart of the Scots. On this, the 700th
anniversary of its removal from Scotland, it is appropriate to return it to its historical
homeland.48
The arrival of the stone in Scotland was timed for maximum effect on St Andrew’s
Day, Scotland’s national day. While this was greeted in Scotland with emotive
newspaper headlines such as ‘The Stone is coming home’, in reality, when the day

45 Olga Craig, ‘Ian Hamilton on Stone of Destiny: I felt I was holding Scotland’s soul’, The
Telegraph, 14 December 2008.
46 F. Wallace Connon, The Stone of Destiny, or the Stone that Binds the Commonwealth (London:
Covenant, 1951), 12.
47 See, for instance, Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (London: Routledge, 2004).
48 John Major, House of Commons, 3 July 1996.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Romancing the Stone 205

arrived, people were quite confused and conflicted in their emotions. The crowds
who witnessed the stone’s procession down the Royal Mile to Edinburgh Castle
were reported in the Scottish newspaper the Sunday Mail the following day
as follows:
It should have been like Braveheart. When 700 years of history is overturned in an
afternoon, there should have been passion, fervour and cheering. Emotion should
have been written across peoples’ faces. But yesterday, when the Stone of Destiny came
home to Edinburgh on a sunny winter’s day, there was merely an embarrassing silence
from watching crowds.49

It would appear that the crowd was seemingly unable to show any form of out-
ward affection for the stone, and the expected outpouring of nationalistic senti-
ment (as in Braveheart) was not forthcoming. The multiple and complicated
affective histories of the stone were not going to be resolved into an overwhelming
sense of love at first sight for the stone. People did not know how to react or feel.
Part of the problem, according to the article, was that the procession of the stone
surrounded by English military squadrons was (not surprisingly) alienating. A
62-year-old bystander said ‘This ceremony is a fraud. Look at all the servicemen
lining the route with bayonets. It was the establishment showing it’s still in con-
trol of things.’50 It was made quite clear in Major’s speech that the stone was to
remain ‘the property of the Crown’. Moreover, the location in which the stone
was to be placed contributed to the feelings of dissatisfaction and alienation.
Several sites were proposed in a public process of consultation, including the
Museum of Scotland and at Scone. Finally, Edinburgh Castle was chosen to be
the stone’s home, where it is currently displayed in a glass vault along with other
Scottish regalia. Despite Scone having over 50 per cent support, it was ruled out
because the palace and surroundings are now (ironically) privately owned.51 It
was as though the stone had been again displaced, its placement taking into
account considerations more touristic than historical.

IV

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.52
Stone is an ideal witness to history. The Stone of Scone’s materiality, its monolithic
heft, is a fixed, solid, material reminder, a link between the past and the present

49 Melanie Reid, ‘Scotland’s Sound of Silence as the Stone of Destiny Comes Home in the
Sunshine’, Sunday Mail (Glasgow), 1 December 1996.
50 Reid, ‘Scotland’s Sound of Silence’.    51 Aitchison, Scotland’s Stone of Destiny, 149.
52 T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922), lines 26–30.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

206 Alicia Marchant

that is more durable and exists for a far greater time than the comparatively
shorter lives of the monarchs that it makes. The stone is evidence of Scotland’s
long history. Ian Hamilton, one of the students who took the stone in 1950–1,
remarked that ‘[t]he stone of destiny had always been in my mind as a symbol of
the continued existence of the Scottish nation’.53 The stone has become explicitly
linked to Scotland, to notions of independence, and to divine kingship.
The Stone of Scone itself appears to be timeless, and is a time traveller, itself
both evidence of the past and witness to that past. It is not only the stone’s past that
is imagined and written about, but also its future. The name ‘Stone of Destiny’ was
first applied to the stone in the mid-sixteenth century, and in the nineteenth
century became its most common name. The prophecies that inspired this name,
however, were first recorded in the early fourteenth century. While the prophecy
evolved over time depending upon the contemporary political climate, the crux of
it revolved around the notion that whoever possessed the stone would rule a great
land. The prophecy is cited in diplomatic documents sent to England in 1324 by
Robert I (the Bruce) when asking for the stone’s return to Scotland. The English
chronicle Vita Edwardi Secundi records the document as claiming that ‘Moses had
prophesied that whoever bore that stone with him should bring broad lands under
the yoke of his lordship.’54 The inclusion of the prophecy in such an important
request is telling of its significance.
The taking of the stone by Edward I was considered by many medieval Scottish
chroniclers to be the start of a predestined series of events that would culminate in
a Scottish king gaining the English crown. In the most influential and comprehensive
account of the prophecy, John of Fordun, in his Chronicle of the Scottish People,
written in the 1370s, writes:
Unless the fates deceive, the Scots will reign, it is said,
In the same place where the stone has been laid.55
Fordun’s couplet appears, usually verbatim, in many later Scottish chronicles,
compounding the idea of the stone’s role in the making of powerful kings over a
significant period of time. It made its way into many English chronicles also,
particularly in Elizabethan England, including Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of
England, Scotland and Ireland (1577), which records:
This ſtone was in faſhion like a ſeate or Chayre, hauing ſuch a fatall deſtinie, as the
Scottes ſay, following it, that whereſoeuer it ſhould be founde, there ſhoulde the
Scottiſh men raigne and haue the ſupreme gouernance.56
The connection of the stone with notions of prophecy and even magic would have
evoked in both England and Scotland such emotional responses as awe and majesty
in the power of the stone. The stone’s connection to a projected temporality would
probably have been a source of fear in England. Not surprisingly, the accession of

53 Ian R. Hamilton, The Taking of the Stone of Destiny (Moffat: Lochar, 1991), 9.
54 Vita Edward Secundi, 225.   55 John of Fordun’s Chronicle of the Scottish Nation, 23–4.
56 Raphael Holinshed, The Laste Volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, vol. II
(London: John Hunne, 1577), 3.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Romancing the Stone 207

James VI of Scotland to the English throne as James I saw a rise in interest in the
prophecy. Here, we have an artefact that is not just a passive recipient with emotions
projected onto it; rather, the ‘Stone of Destiny’ suggests that this stone object was
agentive and had a role in determining the Golden Age of Scotland.

C onclusions

Much ink has been spilled in the writing of both pseudo-history and fiction,
and all this has to be set aside since an understanding of the authentic history
of the Stone can only be achieved by methodical, unemotional and, above all
rigorously scholarly study.57
No stone ever had so wonderful a history.58
The history of the stone provides it with an affective load which is difficult to
unpack. Clearly the stone articulates and expresses social and power relations that
are emotionally loaded. The stone has been vested with its own power and strong
affective capacity, even in situations in which it has symbolized the colonial power
of one nation over another. This object has become actant, making and shaping
people, their emotional relationships to each other and to it, as much as it has had
them made by people.
It has done so in ways that have changed over time and through space. Thus the
stone has changing emotional capacities and meanings that relate to its assemblage
with other objects in different spaces, its material forms, and its uses. The stone’s
relationship to objects in Westminster Abbey evidently created new emotional
resonances for visitors to those which it gains in a locked vault in Edinburgh
Castle, as part of a paying exhibition where it is now held. It has been structured
and framed in these places to have different values, and to do different things.
The stone’s affective load is increased by its apparent movement between the
sticky centres of London, Scone, and Edinburgh, invoking a range of emotions
linked to nationhood and national communities. These too are evident at the per-
formances of ritual kingship that actively seek to generate emotions such as awe
and wonderment at the power of kingship. These affective processes and practices
render this piece of stone extraordinary, and led to the naming and renaming of the
stone in different contexts and for different purposes.
Its affective power is also related to its physical form. Materiality has come to
matter at different times. For example, doubts about its authenticity arise from
recent analyses of its physical and geological composition. Its physical form has
also been read at times as a kind of provocative transcendence of stone itself, the
provocation of its stony silence, the steadfast resistance of the Scots, quietly biding
their time.

57 Rodwell, The Coronation Chair and the Stone of Scone, vii–viii.

58 William Burges, ‘The Coronation Chair’, in Gleanings from Westminster Abbey, ed. G. G. Scott
(Oxford and London: J. Henry and J. Parker, 1863), 121.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

208 Alicia Marchant

Its use is also important. What the stone has been made to do creates new affective
practices. These have been changed by its double theft—by the English and by the
Scottish students. The latter is connected also to doubts about the stone—and
their emotional consequences—due to the ease with which it was able to be taken
from the abbey by students who touched it and rendered its political authority at
least momentarily questionable.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

12
Lord Mansfield’s Voices
In the Archive, Hearing Things

Carolyn Steedman

T h e Vo i c e s : A n I n t ro d u c t i o n

Archives are places for feeling things, or at least, places in which many historians
feel things. You may feel anxious (I’ll never get it done!), despairing, guilty (about so
many things, not least the money you’re spending, by just being fruitlessly here);
almost certainly you feel tired, possibly exhausted, and hungry, and dirty.
Documents, if you’re allowed to lay your hands on them, are often filthy things; it’s
quite difficult to get hold of food in most county record offices, and going out to
eat something is such a waste of time. You may feel the simple, quiet pleasure of
finding something, something you’re looking for, and writing it down. You may,
sometimes, in a different modality of perception, feel the decaying leather of a
notebook cover, the ever so slightly dusty surface of the page on which someone
(maybe, if you’re lucky, the historical person you are pursuing) wrote a long time
ago: the movement of her pen, the pencilled groove of notation in the margin. But
most likely not; you will spend a lot of hot and flurried time interfacing with all
the slippery surfaces of a microfilm reader. And you may hear things.
Words are material things, as eighteenth-century sensationalist psychology
taught, not simply, or not only, because the human voice may be skewered by a pen
to the page of a notebook, but because words are a product of the human body and
are sensible to other bodies: they are apprehensible to the senses.1 Magistrates’
clerks and court reporters writing down the required testimony of the poor made
reference to the language philosophy of John Locke in their mundane acts of
recording and writing, however bored, or careless, or inattentive their transcription
may have been.2 But centuries on, opening their decaying registers, the writing

1 Thomas Astle, The Origin and Progress of Writing, as well hieroglyphic as elementary, &c., for the
author (London, 1784); James Beattie, The Theory of Language, In Two Parts (Edinburgh: Strahan,
Cadell, & Creech, 1788); Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977), 21–54; Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the
Language of Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982); Nicholas Hudson, ‘Eighteenth-
Century Language Theory’, Eighteenth-Century Life 20.3 (1996): 81–91; Hannah Dawson, Locke,
Language and Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
2 For the narratives of the poor as required speech and the use of their testimony in the eighteenth-
century novel, see Carolyn Steedman, ‘Enforced Narratives: Stories of Another Self ’, in Feminism and
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

210 Carolyn Steedman

dissolves, and you fancy that you hear the witnesses and plaintiffs, the poor young
woman seven months gone naming the father of her unborn child, as they speak
their material but ephemeral words. But, really, you’re only listening to the void.3
For such reasons, we shall begin with these words:
you are a common thief you live by thieving and bilking—Don’t you meddle—well I won’t
meddle—she is young and strong about 26—Dog Kennel passage close to highway in
Uxbridge Road I have gone round I would not go bye that way stench from dead Horses—
against a wall and he misused me—came home drunk—I was to carry them to Halifax
Coffee House in Farthing Alley—it might be Harrington who was to look at them but
I don’t know I can’t recollect he did look at them—don’t remember the first use of sea-weed
as manure—I can say nothing about it—She cryed I can’t get drowned ashamed she was
naked—I took from his Mouth the Names which I wrote upon this Paper—sodomising
bastard I sd.—lucky I had got Lease from Deft. Before he might want me to be Witness—
you are a fine Woman indeed to be asleep & lose yr Corps—I went to the Door to have a
little air with my Daur & Mrs Baines—I have lived 21 years and am well known. I sell
Oysters—No Ship safe which is built in an Outlandish way—called her Whore & struck
her & bid her remember it—If you have mind to have Law you shall have enough.
Whose words are they? I can say a few things about the sensibility that typed them,
as you see them now, sometime in the summer of 2014, and also much earlier, in
the summer of 2001; not about the sensibility that ‘wrote’ the words—but the
­factors shaping the particular formatting and presentation you have before you.
(This is to leave an anonymous typesetter for this volume quite out of the account,
an omission which is a minor but important point of the story about to be told.)
The presentation above is greatly influenced by the clamorous voices of the poor,
written up by all manner of nineteenth-century reporters of ‘low-life deeps’, the
‘metropolitan abyss’, and ‘darkest England’.4 Those half-invented titles evoke a
Victorian literature of social investigation and the century’s many melodramas of
working-class life. My reading of much ‘low-life’ literature, over forty years, has
shaped the transcription (then, in 2001, and now): I find it difficult to see or hear
the words in any other way. Moreover, this sensibility was influenced long ago by
the exhilarating idea that a mode of transcribing someone else’s spoken words is in

Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods, ed. Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury, and Penny Summerfield (London
and New York: Routledge, 2000), 25–39.
3 Emily Robinson, ‘Touching the Void: Affective History and the Impossible’, Rethinking History
14.4 (2010): 503–20.
4 Pierce Egan’s Life in London or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his elegant
friend, Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their rambles and sprees through the
Metropolis (‘Tom and Jerry’) first appeared in 1821; it had a very long run: Pierce Egan, Tom & Jerry:
Life in London, or, The Day and Night scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq. and his Elegant Friend Corinthian
Tom in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis (London: John Camden Hotten, 1881). Also
Augustus Mayhew, Paved with Gold; or the Romance and Reality of the London Street: An Unfashionable
Novel (London: Henry Bohn, 1851); Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London:
George Woodfall, 1851); James Greenwood, Low-Life Deeps. An Account of the Strange Fish to be Found
There (London: Chatto & Windus, 1881); Jack London, People of the Abyss (London: Macmillan,
1903); Alexander Paterson, Across the Bridges (London: Arnold, 1911). See Rick Allen, The Moving
Pageant: A Literary Source Book on London Street Life, 1700–1914 (London: Routledge, 1998) for a
fuller account.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Lord Mansfield’s Voices 211

itself a form of language theory.5 Naming the participants in a conversation or oral

history interview or not naming them; removing the questions of the interlocutor;
putting names at the beginning or end of a block of transcribed speech; setting
fragmented, hesitant, speech as continuous prose—all of this matters in the w ­ riting
down of other people’s voices. In one sense, I ‘wrote’ these words.
I do not remember crying over them back in 2001; I hadn’t the time for tears.
I used to cry quite a lot in libraries and record offices: for shivering poor children
washing cresses at Farringdon Green Market as they prepared their goods for sale,
winter 1849; at the formulaic, desperate narratives of the settlement or bastardy
examination; at the terrible enduring weight of the world of which I am a part.6
Over the years between 2001 and 2014 I have cried for the poor young woman
who could not, shivering and naked, effect her final act of desperation and drown
herself; but only in my own house, and privately, and at the plangent sadness of
‘I can’t get drowned’. But in general, I seem to have laid off the tears once I under-
stood that I was only ever crying for myself.7 I believe that I now know where I’m
coming from in the intensity of my archival encounters.8 I understand (believe
I understand) that the sympathies and empathies of twentieth-century British
social history can be read as part of a longstanding project of modernity (originat-
ing in the eighteenth century and given its most elegant exposition by Adam Smith
in The Theory of Moral Sentiments) of finding your own soul finer in its ability to
apprehend the pain of others. After the eighteenth-century empathetic turn you do
not ask: how does, or did, this person feel? Rather you ask: how would I feel if
that happened to me? How do I feel, feeling the weight of the world, the suffering
of others?9
Speaking literally, the words set in italics above were written by William Murray,
Earl of Mansfield and Lord Chief Justice of England (1705–93). He became Chief
Justice of the Court of King’s Bench in 1756, and remained so until 1788. What
you have just read is a compendium of recorded utterances and sentences taken
from several volumes in the series catalogued as ‘Judges Notebooks of the First Earl
of Mansfield’. The notebooks are archived with the Murray family papers at Scone
Palace, Perth, Scotland.10 But though so labelled, they cover the period 1742–93,

5 Elinor Ochs, ‘Transcription as Theory’, in Developmental Pragmatics, ed. E. Ochs and

B. Schieffelin (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 43–72; Christina Davidson, ‘Transcription:
Imperatives for Qualitative Research’, International Journal of Qualitative Methods 8.2 (2009): 1–52
(<http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/IJQM/article/viewFile/4205/5401>) surveys thirty
years’ worth of transcription theory.
6 Henry Mayhew, ‘Watercress Girl’, in London Labour and the London Poor, vol. I: The London
Street-Folk (London: Griffin, Bohn, 1861), 151–2; Pierre Bourdieu, La Misère du monde (Paris: Seuil,
1993), trans. as The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1999); Carolyn Steedman, ‘The Watercress Seller’, in Reading the Past: Literature and History, ed.
Tamsin Spargo (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 18–25.
7 Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (London: Virago, 1986), 30.
8 Robinson, ‘Touching the Void’.
9 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: A. Millar; Edinburgh: A. Kincaid &
J. Bell, 1759), 12–25. For ‘social suffering’, Bourdieu, Misère du monde; Simon J. Charlesworth,
A Phenomenology of Working-Class Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
10 Scone Palace, Perth, Murray Family Papers, 1st Earl of Mansfield, judge’s notebooks and papers
relating to his judicial work and career, 1742–94. What will be referred to in this chapter is RH4/151,
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

212 Carolyn Steedman

so were begun long before William Murray was appointed Chief Justice (and
­elevated to the peerage). His earlier government positions—Solicitor General,
Attorney General—allowed him to continue his lucrative private practice as a
­barrister, representing clients in a wide variety of lawsuits. According to Norman
Poser’s new biography of Mansfield, the only limitation on a law officer’s private
practice was that he could not act against the government.11 The entries from
which I made this compilation are from the 1750s, when he was on the South
Eastern Assize circuit, and at jury trials which he conducted at Westminster Hall,
and at the Guildhall for the City of London.12
In 2001 I was working on what would become the article ‘Lord Mansfield’s
Women’; in my own research notebook I headed the page of pencilled transcrip-
tion ‘Lord Mansfield’s Voices’, so I evidently always envisioned a companion piece
to his ‘Women’.13 I was in a very great hurry, for consulting the Murray family
papers costs a deal of money (and time, too). I was in a distant city, my credit card
clocking up the price of the train fare, of somewhere to stay, the restaurant meals.14
I wasn’t after this; I wasn’t after anything from the 1750s; I was trying to find
Mansfield’s and his fellow judges’ adjudication of a series of Poor Law appeal cases,
forwarded from county quarter sessions to the Court of King’s Bench in the 1770s
and 1780s. The appeal cases all involved poor working women and the troubling
question of their settlement under the old Poor Law.15 Half a dozen poor women
made up my category ‘Lord Mansfield’s Women’, including the slave-servant of
Thames Ditton, Surrey, Charlotte Howe. I added to the list of Women the black
child Elizabeth [Dido] Belle, who grew up in very different circumstances from those
of Howe, at Mansfield’s country house at Kenwood. Also included in the category
were all the ladies (nieces, grand-nieces, his wife Lady Betty) who shaped the Chief
Justice’s domestic life and thus—perhaps—the public law he made and unmade.16

Judges’ Notebooks of the First Earl of Mansfield. RH4/151/1 also includes ‘Miscellaneous papers
relating to actions heard before Mansfield, c.1742–1785’.
11 Norman Poser, Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 2013), 97–8.
12 James Oldham, The Mansfield Manuscripts and the Growth of the English Law in the Eighteenth
Century, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), vol. I, 5;
vol. II, Appendix B, 1484–1504; Edmund Heward, ‘Lord Mansfield’s Notebooks’, Law Quarterly
Review 92 (1976): 438–55.
13 Carolyn Steedman, ‘Lord Mansfield’s Women’, Past and Present 176 (2002): 105–43.
14 I repeat myself: Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 18.
15 Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century legislation inaugurating the old Poor Law prescribed a dom-
inant mode of operation: a poor or indigent person claiming relief from a local authority must dem-
onstrate his or her ‘settlement’, that is, that they ‘belonged’ to that place and were among its settled
poor. Settlement could be acquired in several ways (most obviously by being born to a father who
possessed it, and never moving from a natal parish); but ‘earning’ it by service was the most usual
route—it certainly produced the most litigation. A man or a woman hired to work in a particular
place and fulfilling the contract (the agreement to serve for a year) had an important claim to settle-
ment and thus to relief. ‘Serving’ meant many kinds of work done for a master or mistress under a
hiring agreement; but in the eighteenth century the most common hiring was as a domestic. Settlement
acquired by domestic service was something a woman could ‘earn’ by exercising her own labour, and
in certain circumstances, pass on to her children.
16 Gene Adams, ‘Dido Elizabeth Belle: A Black Girl at Kenwood. An Account of a Protegée [sic] of
the 1st Lord Mansfield’, Camden History Review 12 (1984): 10–14; Reyahn King, ‘Belle, Dido Elizabeth
(1761?–1804)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004);
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Lord Mansfield’s Voices 213

The poor women seeking their settlement at the top of my list did not have to have
had their case adjudicated on appeal by Lord Mansfield himself to be counted one
of his Women (though the majority did). Later appeal cases, involving other King’s
Bench judges (and a later Chief Justice) would do for me: I was attempting to
establish a quasi-legal category by which we might consider the high courts’ inter-
vention in the old Poor Law, and the common law judges as policy-makers in
regard to the settlement question.17 I was also pursuing the monetary provisions
Mansfield made for Elizabeth [Dido] Belle. All of this was sixteen years ago, and
my research questions dictated my focus on the later eighteenth century, specific-
ally the mid-1780s.
I already had in mind King’s Bench treatment of the servant Charlotte Howe
(Servant? Slave-servant? Former slave? There was no legal category for her condi-
tion of being and existence), for in 1785 Mansfield, who gave the judgment in the
appeal case involving her, determined that her being black, or her having been, or
being, a slave, was not to the point. To prove a settlement, there had to have been
a hiring (a contract of service). There had not been a contract in Howe’s case; she
had been brought from the Americas by her naval-captain master in 1781 and
acted as servant to his wife, in the rural fastness of Surrey. Being unfree, she had
never been in a position to make contract with another person, for she was not a
(legal) person herself. She was not the type of free person who, as John Locke
­proclaimed in 1689, might of his or her own will and volition ‘make himself a
servant to another by selling him, for a certain time, the service he undertakes to
do in exchange for wages he is to receive’.18
I found no trace of Charlotte Howe in the Murray papers I was able to consult,
though quite a lot about the ‘Black Girl at Kenwood’. I knew before I set out for
the archive just how unlikely it would be to find Howe. My anxiety and guilt at
spending so much time and money on something I wasn’t going to find anyway
certainly shadowed my days there. The absence—the perfect silence—of Charlotte
Howe inflected what I read and what I heard. I was able to conclude the article
‘Lord Mansfield’s Women’ with a reflection on her absent voice: I described the
Marvellous Girls, the young women who, in claiming their settlement, spoke out
in many courts of law—‘not half gone with child . . . could have done . . . [my
work] . . . to the end of the year—better to have clothes . . . [than wages for I am]
connected with bad friends’—who knew what and who they were, as women and
workers; as legal persons.19 But not Charlotte Howe. It was not possible to retrieve

online edn, October 2007 (<http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/view/article/

73352>, accessed 24 September 2014); Poser, Lord Mansfield, 299–300, 390–3; Belle, dir. Amma
Asante, DJ Films, Isle of Man Film, and Pinewood Pictures with support from the BFI, 2013; Paula
Byrne, Belle: The Slave Daughter and the Lord Chief Justice (London: William Collins, 2014).
17 For the judges on circuit as policy-makers, see Joanna Innes, ‘Parliament and the Shaping of
Eighteenth-Century Social Policy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series, 40 (1990):
63–92.
18 John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government (1690), Chapter 7 (‘Of Political or Civil Society’),
Section 85.
19 Quite as marvellous as (more marvellous than) the eighteenth century’s official Marvellous One,
Thomas Chatterton. Linda Kelly, The Marvellous Boy: The Life and Myth of Thomas Chatterton
(London: Faber and Faber, 2009).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

214 Carolyn Steedman

her spoken voice from this archive or any other, or from published court tran-
scripts, or from the newspapers. Through the fifty years during which the law
reports repeated her story, it was always written in a way that makes it impossible
to recover the first-person singular.
I haven’t revisited the Murray archive in preparation for writing this chapter; I’ve
had to rely on a kind of multilayered memory of many transcriptions. In my 2001
notebook, I’ve found myself exercising the editorial arts on Mansfield’s writing
(Already!–without knowing what my pencilled transcription was for! It can only
have an hour . . . I wasn’t really wasting time). It was a way of proceeding quite con-
trary to the patient, chronologically ordered, dated items concerning his com-
ments on the Poor Law that I collected at the same time. The fragments of speech
above were written down at random, from what I remembered noticing maybe
twenty minutes before, reeling back through the microfilm to find them. So not
knowing why, I turned Mansfield’s verbatim transcription of what witnesses, plain-
tiffs, and defendants said in court into a kind of symphony for many voices, as if
for all the world I were a sound engineer employed by the BBC Radiophonic
Workshop.20 Later, at home, still summer 2001, I typed up my handwritten tran-
scription much as it appears above. Individual utterances are taken from separate
pages of the original notebooks, and from many different court sittings, cases, and
hearings. I removed time and location from Mansfield’s notes, but I preserved his
spelling, punctuation, and use of contractions (‘Daur’ for daughter; ‘sd’ for said).21
Each separate utterance is as he wrote it. My editorial interventions were the amal-
gamation itself, and the em dashes between the separate fragments of speech. But
you could say: the voices come from 2001, and I wrote them. Thus are raised ques-
tions of writing, authorship, and representation, which this chapter will explore.
But the question of being in the archive—being in, feeling things in, hearing things
in an archive—is much more important. What is being recorded here? Being
heard? By whom? When?

S e v e n D e g r e e s o f S e pa r at i o n

In an archive, you can always measure out the distance from whatever it is you’re
looking at. Think of this: the voices appeared suddenly on the microfilm reader,
leaping from the pages of a filmed document that was ostensibly something else,

20 The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was a sound effects unit of the BBC. Created in 1958 to prod-
uce effects and new music for radio, it was closed in 1998 (<http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/
artists/39f0d457-37ba-43b9-b0a9-05214bae5d97>, accessed 15 May 2017); Louis Niebur, Special
Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2010). The workshop had a certain (though underexplored) influence on the practice
of British oral history, particularly through the radio work (‘The Radio Ballads’) of Philip Donnellan.
But see Ieuan Franklin, ‘Documenting the Social and Historical Margins in the Films of Philip
Donnellan’, La Revue LISA 12.1 (2014) (<https://lisa.revues.org/5606>, accessed 15 May 2017).
21 Oldham has discussed the principles of his transcription of the Mansfield manuscripts: ‘silently
supplied articles’, standardized ampersands, inserted and altered punctuation ‘for convenience’, mod-
ernized spelling and capitalization, and approximated to Mansfield’s paragraphing ‘except where this
would create perplexity’. Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, vol. I, xxviii–xxix.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Lord Mansfield’s Voices 215

something happening in the 1780s, not the 1750s. I’d just made a note that I’d
found a Poor Law appeal case during which Mansfield issued a famous (in its day)
condemnation of the perfectly useless statute law he had to work with and the arbi-
trary way in which magistrates proceeded with settlement law. ‘It is of more
Importance in most Cases that the Law shou’d be certain than what the Law is,’ he
wrote in 1785. ‘It is particularly so in Questions relative to Settlements’.22 Then
suddenly, I was in the 1750s. ‘This is about a third of the way through the reel,’
I noted. ‘Reel RH4/151/1—I can maybe go back to this and check last entries
where it changes into a notebook for the 1750s.’ I evidently did do this, but prob-
ably the next day, for my voice symphony—Lord Mansfield’s Voices—is a page
away from the note about Reel RH4. I guess I battled on with ‘Volume 182. Small
cash book, 1778–1793’, which is noted next, though God alone knows where
I found it (On another microfilm reel? On the same reel? The actual, physical
cashbook?). You can’t really tell what the principle of photography was, or if some
stray pages from a box or a bundle were photographed in the middle of doing the
notebooks. Discussing legal archives in general and those of the eighteenth-­century
King’s Bench in particular (in The National Archives), Paul Halliday observes that
their makers determined long ago what we might find there, by their various types
of labelling. The high authority of the law and of precedent is reinforced in this
way, says Halliday. But in fragments of an archive, or in the microfilmed parts of it
to which you are given access, there can be no certain grasp of the ‘catalogues,
tables and indexes by which the labels themselves were and can be deployed’.23
Whatever which way, the material from the 1750s was a surprise of the chrono-
logical kind. When I went back and found my place, I labelled my page of tran-
scription with ‘Lord Mansfield’s Voices~on circuit~in Maidstone~in KB. This is
the 1750s, on circuit in SE [South East], in KB.’
The microfilm separates you from the original documents, with no one to whom
you can put your why-and-wherefore questions.24 But the first and obvious degree
of separation is measured by the time that has passed since the words you read
were penned. The writer is dead and gone, and the traces left by William Murray
(his handwriting, the shape and size of the notebooks, the material conditions of
his writing) are immaterial, because, suddenly, you are not after him, or his judg-
ments, or his lambastings of the Poor Laws; you are caught by a voice that said
something, some words, sometime before a witness remembered them, in response
to a question put in court. The witnesses repeat what they remember hearing
someone say, last week, last year; a judge writes down what is said now, Guildford
Assizes, 1757. This is, to say the least, an attenuated form of transcription, then

22 Murray Family Papers, Earls of Mansfield, Box 68, King’s Bench Papers 1782–85. ‘Devonshire.
King ag. Inhabitants of Harberton, 23 Nov 1785 . . . If the Justices of the Peace at their Sessions & even
out of their Sessions are to be Erected into Chancellors, it cannot but happen that on the same Facts,
very different Decisions must be made.’ Also Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, vol. I, 108.
23 Paul D. Halliday, ‘Authority in the Archives’, Critical Analysis of the Law 1.1 (2014): 110–42.
24 The Mansfield Judges’ Notebooks are permanently held on microfilm in the National Archives
of Scotland. Scone Palace Archives does not make the originals available to researchers; permission
from the Murray family is required to consult the microfilm copies at West Register House.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

216 Carolyn Steedman

and now. That maybe no one ever actually said ‘I have lived 21 years and am well
known. I sell Oysters’ using exactly those words is the least of your worries. The
people who possibly said these words, or something like these words, are not your
subjects; you will not be writing about them; they will not be part of your argu-
ment. But their presence delays you; it compels you to write down words that
were—literally—composed by Lord Mansfield. You copy them out, knowing that
whatever you come to write about them, if you ever do, will not be—cannot be—
about what was there, what it was like, Once Upon a Time. ‘There is history’, says
Jacques Rancière in Les Noms de l’histoire,
because there is the past and a specific passion for the past. And there is history because
there is an absence . . . The status of history depends on the treatment of this twofold
absence of the ‘thing itself ’ that is no longer there—that is in the past; and that never
was—because it never was such as it was told.25
But there are voices, echoing from the distant vault of what was, or what may have
been; people speak out in courts of law, or under severe questioning from some
official entering their name on a list of applicants for poor relief. Nearly all tran-
scribers of the words of the poor—wearied, bored, careless, inattentive—were
anonymous in a way that the Lord Chief Justice was not. Clerks and court report-
ers are no more to be retrieved than the subjects of their writing and recording,
which is, I suppose, the second degree of separation: the words you see and hear
were not written by the pauper or plaintiff you are interested in, but by some dimly
imagined interlocutor, some minor official of some state system, whose act of writ-
ing effaces him (always a him, until the late nineteenth century) from the page.
The next separation is to do with where you are. You do not, for the main part,
read the voices (from a past that never was) in the place where they were—­perhaps—
spoken. Lord Mansfield’s legal and family papers are archived in a different legal,
national, and geographical space from the one in which they were produced. They
are stored with the extensive Murray archive at Scone Palace, in Perthshire,
Scotland, in the private family home which William Murray left at the age of thir-
teen and never, by all accounts, visited again.26 The legal papers and notebooks
archived there concern the English legal system, not the Scottish: they emanated
from the English South Eastern Assize court circuit, the Court of King’s Bench and
other London and City courts, and earlier, from Murray’s own legal practice, oper-
ated out of first Lincoln’s Inn and then the Inner Temple.27 Many of Mansfield’s
legal papers were evidently stored by him in his family home in Bloomsbury,
London. In Barnaby Rudge (1841) Charles Dickens made famous, all over again

25 Jacques Rancière, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge (1992) (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 63. For Rancière’s opaque acknowledgement of the impossibil-
ity of rewriting speech from the past, see The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual
Emancipation (1987), intro. and trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991),
22–3, and commentary by Carolyn Steedman, ‘Reading Rancière’, in Rancière Now, ed. Oliver Davis
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 69–84.
26 Poser, Lord Mansfield, 18–120; Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, vol. I, 8–43.
27 Poser, Lord Mansfield, 46–8. In the 1730s Murray did act on behalf of or against Scottish appel-
lants to the House of Lords.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Lord Mansfield’s Voices 217

for the new century, the story of their destruction by the Gordon Rioters in 1780.28
Hundreds of books and many literary manuscripts were burned, but ‘perhaps the
greatest loss was some two hundred notebooks containing Mansfield’s handwritten
notes on cases he had decided’.29 In Perthshire survives a tiny fragment of a much
larger, lost archive, so the words of evidence that open this chapter are separated,
by a fourth (or fifth) and particular degree, from all the other written words that
may have given them context.
The notebooks, composed in the south-east of England, records of the English
legal system, are housed in Scotland. But they cannot be consulted in their resting
place. After permission has been granted by the Murray family for you to see them,
they are transported to a public or semi-public repository. These days archive con-
sultations take place at the University of Dundee’s Archive Services; Scone Palace
charges a fee for the administrative and transportation costs involved.30 In 2001
I travelled to Edinburgh, where the documents I had selected were made available
in one of the search rooms of the National Archives of Scotland, in West Register
House, at the opposite end of Princes Street from the main General Register
House.31 In those days, when I was a full-time university employee, there was a
departmental research account for me to draw on for archive work like this, much
astonishment from colleagues at the idea of being charged to consult an archive,
and some good one-liners from the head of department who signed my claim
form about the eighteenth-century cost of movement of goods by donkey-pannier
from Perth to Midlothian. But I didn’t feel the agitation and resentment I feel
when paying a personal subscription to a commercial Internet database provider,
or for-profit genealogy company. Such companies provide (among other material)
baptism, marriage, and burial details extracted from the parish records held in UK
county record offices. ‘They’re our records!’ you cry. ‘I don’t see why I should pay
to look at them!’ But of course, looking at or consulting them (which you could do
for free if, for example, you took the train to Shropshire Archives) is not what
you’re paying for. Payment is for their transcription, digitization, and the online
search facility. Access to the physical repositories which hold records of national
and local government and administration is free, and also public, in that local
record offices (and the National Archives at Kew and the National Archives of
Scotland in Edinburgh) are funded out of tax revenues, local and national. The
private family archive at Scone Palace charges for moving the Murray papers, not
for consulting them; I had no right to the parsimonious resentment I feel every
time I catch sight of my personal monthly subscription to Ancestry.co.uk, for I was
not myself paying for transportation to Edinburgh. In these several ways, the
records themselves are cut loose from their many contexts, and you, being not at
home, are cut loose from your own. In a situation like this, far away, and in another
country, you are inclined to hear voices.

28 Poser, Lord Mansfield, 360–475.    29 Poser, Lord Mansfield, 365.

30 ‘Art and Archive Enquiries’ (<http://scone-palace.co.uk/palace-grounds/art-archive-enquiries>,
accessed 15 May 2017).
31 The microfilms of the Notebooks are already there. See note 24.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

218 Carolyn Steedman

But they are not the voices you are used to. I am used to—take this as an
e­xample—looking up from the page of the ‘Overseers’ Accounts and Rates,
1813–1822, parish of Hardington Mandeville, Somerset’, out through the window
of Somerset Archives in Taunton, at a landscape and a sky that is just a bit like that
enclosing a village twenty-five miles or so south-east of where you are. I sit in a
building provided by the local state—a county record office–on the outskirts of a
county town that inscribed the very limits of the administrative world that the
poor and paupers of Hardington Mandeville c.1800–20 knew. I am not alone; I am
as much at home as it is possible to be with the state. I believe that the hum of
voices I hear around me, as local historians load the microfilm reader machines,
and search the microfiche pages for one of the lost ones, one of their family from a
hundred years ago, is pretty much like what I might have heard in the Hardington
Mandeville vestry room in 1814: similar accents; something like the same quality
of voice. I like working in local record offices, enjoy the little space of quiet you can
make for yourself as the busy world of family and local history buzzes around. Had
I read Lord Mansfield’s notebooks in the National Archives at Kew, or in Lincoln’s
Inn Law Library (logical places for their deposition) I could have looked out of a
window, or caught a snatch of passing conversation from the street when I went
out for lunch and thought for a moment that his Voices came from outside, echo-
ing down the vortex of 250 years. But when you are alone, and in another country,
and dislocated by tiredness and the anxiety that you’ll never get it done, then the
only place of origin for the Voices is yourself.
Like many historians of the European eighteenth century, I am as convinced as
Arlette Farge that ‘judicial records . . . created a space of captured speech’.32 But
whose speech? Whose voices? Mansfield’s? Mine? The words of those entombed in
the past? In his very first days in the Archives Nationales in Paris, in the 1830s,
Jules Michelet said he discerned ‘a movement and murmur which were not those
of death’. He heard muffled voices; he wrote as if the documents themselves spoke,
out of their own desires: ‘these papers and parchments, so long deserted, desired no
better than to be restored to the light of day’.33 It’s taken me a very long time to
understand what Michelet is so clear about: that the murmuring came from the
documents, not from the myriads of the dead and gone. But in this particular case,
summer 2001, I was not handling the documents that wanted me to look at them,
or which wanted me to leave them alone; I was using a microfilm. I had no contact
with the pages Mansfield wrote on. I could not touch the pages he touched.
(Though I did touch the volumes and bundles containing his accounts and corres-
pondence with his agents, bankers, and solicitors.)

32 Arlette Farge, Le Goût de l’archive (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989); Arlette Farge, The Allure of the
Archive, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton, foreword by Natalie Zemon Davis (New Haven, CT, and
London: Yale University Press, 2013).
33 Jules Michelet, ‘Et à mesure que je soufflais sur leur poussière, je les voyais se soulever . . . ’. Jules
Michelet, ‘Preface de l’Histoire de France’ [1869]; and ‘Examen des remaniements du texte de 1833
par Robert Casanova’, in Œuvres complètes, vol. IV (Paris: Flammarion, 1974), 613–14, 727.
Steedman, Dust, 26–7.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Lord Mansfield’s Voices 219

And . . . yet another degree of separation: I was working in an archive in a city

that had once been my home, however foreign and irreducibly English I had felt
in it, what with my self-aggrandizing and historically inappropriate colonial guilt.
Scotland was never colonized by England, or by the British state. It’s just that as an
English person, your hands are always a little bit bloodied most of the places you
go.34 I got married in Edinburgh, lived there for three years in the late 1960s and
early 1970s. Visiting in 2001, I was separated from my own past; or at least able to
measure the past into a history.

Vo rt e x

From the time of classical antiquity, commentators have bemoaned the inadequa-
cies of writing for expressing meaning. A piece of written language may be a
­reasonable model of what a speaker said, but it is pretty useless for conveying what
the speaker meant. Writing systems have great difficulty in capturing the prosodic
­features of speech: intonation, loudness or quietness of volume, voice quality.
Spoken utterances imply, hint, insinuate; they also assert and define. Written
­language can do the last two; it cannot easily do the first three. It cannot readily
indicate its hidden and intended meanings, as can speech. Writing, to say it at its
most definitive and forceful, lacks illocutionary force.35 And always has. Modern
linguists describe the gradual evolution of punctuation marks as a mission con-
ducted across many writing systems, to give writing the illocutionary force it lacks.
David Olsen’s work allows us to see Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) as a great
monument to punctuation (a major attempt at presence in writing, theoretically
resonant to this day). Pamela’s printer/author, who had the entire resource of
­hot-metal printing press technology available in the workshop across the yard from
the room in which he wrote, made Pamela (the character) out of italicisation;
dashes en (–) and em (—); exclamation marks (!); flung all over the place, in a
grand (I would say sublime) illocutionary mission. But the dark shadow of writing,
which separates us from life (the dark shadow apprehended by Plato, by Rousseau,
and, for our own era, by Jacques Derrida), still fell; in the end we do not—can-
not—know what ‘Pamela’ and Pamela actually meant. But punctuation marks were
such a valiant effort to hold back the dark: a series of typographical marks drew
attention to the phrasing and emphasis of spoken language, and allowed myriad
readers to imagine hearing it, as uttered. It was a technology for making meaning
(or the intention of the speaker) plainer, for drawing attention to the rhythmic
structure of the language, and to its phonetic arrangements, by simply showing
what the voice did, where it paused, stopped, trailed away, or made emphasis.

34 Carol Ann Duffy, ‘September 2014’, The Guardian, 20 September 2014: ‘cousins, sisters, broth-
ers, / in your brave, bold, brilliant land: / the thistle jags our hearts, / take these roses / from our
bloodied hands’.
35 David Olson, The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and
Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 154–5.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

220 Carolyn Steedman

In linguistic and language-history terms, Lord Mansfield’s Voices emerge from

the little Babel of discussion that brought the principles of modern language analysis
into being in the middle years of the eighteenth century. How to represent speech?
It is said that one of the functions of italics in mid-eighteenth-century prose
­writing was to mark quotations, and that this had been their primary role after the
introduction of italic type to England in 1528. In the later sixteenth century, italic
type was also used to mark emphasis and contrastive stress. When Mansfield
recorded court testimony in the 1750s, the weight of advice about grammar in
relation to punctuation was in the process of shifting from recommendation of
italics to quotation marks, which are manageable in handwriting in a way that ital-
ics are not; but Mansfield did not use quotation marks in his notebooks. He did,
however, organize his prose by a contemporary understanding of the sentence.
‘What is a Sentence?’ asks the nameless interlocutor of Daniel Farroe’s 1754 Royal
Universal British Grammar; to which the answer was ‘It is the Comprehension of
at least three Words, by which one Sentiment or Thought of the Mind is expressed;
and it is either single or compound.’36 Ten years later, the consensus of advice from
the grammar books was that a sentence was an utterance containing a verb. Or at
least, by then, main verbs are mentioned as essential parts of ‘the sentence’ for
scholars learning about them. These mid-eighteenth-century questions about the
relationship between written and spoken language provided the principles of
­modern language analysis.37 It held sway until very recently.
But the assumptions of early modern language theory are now questioned by
modern linguists. On the old (eighteenth-century) model, writing was seen as a
technology for the storage and transmission of speech, allowing the absent to
become present, giving its users the means to imagine time in a new way by mak-
ing that which had gone, and that which would never be personally witnessed,
available to consciousness. On this model, writing was assumed to be a transcrip-
tion of spoken language. Rousseau-istic savages ‘discovering’ writing, or seven-
teenth-century children producing rows of syllables on their slates were assumed to
have already had a model of language in which sentences, words, syllables, and
sounds figured. But newer arguments about the relationship between spoken and

36 D. Farro [sic], The Royal Universal British Grammar and Vocabulary. Being a Digestion of the
Entire English Language into its Proper Parts of Speech. Compiled and Calculated for Equal Ease, Both for
the Master and Scholar: In a Method Entirely New, 3rd edn (London: For the author, 1754), 320–38.
37 For a fuller discussion of this point, Carolyn Steedman, ‘Sights Unseen, Cries Unheard: Writing
the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis’, Representations 118 (2012): 28–71; Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic
World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999);
Joe Bray, ‘An Historical Approach to Speech Presentation: Embedded Quotations in Eighteenth-
Century Fictions’, in Poetics, Linguistics and History: Discourses of War and Conflict. Proceedings of
PALA XIX, Potchefstroom University, South Africa, March 1999 (Published for PALA by the Oxford
Text Archive, 2001), 546–56; James Greenwood, The Royal Grammar, containing what is necessary to
the knowledge of the English tongue: Laid down in a plain and familiar Way: For the Use of young
Gentlemen and Ladies: To which are added, lessons for boys at school, shewing the Use of the Parts of Speech,
and the joining Words together in a Sentence … (London: J. Nourse, 1750), 154–5; Peter Walkden
Fogg, Elementa Anglicana; or, the principles of English grammar displayed and exemplified . . . In two
­volumes (Stockport: For the author, 1792–6), vol. II, 66; Peter Walkden Fogg, Dissertations
Grammatical and Philological (London: Printed for the author, 1796), 54.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Lord Mansfield’s Voices 221

written language suggest that non-literate speakers (evidence here is historical, and
from many studies of modern children learning to read and write) do not think
about language in this way, at all. It now seems that it is learning to read and write
in the first place which provides such concepts: literacy learning itself allows users
to theorize language in these terms. ‘Conceptual implications come from ways of
reading,’ says David Olson, ‘for it is . . . reading which allows a text to be taken as a
model of verbal form, that is, for what is said.’ The history of writing is not one of
people learning to transcribe speech, but of ‘learning how to “hear” and think of
language in terms of the categories provided by the writing system’.38
This language history is the how and why of the voices I heard in North Register
House, in the summer of 2001. It is what lies beneath the sudden, amazing shock
of hearing them. It may explain my later tears. As we picture the Lord Chief Justice
sitting at—let us say—Surrey Assizes in Croydon in 1757, we have to think of him
as an ordinary writer at the end of the early modern period. He sits above the table
at which other ordinary writers—the barristers—write, as he may have written in
his William Murray days. The barristers, facing the courtroom not the bench, sit
alongside yet more ordinary writers: clerks, attorneys, and the law writers who take
the shorthand notes for the case report. They too are ordinary writers of their era,
each trained in literacy in different ways to be sure, but because taught and trained,
and because readers, ordinary writers who carry the language theory by which they
were taught around with them, though it may not often be present to their con-
scious mind. The Chief Justice does not make shorthand notes of what the people
in the dock say.39 He writes in a clear hand on the pages of a notebook measuring
about 6" × 9". It is bound on the vertical, rather like a modern shorthand jotter.40
He starts a new line for each new utterance, so the format is rather like that of a
play script. James Oldham’s two-volume transcription of the Mansfield manu-
scripts shows the Chief Justice noting the names of speakers as often as not. But
Oldham did not transcribe the majority of assize business recorded in the note-
books, from which the Voices come, for assize cases did not often give rise to
innovative judgments, or contribute to the development of English law.41 My
memory (of a microfilm copy of the assize material) is that Mansfield recorded
names far less frequently than he did for cases which demonstrated some point of
law. He blocked the extended utterances he recorded with a narrow indentation.
He appeared to be after what witnesses and defendants said—their very words—
not what they meant, or what their intentions or motives for saying the words

38 David R. Olson, ‘Literate Mentalities: Literacy, Consciousness of Language, and Modes of

Thought’, in Modes of Thought: Explorations in Culture and Cognition, ed. David R. Olson, Nancy
Torrance, and Angela Halyard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 141–51.
39 For the purposes of all the judges’ personal records and the use of shorthand, see Oldham,
Mansfield Manuscripts, vol. I, 162–94.
40 ‘23 cm tall, 15cm wide and 3.5cm thick. The spine runs along the top of the book, and there is
a brass clasp at the bottom. Lord Mansfield wrote in the books from the spine down towards the brass
clasp, like we would write in a spiral bound notebook now.’ Information from the Scone Palace arch-
ivist, Sarah Adams (6 October 2014). I am most grateful. See also Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts,
vol. I, xxi.
41 Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, vol. I, 163–4.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

222 Carolyn Steedman

were. The voices are an aide-mémoire, for him, assize judge, but they are not going
to be written up later, into the kind of narrative that the law writers (and maybe a
little farther back in the courtroom the newsmen) will produce, to be printed, pub-
lished, and read.
The names of the petty thieves and bilkers of Guildford and Maidstone may not
have been very much to the Chief Justice’s point. Discussing ‘Assault and False
Imprisonment, Public Order and Welfare’ cases heard by Mansfield in Westminster
Hall and Guildhall, London, Oldham suggests that ‘collectively . . . [they] reflect
the frustration Mansfield felt with the flow into the courtroom of the lowlife of
London—the schemers, conspirators, rioters, prostitutes, and cheats’. He says that
he, legal historian, ‘can sense Mansfield’s distaste for these cases, both at a personal
level and at a legal process level. Personally, Mansfield viewed with melancholy the
evidence of what he saw as the degraded state of society at large.’42 What is it to
have someone allow you to speak out of the darkness and yet for no one to know
your name?43 But Mansfield’s assize notes do provide entry for low-life voices, des-
pite his (possible) distaste for their speakers, in a way that contemporary accounts
of low life do not.44
I do not know if Mansfield’s assize notes were ever read over by him, or anyone
else, once the assize court was finished. This is by way of contrast with his draft
opinions from 1780–5; Oldham says that Mansfield’s ‘handwritten drafts were
often handed over to court reporters’.45 The opinions were written on the route to
judgment (judgments made in the privacy of his notebook, some minutes or hours
before they were given). Then, later, he produced a law story that ineluctably
moved to its conclusion, which was his judgment.46 The opinions do not involve
recorded speech, and scarcely ever a narrative of circumstances. They are (obvi-
ously!) summative judgments, in the legal and stylistic sense.
In the 1750s, it may appear that briefly and from a more elevated social ­position,
this writer William Murray was attempting, just like Samuel Richardson, to mend,
or cover over, the great chasm between speech and writing. His notebooks appear
to show the same kind of faith as that of the printer/bookseller, that writing and
reality may be one and the same; that writing may be, somehow, simultaneous with
its occurrence. All manner of people, high and low, and very high indeed, are
caught in the language web woven across this society by print culture. But that is a
reading of the assize circuit notebooks performed after an accreted legal and lan-
guage history has done its work, over the past 300 years. And how else would you
(how else would a judge) make notes of the unimportant cases of farmers and
sailors, and the legally uninteresting testimony of oyster sellers, except in this man-
ner? We might consider Mansfield further as a reader: how many published play
scripts had he read? If he were a typical upper-class reader of the early eighteenth
century, then the answer would be ‘many’. Had he heard the London voices of

42 Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, vol. II, 926.    43 Rancière, Names of History, 61–75.
44 Steedman, ‘Sights Unseen’.    45 Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, vol. I, xxviii.
46 Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz, eds., Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law (New
Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1996).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Lord Mansfield’s Voices 223

Collin’s Walk through London and Westminster (1690), of Trivia; or, the Art of
Walking the Streets of London, by Mr Gay (1716), or Edward Ward’s ‘Merry
Observations upon Every Month and every remarkable Day throughout of the
Year’ (1718), or Erasmus Jones’s A Trip through London (1728)? Had Mansfield
caught sight of the strange 1750s Low-life which, purporting to be about the
unceasing babble of the Great City of the Word, allows not one low-life person to
speak in its hundred pages?47 Much of Mansfield’s personal library was destroyed
by the Gordon Rioters, but Norman Poser has examined an inventory of the one
housed in his Lincoln’s Inn house at the time of his death. It shows, he says, ‘the
extraordinary breadth of his literary interests’; but in Poser’s account of it, it shows
no play scripts, no London- or low-life literature, from modern or ancient times.48
It is an imponderable question whether Mansfield’s distaste for the low life throng-
ing his court, as noted by Oldham, had its origins in his reading, or from the low
simply being there (apprehensible to all the senses) in the small foetid space of the
eighteenth-century courtroom.49
As it is, what we have is William Murray’s writing, not his reading. We have not
an entry something like ‘defendant was left overnight in charge of a body for bur-
ial; corpse removed from downstairs room in which it lay whilst she slept’. Instead,
he wrote down the words of one of the witnesses recalling what he said the day
after the body disappeared: ‘You are a fine Woman indeed to be asleep & lose yr
Corps.’50 Later, at home, typing up my pencilled transcription, I cried when the
young woman, waving, not drowning, her voice spiralling down the years, called
out: ‘I can’t get drowned.’ ‘Ashamed’, Murray noted the witness saying; ashamed
because she was naked. I believe I know why I cry: because of Arlette Farge’s Goût
de l’archive and her Bracelet de parchemin; the moments in the Archives Nationales
and in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris, when she opens the police bundles that

47 Anon., Low-life: Or, One Half of the World Knows not how The Other Half Live, being a Critical
Account of What is transacted by People of almost all Religions, Nations, Circumstances, and Sizes of
Understanding in the Twenty-four Hours, between Saturday-Night and Monday-morning: In a true
Description of a Sunday, as it is usually spent within the Bills of Mortality. Calculated for the Twenty-first
of June: With an Address to the ingenious and ingenuous Mr. Hogarth (1750?–1758), 3rd edn (London:
John Lever, 1764).
48 Poser, Lord Mansfield, 162–3.
49 James Beattie, Crime and Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1986); David Lemmings, ‘Introduction: Criminal Courts, Lawyers and the Public Sphere’, in Crime,
Courtrooms and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1700–1850, ed. David Lemmings (Farnham: Ashgate,
2012), 1–22.
50 This is one of the two cases making up the composite Voices that were transcribed by Oldham,
Mansfield Manuscripts, vol. II, 1061–3. An ‘Assault and False Imprisonment; Public Order and
Welfare’ case, it was heard at Middlesex, on the indictment of the Master of the Shoreditch Poor
House for conspiracy with a surgeon to remove a pauper corpse for the purposes of dissection, thus
depriving the deceased of a funeral. Rex v. Wilkinson & Thomas Young (17 February 1785). This case is
not an assize case, and not from the 1750s; the words must have struck me as I searched the 1785
entries for Charlotte Howe in Rex v. the Inhabitants of Thames Ditton, which was also heard early in
1785: ‘Law Report’, The Times, 29 April 1785, 2. The second of the Voices to appear in Oldham’s
transcriptions is a nuisance case from Middlesex in 1757: Rex v. John Burrell on an indictment for
keeping a dog kennel and feeding the dogs with stinking meat so as to infect his neighbours’ air.
Oldham, Mansfield Manuscripts, vol. II, 897–9. Oldham includes it because it shows surprising devel-
opments in the law of nuisance, often thought to be a nineteenth-century phenomenon.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

224 Carolyn Steedman

are records of suicide, including still the smell of the Seine water in which a young
woman drowned herself, long ago.51 And because of Mary Wollstonecraft, who in
1795 weighted well her petticoats, but who still could not get drowned in the
Thames near Putney Bridge.52 Here, for me, in composing the Voices, were
‘Millions Like Them’ (rather than ‘Millions Like Us’); and ‘Eight Million Stories
in the Naked City’.53 These twentieth-century representations of cities and their
inhabitants’ stories forced my reading of the Mansfield notebooks through the
prism of not only Victorian social investigation, but also in reference to twentieth-
century film treatment of great masses of population, bound together by topog-
raphy, history, and life story. The particular tonal qualities of the Voices was also
provided by Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (1938), not so much the novel
(though the vortex is there), but Richard Attenborough’s film version from 1947:
Ida Arnold (Fate herself ) in the pub on the seafront, heard in the maelstrom of
words before she is seen; her voice and laughter drawn down the years, away from
her and us, even as she speaks them.54 And provided too, by Patrick Hamilton’s
great trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky (1935): Jenny in the pub, not
really understanding what’s going on, the hum of conversation ‘come into being all
around’, whilst ‘outside in the tramshaken street Hammersmith roared and swirled
on its own furious and meaningless course’.55 I wish I knew how Greene and
Attenborough and Hamilton produced their tonal effects, in film and on the page.
I wish that as a writer, I could do it. But I can hear in their way; I had no other way
of hearing Lord Mansfield’s Voices. I believe I know a little about where I’m com-
ing from, as a reader of his voices. Not from where he was coming, at all. It behoves
me to consider well the theories and beliefs of all past writers; to discover what they
read, and how; and how all of it shaped the manner in which they wrote; to dis-
cover exactly what was the theory of those voices, transcribed in London and on

51 Farge, Le Goût de l’archive; Allure of the Archive; and Arlette Farge, Le Bracelet de parchemin:
L’Écrit sur soi, XVIII siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2003).
52 Mary Wollstonecraft’s second suicide attempt in 1795 has often been described. For a recent
telling, see Lyndall Gordon, Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (2005) (London: Virago, 2006),
282–3. Wollstonecraft’s attempt to drown more surely by soaking her clothes in the rain is often con-
fused (by me, certainly) with Virginia Woolf weighting well her pockets with stones before drowning
herself in 1941. Woolf also wrote about Wollstonecraft’s failed attempt in The Common Reader, Second
Series (London: Hogarth, 1932): ‘Mary at once soaked her skirts so that she might sink unfailingly,
and threw herself from Putney Bridge’, 161.
53 Millions Like Us, directed by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder (London: Gainsborough Studios,
1943); Naked City, television series broadcast by ABC (New York, 1958–63), inspired by the 1948
film noir procedural, The Naked City. The end narration of the television series was ‘There are eight
million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.’
54 There is the same tonal effect in many Powell and Pressburger films. The way in which voices
emerge out of a land- or city scape, to be whirled back into silence (or into history; it comes to the
same thing in the end) is a particular feature of A Canterbury Tale—at least in my auditory memory,
which is, I am afraid, a lot of what we’re talking about here. A Canterbury Tale, directed by Michael
Powell and Emeric Pressburger (UK, 1944); Michael Powell, A Life in Movies: An Autobiography
(London: Methuen, 1987), 446–8. Many local people were recruited as extras for this film. Many
Kentish voices speak in it. I think I associated these with the South Eastern Assize Circuit voices
I ‘heard’ in Mansfield’s papers.
55 Patrick Hamilton, ‘The Siege of Pleasure. Jenny. A Glass of Port’, Twenty Thousand Streets under
the Sky: A London Trilogy (1935; London: Chatto & Windus, 1987), 256–98; 267.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Lord Mansfield’s Voices 225

the Home Circuit in the 1750s. For that is all there is—Lord Mansfield’s written
words. They signal that you too, like Jules Michelet, may enter the tomb of the
past; suggest perhaps, that you’re already there. But none of this has much to do
with Lord Mansfield; the Voices are mine.
Now, sixteen years on, the continued echo of Lord Mansfield’s Voices comes
from what I now see as my considerable law envy. I wish I understood. I wish
I understood as much of eighteenth-century law as did the average maidservant,
contesting her right to settlement with a magistrate; I wish I understood and could
use its obfuscating language with the ease of Joseph Woolley, framework knitter of
early nineteenth-century Nottinghamshire, down the alehouse with his friends
and neighbours, all talking law over their pints.56 Law envy isn’t mine alone. It has
developed over the last decade as an affective form (a type of sensibility) and form
of writing. Ian McEwan discusses his new novel The Children Act by pointing out
how many stories, maybe all stories, are to be found in the operation of the family
division of the UK high courts. He could have said, not just the family division,
but in all British courts of law, from the late seventeenth century onwards; and
that—maybe—like me, he is in love with the law, seduced by its authority as a way
of thinking and telling.57 In Outline Rachel Cusk listens to and writes individual
and disconnected voices, which may contribute to the outline of a possible story.
They are not like Lord Mansfield’s Voices, not exactly, for the narrator tells us who
is speaking, and in which place and in what manner. She uses ‘he said’, ‘she said’,
and occasionally speaks herself.58 But the effect is much like listening to the disem-
bodied south-eastern voices from the 1750s, pulled down the vortex of 200 years
or more. We cannot really know where Lord Mansfield was coming from, with his
Voices; but we know where they were going.

56 Carolyn Steedman, Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge: University Press, 2009), 105–29, 172–98; An Everyday Life of the English
Working Class: Work, Self and Sociability in the Early Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013), 122–49.
57 ‘Ian McEwan: The Law versus Religious Belief ’, The Guardian, 5 September 2014; Ian McEwan,
The Children Act (London: Jonathan Cape, 2014).
58 Rachel Cusk, Outline (London: Faber and Faber, 2014).
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Pa rt I V
A f t e rwo r d
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

13
Moving Objects
Emotional Transformation, Tangibility,
and Time Travel

Joanne Begiato

M ovi n g O n : A n A f t e rwo r d o n F u t u r e
R e s e a rc h Di r e c t i o n s

We all possess or remember objects that move us: portable emotional paraphernalia
through which we define aspects of ourselves. From childhood onward we interact
with real and imagined artefacts and in adulthood we curate our actual and virtual
objects according to emotional categories.1 Here is my current personal and pro-
fessional ‘material autobiography’ created for this chapter. Firstly, family objects.
Those which define my relationship with my deceased parents include a St George
and the Dragon brooch, a dolls’ house, a blue clutch bag, a nebulizer, and their
wedding rings; some of them exist only in my memory. I have marked my son’s
growing up by collecting objects that represent his changes: baby shoes, a tiny plas-
tic builder christened Mr Dingle, increasingly detailed Games Workshop models,
and numerous footballs. My husband is evoked through things as diverse as our
matching wedding rings, a hotel room key card, his glasses, a polo shirt, a road
bike, and my Dr Martens. To trace my professional life in objects, here is one book
that helped make me a historian: Ruth M. Arthur’s The Saracen Lamp, which I read
as a child.2 At its heart is the beautiful golden, jewelled lamp that Yusuf, a captured
Saracen, constructed in the early fourteenth century to symbolize his f­orbidden
love for his master’s daughter as she was about to leave France to marry an English
knight. This lamp magically embodied the Saracen’s desire to protect her and
remain a presence in her life, so emotionally powerful that it shaped three women’s
stories spanning six centuries and determined the well-being of the family manor
through the ages. In this book I see my love of gender and family history, and belief
in the power of material culture.

1 People build personal and familial stories through objects and images, in albums and on social media
platforms. For academic perspectives on these practices, see the AHRC-funded ‘The Family Archive
Project’, University of Cardiff (<http://blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/familyarchive>, accessed 7 October 2016).
2 Ruth M. Arthur, The Saracen Lamp, drawings by Margery Gill (London: Gollancz, 1978).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

230 Joanne Begiato

You might justifiably argue that such personal detritus has nothing to do with
histories of material culture and emotions, and even less relevance for the big
­questions of history itself. Yet material culture historians are increasingly finding
that both individuals and societies are the sum of their parts and their objects.3
Their scholarship shows the diverse ways to practise material culture history, the
­innumerable objects and spaces that can be investigated, and recognizes that both
act as agents. Equally, historians of emotions have done much to lay the theoretical
frameworks of their field, and begun putting such theories into practice, although
they have yet to grapple with the questions raised by the study of objects for (and
of ) feelings in the past.4 Feeling Things works at the interface of both scholarly
endeavours. It not only demonstrates that the most powerful things are those
which have some emotional resonance and reveals that objects make emotions
manifest, visible, or substantive; it also takes the lead in a new and exciting field of
history, which has enormous potential to explore imaginatively and better under-
stand societies and cultures.
Indeed, as this collection forcefully demonstrates, emotional autobiographies
can be written to great effect not just about individuals, but also about families,
communities, and nations, to offer new insights into societies across time and
place. Perhaps what strikes me most about my egotistical game of ‘I have an object,
therefore I am who I am’ is its cultural and historical specificity; it reveals a life in
a precise time and place. Although your and my emotional objects might differ,
they will be composed of shared items and forms, for they are shaped in very similar
ways which reveal societal and cultural rules. And this is what Feeling Things so
powerfully lays bare, since it covers European material culture from the medieval
to early modern eras. And while the focus is on pre-industrial objects, it attends
to their afterlife, thereby exposing in enormous detail how different spatial and
­temporal contexts produced varied emotional responses and practices.
This is not to suggest any universality in emotional objects whose origins and
formation are multiple. Some objects, like medieval relics, or wedding rings, are

3 Examples include Renata Ago, Gusto for Things: A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome
(Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2013); Paula Findlen, ed., Early Modern Things:
Objects and their Histories, 1500–1800 (London and New York: Routledge, 2013); Tara Hamling and
Catherine Richardson, eds., Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and its
Meanings (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); Hannah Grieg, Jane Hamlett, and Leonie Hannan, eds., Gender
and Material Culture in Britain since 1600 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Laurel Thatcher
Ulrich, Ivan Gaskell, Sara Schechner, and Sarah Anne Carter, Tangible Things: Making History through
Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
4 For a somewhat randomly selected example of theoretical approaches, see Susan J. Matt, ‘Current
Emotion Research in History: Or, Doing History from the Inside Out’, Emotion Review 3.1 (2011):
117–24; Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction, trans. Keith Tribe (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015); Jan Plamper, ‘The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy,
Barbara H. Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns’, History and Theory 49.2 (2010): 237–65; Susan J. Matt and
Peter N. Stearns, eds., Doing Emotions History (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2014); and for
practical examples, Susan Broomhall, ed., Emotions in the Household, 1200–1900 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Thomas Dixon, ‘The Tears of Mr Justice Willes’, Journal of Victorian
Culture 17.1 (2011): 1–23; Martin Francis, ‘Tears, Tantrums, and Bared Teeth: The Emotional
Economy of Three Conservative Prime Ministers, 1951–1963’, Journal of British Studies 41.3 (2002):
354–87.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Moving Objects 231

constructed to act predominantly as emotional artefacts. Others have become feel-

ing things not through deliberate intent, but simply because a human associates
them with events and circumstances that produce particular emotions, from the
threatening and malign to the benign and transcendent. Emotional objects are also
created in the flow of human relationships, and thus change over personal and his-
torical time, since relationships shift too. Objects imbued with one meaning are
later realigned like dynamic tessellations according to life stage (child to adult) or
relationship (patronage, financial, professional, and marital, and their ending:
bankruptcy, divorce, bereavement), or at societal level through cultural shifts,
­constraints, and possibilities relating to religion, war, colonial and imperial expan-
sion and subjugation, to name but a few. As the contributors to Feeling Things
infer, the trigger to these changes at both individual and societal level involves
memories and hindsight.
I aim, therefore, to develop these commonalities in the light of some of the
questions that this collection raises and thereby pose some possibilities for future
directions in the field. I will play on the three themes that structure the chapters:
potent things, binding things, and moving things, exploring them in broader ways
to suggest how they might shape the way historians tackle emotional artefacts.
Thus, my afterword takes movement as its overall category, since all the contribu-
tions evoke this: imaginative and supernatural movement, physical and temporal
movement, and psychological and physiological movement. Furthermore, this
organizational theme is informed by the various ways in which emotions infer
motion. Emotions’ meanings are mutable, both through time and in experience;
and flow is invoked in scholarly conceptualizations of emotions, such as Sara
Ahmed’s definition that they are ‘practices formed in the relationships between bodies,
objects, or subjects’.5 Finally, in the era this collection covers, of course, emotions
were physical rather than psychological as Thomas Dixon explains: ‘movements,
agitations, or convulsions with no special technical or theoretical import’.6
I also urge that scholars follow Feeling Things’ lead in its inclusive definition of
objects. Be open to the many ways of defining what we include in the category
of material culture, and be ready to practise a variety of approaches to the history
of emotions and emotional-object scholarship.7 Thus, while I acknowledge that the
philosophically minded distinguish between objects and thingness, I propose in
this chapter that historians use a broad definition of materiality in order to explore
the function of emotional objects and their changing meanings over time.8 We can
consider the emotional meanings of things, not only of objects but of their ­locations,

5 Cited in Susan Broomhall, ‘Introduction’, in Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities in
Britain 1650–1850, ed. Susan Broomhall (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 1–11; 2.
6 Dixon, ‘Weeping in Space: Tears, Feelings, and Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in
Spaces for Feeling, ed. Broomhall, 137–58; 138.
7 See the ‘Introduction’ to this volume.
8 For a useful overview of ideas about ‘objects’ and ‘things’, see Antony Hudek, ‘Introduction//
Detours of Objects’, in The Object: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Antony Hudek (London and
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 14–27; 14–17. Like the editors of this volume, Ulrich et al. use
‘thing’ and ‘object’ interchangeably because they do not follow the premise that ‘thing’ evokes reson-
ances which ‘object’ does not. See Ulrich et al., Tangible Things, 2.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

232 Joanne Begiato

so that buildings and spaces are included in the analysis.9 We should encompass
three-dimensional physical objects that survive, but also descriptions of non-­
surviving things, as well as imagined objects in print culture. Moreover, rather than
investigate sole objects or simple types of objects, we must adopt the model of
Feeling Things and open up the relationships between objects in constructing
­emotional landscapes. How do a range of objects interact to construct and decon-
struct feelings and identities?
It strikes me too that there is critical value in including all types of objects in
discussions about emotions in the past. This collection focuses upon handmade
objects, those likely to have ‘charisma’ which may attract humans to imbue them
with particular forms of emotional resonance.10 In a pre-industrial world this
included mundane objects, which were translated into things that had meaning at
individual or societal level, as Hilary Davidson’s wonderful evocation of the pluri-
vocal nature of shoes’ emotional meaning reveals.11 Similarly, Sally Holloway
shows that eighteenth-century mothers used readily available items such as fabric
cockades and hearts and flowers printed on textiles to mark out their deep feelings
for their infants, as well as exquisite and expensive hand-crafted pincushions and
quilts.12 As the volume’s contributors reveal, people invest a high level of time,
skill, and, therefore, sentiment in objects they make by hand, whether necessities
or luxuries. Thus, there are a number of questions to be answered by historians of
the industrial and post-industrial periods. Should we wonder, as Victor Margolin
does, whether humans can develop emotional attachments to high-tech industrial
objects compared to hand-crafted or manufactured ones?13 This probably under-
estimates the ability of people to create relationships with objects of all kinds.
Anna Schram Vejlby also asks whether the advent of mass production invested the
‘homemade’ with more emotional meaning.14 Certainly, if the unique end product
of hand-crafting carries more emotional freight, then historians of emotions of the
eras of machine-made and mass-produced goods need to be mindful of the differ-
ent ways in which emotions and objects interacted; not to mention, as this volume
suggests, the ways that emotions as objects interact through or across time, as well
as in particular times and places.
I suggest that careful consideration of machine-made, even mass-consumption,
objects should, nonetheless, be included in future research, even or perhaps espe-
cially in relation to ‘artisanal’ products, in which the modern era has witnessed

9 For a concerted effort to assess both, see Joanne Begiato, ‘Beyond the Rule of Thumb: The
Materiality of Marital Violence in England c.1700–1850, Cultural and Social History (forthcoming).
10 Of immense interest will be the publications deriving from the research project ‘Domestic
Devotions: The Place of Piety in the Italian Renaissance Home 1400–1600’ (Dr Abigail Brundin,
Professor Deborah Howard, Dr Mary Laven, <http://domesticdevotions.lib.cam.ac.uk, accessed
7 October 2016).
11 See Chapter 5 in this volume.    12 See Chapter 9 in this volume.
13 Victor Margolin, ‘Introduction: How Do I Love Thee? Objects of Endearment in Contemporary
Culture’, in Love Objects: Emotion, Design and Material Culture, ed. Anna Moran and Sorcha O’Brien
(London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 1–6; 4.
14 Anna Schram Vejlby, ‘Diligence and Emotion: Knitting in Danish Golden Age Portraiture’,
Textile 14.2 (2016): 188–207; 202.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Moving Objects 233

pockets of fascination, often pitched directly against industrial advancement.15

These are, after all, the objects that most people in modern and post-modern
worlds encounter. They can be associated with feelings. Mass-produced dolls, for
instance, promote a wave of nostalgic emotions in adults, as do the ‘retro’ objects
consumed by generations nostalgically looking back to their parental homes and
childhoods. Machine-made fabrics have been shown to convey emotions. Alison
Matthews David, for instance, charts the fear and revulsion that became associated
with flammable flannelette in the late nineteenth century, and which drove efforts
to find substitutes for children’s nightwear that were not so prone to catch fire.16
Moreover, there is a potential for uniqueness in objects that are partly machine-
made but also hand-assembled. Mass-made models, such as dolls’ houses, model
planes, and fantasy figures, for instance, can be transformed into objects unique to
their modellers during the personal process of assembling and painting them.
Thus, they may also have distinctive emotional weight that serves specific func-
tions for different age groups, genders, and communities. All such objects have
prompted many feelings which offer a range of insights into class, gender, race,
migration, and much more.17
A broad definition of materiality equips us to explore the textural complexity of
emotional material culture. After all, this volume demonstrates that it is difficult to
fully separate embodiment from material culture. Contributors, for instance, dis-
cuss dead saints’ body parts (Mary Magdalene’s tooth) and excreta (Christ’s tears),
people’s bodily handling of objects through rubbing, kissing, and touching (letters,
books, relics, stones), disembodied and prosthetic bodily parts (iron hands), and
bodies’ responses to objects and things. My afterword extends this to make a case
for including in the categories of objects that evoke emotions those which are more
ephemeral or transitory, such as music, food, and smell.18

T r a n s f o r m at i o n

Feeling Things shows the immense capacity of emotional objects to be transformed

in numerous ways. Part I, ‘Potent Things’, focuses upon objects that embodied
supernatural powers. As the chapters show, medieval saints’ relics’ holiness and
charisma could be transferred by a haptic act to a receiving object. Tokens in the
form of replica chemises, for example, were transformed when touched to the

15 See Hudek, ‘Introduction//Detours of Objects’, 14.

16 Alison Matthews David, ‘Blazing Ballet Girls and Flannelette Shrouds: Fabric, Fire, and Fear in
the Long Nineteenth Century’, Textile 14.2 (2016): 244–67; 257–64.
17 Pierre Lemonnier, Mundane Objects: Materiality and Non-Verbal Communication (Walnut
Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012). For a personalized example, see Matt Houlbrook, ‘Hidden
Objects and Untold Histories’ (<https://mbsbham.wordpress.com/2016/05/12/hidden-objects>,
accessed 7 October 2016).
18 For the historical value of examining a preserved tortilla and ‘spirit-writing’ preserved on a slate,
see Ulrich et al., Tangible Things, 103, 165–6. For directions in the history of the senses, see William
Tullett, ‘Grease and Sweat: Race and Smell in Eighteenth-Century English Culture’, Cultural and
Social History (2016): 1–16.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

234 Joanne Begiato

c­ asket containing the Virgin Mary’s chemise. Now sharing the relic’s miraculous
properties, the tokens became at one and the same time consumer and devotional
objects, which in turn each potentially possessed further layers of emotional
­value.19 Scholars could fruitfully explore these kinds of movements in meaning
more explicitly. Such divine and/or emotional presence can, of course, be gained,
lost, or diminished over time or across space according to different cultural con-
texts. The Stone of Scone, as Alicia Marchant shows, was at one point believed to
transform a person into a monarch, while by the twentieth century it was instead
a mythical marker of nationhood.20 Shoes’ ‘vessel-like qualities’, in different times
and places, Hilary Davidson reveals, could hold the divine or the magical, and
contain the protective spirit of original wearers, or capture malign forces.
As such, another critical research question scholars need to ask is why, when,
and where some objects stop being emotional artefacts. Clearly a key feature of
such shifts relates to societies’ changing notions of religion and the supernatural.
So, emotional accretions wear off when people do not share the same faith; indeed
fear and disgust might thus replace awe and desire. Interestingly, however, location
and history appear to be significant in evoking emotions, regardless of whether
spiritual beliefs are shared. So the concealed shoes, originally hidden to ward off
evil and protect a house, for instance, are retained in situ by their modern home-
owners following discovery.21 Perhaps their new owners still see them as emotion-
ally evocative—bearers of magical power and therefore provoking awe; perhaps
they are repelled by them, but fearful to remove them: different emotions, but the
same result. Christian myths can also be harnessed in similar ways to holy relics,
but to other ends in secular societies. A telling example is the National Socialist
blood-flag (Blutfahne) ceremony in which the flag carried at the Munich Beer-hall
Putsch of 1923, and stained with the blood of the ‘sixteen martyrs’, was used from
1935 as a holy symbol. In flag-dedication ceremonies, banners and flags were
touched to the blood-flag to be sanctified. In entirely different ideological condi-
tions to medieval holy contagion, the political ritual of the blood-flag, while rooted
in Christian myth, was deployed to confirm the structure of the Nazi mythos and
construct community experience. For all this might have shared similarities with
charismatic objects and the feelings they incited, no doubt the emotions stirred by
these acts of transference led to distinctive outcomes in 1930s Germany.22
Transformation can also occur at a more routine, less supernatural level. Are
there objects that can cause antipathy because of what they represent in the light
of personal or cultural change? Do involuntary consumption and the second-hand,
recycled, and charitable nature of objects change subject–object interaction and
meaning? An example might be the clothing that slaves, paupers, or servants were
obliged to wear, or objects associated with institutions like hospitals, prisons,

19 See Chapter 4 in this volume.    20 See Chapter 11 in this volume.

21 See Chapter 5 in this volume.
22 Simon Taylor, ‘Symbol and Ritual under National Socialism’, British Journal of Sociology 32.4
(1981): 504–20; 508–10.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Moving Objects 235

schools, and workhouses.23 What would be interesting to uncover is how far per-
sonal and society’s views are shaped and possibly changed by visceral responses to
such objects.

Ta n g ibili t y

The artefacts explored in Feeling Things have different physical qualities. They
include saints’ bodily relics, durable stone, and fragile fabrics which still survive.
But the contributions also show that an emotional artefact does not need solid
substance. Other objects, for example, are far more intangible, like inky ‘debris’ on
a letter. Some are literally absent, like Christ’s evaporated tear housed within
another object. Helen Hickey points out that the Holy Tear’s reliquary was a vessel
for what once was, but was no more: ‘A tear is an object that we cannot capture,
only remember.’24 Others might be temporarily absent, perhaps hidden for long
periods, such as concealed objects which only come into view occasionally. For
much of their existence the person who hides them is aware of them at the level of
knowledge rather than handling or seeing them. Some emotional artefacts cannot
be handled. In Carolyn Steedman’s chapter, a line of text is imagined as a voice
from the past that evokes and kindles feelings.25 Thus, surely scholars must include
sounds as emotional objects, even if that sound is most often recoverable only
when rendered as notes on a page, or an instruction to play words to the tune of
another ballad, perhaps itself now lost. After all, music is the most universal prompt
of various emotions.26
Equally, if a disappeared trace of a thing can evoke emotions and continue to do
so over time despite its form only existing in report, we can include objects that are
not just delicate or easily broken but those for which we only have descriptions or
those which are replaced by other versions. These include multiple iterations of an
object that is loaded with emotional power but does not remain constant, since it
is regularly replaced by the subject, such as food or perfume. There is evidence that
suggests that both of these are associated with strong emotions and therefore
repeatedly sought out when one form is consumed.27 Thus, memories of ­childhood

23 For involuntary consumption, see John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in
Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2007). For the
material culture of the poor and institutionalized, see Jane Hamlett, At Home in the Institution:
Material Life in Asylums, Lodging Houses and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
24 See Chapter 4 in this volume.    25 See Chapter 12 in this volume.
26 There is established scholarship on music, psychology, and emotions, but as far as I am aware,
there is little in the way of historical investigation of music as a tangible object/sense and the relation-
ship between it and past societies. For research on the changing emotions in Europe’s musical life, see
Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, ‘The Musical Score of Emotions’ (<https://
www.mpg.de/9788927/F003_focus_032-039.pdf>, accessed 7 October 2016).
27 This area is being opened up; for example, see the suggestions for future research directions made
by Barbara Keys, ‘Senses and Emotions in the History of Sport’, Journal of Sport History 41.1 (2013):
21–38.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

236 Joanne Begiato

sweets and toys are emotional objects, which tell us something about the
adult’s emotional perception of childhood. Not simply a Proustian moment of
involuntary memory, this can reveal wider cultural trends.28 Elizabeth Fry, for
example, reminisced in 1828 about her mother’s wild flowers and shells she and
her mother collected when she was a child. She recalled the support such objects
gave her in later life: ‘I may truly say, in the midst even of deep trouble, and often
most weighty engagements of a religious and philanthropic nature, I have derived
advantage, refreshment, and pleasure, from my taste for these things, making
collections of them, and various natural curiosities.’29 This not only captured
her emotional ­memories of her mother, but crucially demonstrates that in her
adulthood the idea of a successful eighteenth-century childhood was as a time of
learning through play following the developments in concepts of child-rearing.30
In short, we can be more experimental about what constitutes an emotional object,
incorporating a sensory approach which expands our study to include how people
define objects’ sensual traces such as taste, smell, sound, sight, as well as touch in
relation to feeling.
Entirely imagined objects are also powerful. In print culture, from fiction to
life-writings, the association of objects with emotions served a variety of purposes.
A didactic function is most obvious. Examples are the imagined doll and dolls’
house in The Adventures of a Doll, published in 1816. In this the eponymous doll
embarked on a series of adventures with different children into whose possession
she fell. The doll acted as the agent teaching girls what was appropriate behaviour.
In one chapter, she narrated the flaws of one child who temporarily owned her.
Amelia Fry’s flaws stemmed from her mother, who was the archetypal ‘bad’ mother
of the period: overly indulgent and incapable of acting as a moral exemplar. Both
parental failings were demonstrated during a walk mother and daughter took on
the beach. Bored and quarrelsome, they came across ‘a company of merry little
girls’ playing with a ‘playhouse’ which the girls had created from a hollow in the
rock. The girls were managing their domestic domain, arranging blue mussel shell
and white cockle ornaments along with bits of broken china on the rock ‘shelves’.
The doll reported that Mrs Fry was temporarily moved by the girls’ healthy, happy
faces and ‘could not but feel, that they had more joy with their simple shells and
broken china, than she had ever had in her magnificent baby-house’. However, this
charming encounter did not rescue the insensible Frys. Furious with the girls’
­simple pleasures, Amelia poured all their ornaments into her lap and ran to the sea
and threw them in.31 The book was intended to educate girls on appropriate moral
behaviour, typically judged through their actions and capacity for emotional
self-management. What scholars need to explore is how far evoking feelings about

28 For discussion of the role of memory and affection in accessing the past, see Emily Robinson,
‘Touching the Void: Affective History and the Impossible’, Rethinking History 14.4 (2010): 503–20; 514.
29 Memoir of the Life of Elizabeth Fry with Extracts from her Journal and Letters, in Two Volumes, ed.
Elizabeth Gurney Fry, Katharine Fry, and Rachel Elizabeth Cresswell (Philadelphia, PA: H. Longstreth,
1847), 23.
30 Memoir of the Life of Elizabeth Fry, ed. Fry et al., 20–3.
31 Mary Mister, The Adventures of a Doll: Compiled with the Hope of Affording Amusement and
Instruction (London: Darton, Harvey, and Darton, 1816).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Moving Objects 237

certain behaviours might increase success in conformity, helping to translate

­didacticism into ideas and practice. Of course, understanding emotional artefacts
adds layers of nuance to our understanding of people’s behaviour. So here, although
Amelia’s behaviour was intended for censure, girls reading about her actions might
have inferred that dolls’ houses did not always have to be about conformity and
relished her rebellion enacted through the substitute dolls’ house.
Tangibility takes other forms. Books, as Lara Farina’s chapter shows, are one of
the objects where it is possible to see the result of readers’ touch. She argues that an
author might intend the ‘literal holding of the book’ to work in conjunction with
the text to trigger feelings which thereby assist in forming a devotional collective as
the book is circulated among several readers.32 The connecting premise of Part II,
‘Binding Things’, is that tactile engagement creates and sustains interpersonal
emotions and networks. Correspondence is the most obvious example, and Diana
G. Barnes traces the emotional residue of marks on pages that were written upon,
folded, sealed, smelled, caressed, and sometimes perhaps torn up by their senders
and recipients to historicize elite personal emotions and cultural writing models.33
Another type of object that is worth investigating in this vein is political and mili-
tary memorabilia. Did owning and—crucially—handling mementoes, jewellery,
engravings, and figurines, help to develop emotional relationships that created,
reinforced, and sustained political and national beliefs?34 Haptic interaction with
objects is not necessarily easily accessed, and evidence of handling, wear and tear,
rubbing, and polishing often only exists in descriptive or narrativized form. In
these cases, accounts do not always describe the effects of touch, and it may be here
where historians of emotional artefacts need to deploy social history techniques to
build a contextual picture of practice. So, for example, it would be fruitful to
examine which items of furniture in nineteenth-century homes might function as
emotional objects by contextualizing surviving examples in accounts of and guides
to domestic cleaning for wives, housekeepers, and domestic servants, alongside
women’s descriptions of their daily housekeeping.35

Tim e T r av e l

As Ulrich et al. observe, ‘[f ]or the most part . . . things are radically unstable. They
change physically over time, in their uses by successive human groups, and in their
significance to various peoples.’36 Thus, the case studies in Tangible Things operate
as a journey, travelling with the object from its origin to its current location in the

32 See Chapter 6 in this volume.    33 See Chapter 7 in this volume.

34 For example, Belinda Beaton, ‘Materializing the Duke’, Journal of Victorian Culture 10.1 (2005):
100–7; Simon Morgan, ‘Material Culture and the Politics of Personality in Early Victorian England’,
Journal of Victorian Culture 17.2 (2012): 127–46.
35 Alice Dolan and Sally Holloway make a similar point, suggesting that a challenge historians of
emotional objects face is to quantify groups or collections of emotional objects. Alice Dolan and Sally
Holloway, ‘Emotional Textiles: An Introduction’, Textile 14.2 (2016): 152–9; 156.
36 Ulrich et al., Tangible Things, 5.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

238 Joanne Begiato

collections of Harvard University, a journey often signifying colonial oppression.

Other kinds of journeys through time are traceable in objects. Emotional objects
can tie different generations together through time. There is evidence, for example,
that dolls’ houses act as mnemonics of family and generational affection and func-
tion to connect family members across time. The travels of the most expensive and
beautiful examples are more easily charted since they were often converted into
family heirlooms. The documentation for surviving Dutch cabinet houses reveals
that their female owners frequently stipulated that they were to be passed down the
feminine line to daughters, cousins, or nieces, forming a ‘matrilineal inheritance’.37
The Tate Baby House, which was constructed around 1760, was also passed down
from mother to daughter until its last owner died in 1929.38
Considering the emotions generated around objects opens up the possibilities
beyond conventional chronologies. Part III of this book, ‘Moving Things’,
­meditates on the ways that historical objects can distort or collapse time when
­different emotional communities and cultures encountered them. True enough;
but it is possible to take this further in our scholarly examination of emotional
artefacts and consider their role as time travellers.39 Emotional objects have an
afterlife, which can be traced in the way that their meanings and the feelings they
evoke change over time. Yet they also function to prompt subjects to use them to
look back, perhaps with nostalgia, or as a lesson, or warning, and yet others to
look forwards, imbuing them with feelings projected to future generations.
Sally Holloway shows that a range of objects associated with infants fulfilled this
role. The tokens that mothers left with their infants at the Foundling Hospital, and
the pincushion gifts spelling out blessings of good health to elite babies, were all
repositories of hopes for the future; they transmitted well-being into children’s
future lives.40
As such, emotional artefacts are even more diachronic in nature than material
culture more broadly, since their historicizing with regard to emotions facilitates
the charting of their interaction with cultural trends even more sharply than an
object-biography approach might allow. As Susan Broomhall demonstrates, this
can be especially useful to examine national identity. She selects a number of
objects to show how materiality, location, and assemblage change their meaning in
terms of colonial presence and dominion over time. For instance, the objects
resulting from a shipwreck in 1656 caused fear for the crew of the Dutch East
India Company vessel that came upon the wreck artefacts two years later, both

37 Susan Broomhall and Jennifer Spinks, ‘Imagining Domesticity in Early Modern Dutch Dolls’
Houses’, in their Early Modern Women in the Low Countries: Feminizing Sources and Interpretations of
the Past (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 99–122; 112.
38 Halina Pasierbska, Dolls’ Houses from the V&A Museum of Childhood (London: V&A Publishing,
2015), 344.
39 See Chapter 11 in this volume.
40 See Chapter 9 in this volume. Similarly, the majority of surviving Danish christening garments
constructed between 1700 and 1850 incorporate red and metal elements, which were used to protect
newborns from future dangers, including being bewitched or replaced by a changeling, illness, and
death. See Tove Engelhardt Mathiassen, ‘Protective Strategies and Emotions Invested in Early Modern
Danish Christening Garments’, Textile 14.2 (2016): 208–25.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Moving Objects 239

for their individual fates and for the fate of Dutch claimants to the region. By the
twentieth century, however, the same objects caused excitement and greed over their
historical value.41 As the contributors to Tangible Things observe, emotional power
may be discharged or changed once an object’s location or context is altered.42
Thus, I propose that instead of a one-way journey from origin to collection, it
might be possible to construct a diachronic framework of an object that attends to
the development of emotional artefacts. Historians could attempt this in order to
explore different ways of thinking about historical time, from both individual and
societal levels, comparing objects and emotions across time to show how socio-
cultural practices and ideas influenced subject–object interaction and meaning.
This necessitates more engagement with the fields of memory and its cousins, nos-
talgia and hindsight, since the most powerful memories are those associated with
acute emotions and emotional events.43 The Magdalene reliquary that Elina
Gertsman discusses, for instance, acted upon its viewers by making its subject,
function, and materials into emotional conduits. Each component triggered mem-
ory of cultural significance and knowledge, which in turn evoked a feeling.44
Davidson’s exploration of shoes also shows that the selection of objects considered
as repositories of emotions was often shaped by memory.45 A special issue on tex-
tiles as emotional objects also recently revealed that textiles are often ‘presented as
important vehicles for emotionally charged memories . . . personalized and care-
fully preserved before being passed along by family members’.46
To offer an example, I want to reflect on the way that accounts of personal
experiences of dolls’ houses are more often than not recounted through memories.
In contextualizing my own research on dolls’ houses as emotional objects I col-
lected around 200 tweets by people reflecting on their relationships with their
childhood dolls’ houses.47 They reveal that modern dolls’ houses are still handed
across generations, not for any intrinsic monetary value but because their emo-
tional worth makes them precious. Dolls’ houses house people’s feelings for loved
family members. Everyone who volunteered information about a dolls’ house
mentioned one or more relatives. Often people remembered with enormous fond-
ness the male family members who made their dolls’ houses. As adults, people
remember their loved relatives through the medium of objects, so that as an emo-
tional artefact the dolls’ house comes to physically represent and sustain family
relationships. As I have shown elsewhere, autobiographers often associate specific
objects with relatives. Mary Schimmelpenninck recorded in her memoir that her
grandfather would blow a little silver whistle on their walks beside a lake in the
1780s, calling to him water fowl to feed. Sixty-six years later she still wore it ‘in

41 See Chapter 10 in this volume.    42 Ulrich et al., Tangible Things, 171.

43 For examples of the links between emotions and memories, sometimes tied to a recollection of
material objects, see Joanne Begiato, Parenting in England 1760–1830: Emotions, Identity and
Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 99–100, Chapter 5; and Annette Kuhn, Family
Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995).
44 See Chapter 2 in this volume.    45 See Chapter 5 in this volume.
46 Dolan and Holloway, ‘Emotional Textiles’, 157.
47 <https://jbhist.wordpress.com/2015/11/17/the-dolls-house-and-its-links-with-home-and/>,
accessed 7 October 2016.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

240 Joanne Begiato

remembrance of him’.48 There is considerable room for imaginative analysis in this

vein to shed more light on notions of parenting, family, and gender. Why not com-
pare oral history or personal recollections of the making, use, and memory of the
objects to access information about past feeling?
Another way in which to imaginatively interrogate the relationship between
emotions, memories, and material culture is through nostalgia, which acts as a
medium for fighting the passage of time and loss of loved ones. Recent work on the
role of dolls’ houses in elderly women’s lives, for example, reveals how nostalgia
shapes their use. Hyun-Jung Oh explains that the older women who collect and
furnish these houses participate in a ‘cult of nostalgia’, objectifying ‘their memory
or imagination of childhood or ancestry, such that Tudor, Victorian, or 1940s
styles are favoured’. The medium of dolls’ houses allows them to return to child-
hood and the ‘warmth of the home’,49 and thus gives them a sense of control over
objects ‘that are manipulable and protected from inexorable human destiny’.50
Nancy Wei-Ning Chen points out that playing with a dolls’ house:
preserves and condenses a particular moment when all objects inside it are exhibited
in an intact condition with no traces of having been tarnished. And the dolls’ house
inhabitants, if any, are carefully posed to play their parts in the pageant. Indeed, the
dolls’ house world freezes action at a particular time and position.51
A similar contraction and preservation of time is at work in dolls’ houses dating
from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They too were associated with
nostalgia through their function as an emotional object that stimulated nostalgic
feelings for a lost family life, but also helped manage and soothe those emotions.
Thinking about the formation and development of emotional objects in this
manner enables us to see how emotional objects disrupt conventional chronologies
through hindsight, which operates backwards to reshape people’s perceptions of
the past and its material culture. Hindsight is shaped by emotional valences, such
as grief, sadness, anger, horror, but also by societal consensus about the way in
which an event should be perceived once ‘wisdom’ or additional knowledge is
attained. After all, memory, material culture, and emotions form an important
nexus. Memories ‘are often literally housed, with dwellings and the objects they
contain providing the key to remembrance’.52 This links in turn to personal iden-
tity. Marius Kwint, for example, observes that the domestic interior is a space that
‘serves as a model of the psyche, a concrete personality, and is the environment

48 Cited in Begiato, Parenting in England, 126.

49 Hyun-Jung Oh, ‘Putting Together Memories and Fantasies: The Phenomenon of Dolls’ Houses
and Women in their Second Childhood’ (<http://www.vam.ac.uk/moc/small-stories-thinking-small/
putting-together-memories-fantasies-phenomenon-dolls-houses-women-second-childhood/>,
accessed 8 October 2016).
50 Nancy Wei-Ning Chen, ‘The Art of Housekeeping: Dolls’ Houses and the Victorian Domestic
Interior’ (<http://www.vam.ac.uk/moc/small-stories-thinking-small/art-housekeeping-dolls-houses-
victorian-domestic-interior/>, accessed 8 October 2016). For more on this, see Nancy Wei-Ning
Chen, ‘Playing with Size and Reality: The Fascination of a Dolls’ House World’, Children’s Literature
in Education 46.3 (2015): 278–95.
51 Wei-Ning Chen, ‘Playing with Size and Reality’, 284.
52 Leora Auslander, ‘Beyond Words’, American Historical Review 110.4 (2005): 1015–45; 1020.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Moving Objects 241

which memory tends most powerfully to reconstruct’.53 Gaston Bachelard also

linked memories of the home with the ‘self ’, observing for example: ‘the house we
were born in is physically inscribed in us’.54
In fact, as both a space and a repository of domestic objects, the home is often
invoked in memoirs in its imaginary form, and is a particularly significant
­emotional object for many. Almira Gray’s biography of the Gray family, published
in 1927, is an excellent illustration of the home’s potential emotional potency. It
was the family house itself rather than her husband’s family that inspired Almira to
write. She titled her first chapter ‘The voice of the house’ and in it she demon-
strated that it was the very fabric of Grays’ Court as a house through which she
formulated her feelings and identity. She says:
It is not given to many to live as I have done in a beautiful, historic, and romantically
situated house, and from so early an age, before my twentieth birthday, that I seem to
have become a very part of the house. To me the long Gallery lined with oak speaks
with no uncertain voice of the past, of the many different people who have worked,
played, and suffered there since the middle of the seventeenth century, when it was
built on top of the ancient thirteenth-century walls and pillars of the old official house
of the Treasurer of York Minster, situated to the north-east of that great Cathedral. It
is not that there are ghosts in the House—ghosts imply something terrifying, some-
thing unhappy; but there is, at any rate to me, some atmosphere, some impelling force
which cannot be particularly described, but which nevertheless suggests something
very near, very akin to personal life . . . The House inspires love, admiration, respect.55
As Almira’s feelings about her family home show, the time-travelling object is pro-
pelled beyond the subject’s own lifespan through emotions like hope and fear, but
also, through the strong affective ties, the dwelling itself is personified, almost, as
an elder, an inhabitant from the past still standing in the present. The family’s not-
able, worthy ancestors are conceptualized as having imbued the very fabric of the
house with their admirable personalities and qualities so that the dwelling becomes
an agent of family and individual identity and reputation.

C o n c lu s i o n

Feeling Things pushes us to think more carefully about the relationship between
objects and emotions and do more than merely record the feelings attached to
things. Emotions are made manifest by being located in an object. Material culture
thus enables historians of emotions to provide clearer evidence about the ways in
which emotions operate at a variety of levels and beyond human physiology, bridg-
ing some of the gap between mediated and felt emotions. Attention to emotional

53 Marius Kwint, ‘Introduction: The Physical Past’, in Material Memories: Design and Evocation, ed.
Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward, and Jeremy Aynsley (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999), 1–16; 11.
54 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1964), trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Penguin, 2014), 36,
and Chapter 1.
55 Almira Gray, Papers and Diaries of a York Family 1764–1839 (London: Sheldon Press, 1927).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

242 Joanne Begiato

objects also helps historians to engage with the agentic nature of things. Scholars
need to find new ways to explore this process, which is so challenging due to the
interplay between the universal and the individual in the emotional meaning of
such objects. It is, nonetheless, critical to do so, since it can help to explain the
dissemination and reception of cultural values. So, for example, my own research
uncovers examples of men recounting similar reactions to military objects, which
prompts me to argue that emotional objects functioned as disseminators of values
that people shared and interpreted within their pre-existing mutual knowledge of
gender constructions.56 Nonetheless, engagement with them was clearly shaped by
people’s individual experiences such as personal emotional context, and also by
factors such as gender, age, and class which determined access to specific material
cultural forms.
Another complex feature of emotional objects that scholars need to confront is
their explicitly dual aspect in performing not only as agents in stimulating people’s
emotions, but also as repositories, empty until filled with human meaning that
they then hold, retain, pour out, and release over time and subject–object inter-
action. This tension between vessel and agent is laid especially bare at the ­diachronic
level in the form of movement, between objects, people, societies, and across time,
place, and cultures. As explored above, the diverse objects discussed in Feeling
Things share mutability and multivocality, and, often, engagement with the senses.
They have another feature in common: in their capacity to act as time travellers.
Thus, scholars can do more than trace the journey an object has taken, wherein it
is juxtaposed alongside assumptions or pre-existing attitudes to re-vision history or
traditional narratives to scrutinize racial, gender, and social hierarchies. While this
is enormously valuable, tracing the emotional diachronicity of objects adds a fur-
ther dimension because it enables them and their subjects over time to be analysed
in terms of development rather than simply building a chronological narrative.
After all, as Antony Hudek observes: ‘objects define us because they come first,
by commanding our attention, even our respect; they exist before us, possibly
without us’.57 As Feeling Things shows, objects also exist within us, and we exist in
objects, and historians must unpick these relationships and their motive force to
help us appreciate and analyse the material, mental, and emotional worlds of past
societies.

56 Joanne Begiato, Materialising Manliness in Britain c. 1760–1901: Bodies, Emotions, and Objects
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming).
57 Hudek, ‘Introduction//Detours of Objects’, 15.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Select Bibliography

Ago, Renata. Gusto for Things: A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome. Chicago
and London: Chicago University Press, 2013.
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. London: Routledge, 2004.
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC and London:
Duke University Press, 2006.
Alberti, Fay Bound. Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, and Emotion. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010.
Algazi, Gadi. ‘Introduction: Doing Things with Gifts’. In Negotiating the Gift: Pre-Modern
Figurations of Exchange, ed. Gadi Algazi, Valentin Groebner, and Bernhard Jussen, 9–27.
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003.
Allen, Rick. The Moving Pageant: A Literary Sourcebook on London Street Life, 1700–1914.
London: Routledge, 1998.
Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Auslander, Leora. ‘Beyond Words’. American Historical Review 110.4 (2005): 1015–45.
Avery, Victori. Vulcan’s Forge in Venus’ City: The Story of Bronze in Venice, 1350–1650.
Oxford: British Academy, 2011.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas. New York: Penguin, 2014.
Bailey (Begiato), Joanne. Parenting in England 1760–1830: Emotions, Identity, and
Generation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Bailey, Merridee and Katie Barclay, eds. Emotion, Ritual and Power in Europe 1200–1920:
Family, State and Church. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Balsamo, Anne. ‘Forms of Technological Embodiment’. Body & Society 1 (1995): 215–37.
Banfield, Ann. Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of
Fiction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.
Bartlett, Robert. Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the
Martyrs to the Reformation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Batchelor, Jennie and Cora Kaplan, eds. Women and Material Culture, 1660–1830.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Beaton, Belinda. ‘Materializing the Duke’. Journal of Victorian Culture 10.1 (2005): 100–7.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2010.
Benstock, Shari and Suzanne Ferriss, eds. Footnotes: On Shoes. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2001.
Biernoff, Suzannah. Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2002.
Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology‚ or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
Bolens, Guillemette. The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.
Brodie, Antonia. ‘Marking and Memory: An Embroidered Sheet in the Collection of the
Victoria and Albert Museum’. Textile 14.2 (2016): 160–75.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

244 Select Bibliography

Broomhall, Susan. ‘Dishes, Coins and Pipes: The Epistemological and Emotional Power of
VOC Material Culture in Australia’. In The Global Lives of Things: Materials, Material
Culture and Commodities in the First Global Age, ed. Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello,
145–61. London: Routledge, 2015.
Broomhall, Susan, ed. Emotions in the Household, 1200–1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014.
Broomhall, Susan. ‘“Quite indifferent to these things”: The Role of Emotions and
Conversion in the Dutch East India Company’s Interactions with the South Lands’.
Journal of Religious History 39.4 (2015): 524–44.
Broomhall, Susan, ed. Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities in Britain 1650–1850.
London and New York: Routledge, 2015.
Broomhall, Susan and Jennifer Spinks. Early Modern Women in the Low Countries:
Feminizing Sources and Interpretations of the Past. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.
Brown, Bill. ‘Thing Theory’. Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2000): 1–22.
Burger, Glenn. ‘Towards a Premodern Affective Turn’. postmedieval: a journal of medieval
cultural studies 5.1 (2014): 102–14.
Bynum, Caroline Walker. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval
Europe. New York: Zone, 2011.
Bynum, Caroline Walker. The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Caracciolo, Marco. ‘Embodiment at the Crossroads: Some Open Questions between
Literary Interpretation and Cognitive Science’. Poetics Today 34.1–2 (2013): 233–53.
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1984.
Charlesworth, Simon J. A Phenomenology of Working-Class Experience. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Clough, P. T. and Jean Halley, eds. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham, NC,
and London: Duke University Press, 2007.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. ‘Stories of Stone’. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies
1 (2010): 56–63.
Coletti, Theresa. Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in
Late Medieval England. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Corrigan, John, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion. Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2008.
Crawford, Cassandra. Phantom Limb: Amputation, Embodiment, and Prosthetic Technology.
New York: New York University Press, 2014.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly and Eugene Rochberg-Halton. The Meaning of Things: Domestic
Symbols and the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Daniell, Christopher. Death and Burial in Medieval England 1066–1550. London:
Routledge 2005.
Darwin, Charles. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: Penguin, 2009.
Daston, Lorraine, ed. Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science. New York:
Zone, 2004.
Davidson, Hilary. ‘Grave Emotions: Clothing and Textiles from Nineteenth-Century
London Cemeteries’. Textile 14.2 (2016): 226–43.
Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body. London: Verso, 1995.
Davis, Natalie Zemon. The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France. Madison, WI: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2000.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

Select Bibliography 245

Daybell, James. The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the
Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Dixon, Thomas. From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Dixon, Thomas. Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2015.
Dixon, Thomas. ‘Weeping in Space: Tears, Feelings, and Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-
Century Britain’. In Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities in Britain 1650–1850,
ed. Susan Broomhall, 137–58. London and New York: Routledge, 2015.
Dolan, Alice and Sally Holloway. ‘Emotional Textiles: An Introduction’. Textile 14.2
(2016): 152–9.
Edmonds, Penny and Tracey Banivanua Mar, eds. Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives
on Race, Place and Identity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Elliott, Dyan. Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages.
Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
Enterline, Lynn. The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000.
Enterline, Lynn. Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, and Emotion. Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.
Entwistle, Joanne. The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2000.
Farge, Arlette. The Allure of the Archives, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton. New Haven, CT, and
London: Yale University Press, 2013.
Farina, Lara. Erotic Discourse and Early English Religious Writing. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006.
Farina, Lara. ‘Sticking Together’. In Burn After Reading/The Future We Want, ed. Jeffrey
Jerome Cohen, Eileen A. Joy, and Myra Seaman, 29–36. Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Press,
2014.
Findlen, Paula, ed. Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500–1800. London
and New York: Routledge, 2013.
Finucane, Ronald C. Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Belief in Medieval England. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 1995.
Fletcher, Guy. ‘Sentimental Value’. Journal of Value Inquiry 43.1 (2009): 55–65.
Frevert, Ute. ‘Defining Emotions: Concepts and Debates over Three Centuries’. In Ute
Frevert et al., Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling
1700–2000, 1–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Gammerl, Benno. ‘Introduction: Emotional Styles—Concepts and Challenges’. Rethinking
History 16.2 (2012): 161–75.
Geary, Patrick J. Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1990.
Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
Germann, Jennifer G. and Heidi A. Strobel, eds. Materializing Gender in Eighteenth-
Century Europe. New York: Routledge, 2016.
Gerritsen, Anne and Giorgio Riello, eds. Writing Material Culture History. London:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
Gertsman, Elina, ed. Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Gertsman, Elina. Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna. University Park,
PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

246 Select Bibliography

Gilchrist, Roberta. ‘Magic for the Dead? The Archaeology of Magic in Later Medieval
Burials’. Medieval Archaeology 52.1 (2008): 119–59.
Gilchrist, Roberta. Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course. Woodbridge: Boydell &
Brewer, 2012.
Goldberg, Jonathan. Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Gregg, Melissa and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC, and
London: Duke University Press, 2010.
Greig, Hannah, Jane Hamlett, and Leonie Hannan, eds. Gender and Material Culture in
Britain since 1600. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Hahn, Cynthia. Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400–circa
1204. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012.
Hamlett, Jane. At Home in the Institution: Material Life in Asylums, Lodging Houses and
Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Hamling, Tara and Catherine Richardson, eds. Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern
Material Culture and its Meanings. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.
Harris, Oliver J. T. and Tim Flohr Sørensen. ‘Rethinking Emotion and Material Culture’.
Archaeological Dialogues 17.2 (2010): 145–63.
Harvey, Karen, ed. History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative
Sources. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Heidegger, Martin. ‘The Thing’. In Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Alfred Hofstadter,
161–84. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
Hicks, Dan and Mary Carolyn Beaudry, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture
Studies. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Hodder, Ian. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationship between Humans and Things.
Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
Holloway, Sally. ‘Romantic Love in Words and Objects during Courtship and Adultery
c.1730 to 1830’. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 2013.
Hudek, Antony, ed. The Object: Documents of Contemporary Art. London and Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2014.
Hughes-Edwards, Mari. Reading Medieval Anchoritism: Ideology and Spiritual Practices.
Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009.
Jaritz, Gerhard, ed. Emotions and Material Culture: International Round Table Discussion,
Krems an der Donau, October 7 and 8, 2002. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2003.
Keys, Barbara. ‘Senses and Emotions in the History of Sport’. Journal of Sport History 40.1
(2013): 21–38.
Kieschnik, John. ‘Material Culture’. In The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion, ed.
John Corrigan, 223–38. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Knorr Cetina, Karin. ‘Sociality with Objects: Social Relations in Postsocial Knowledge
Societies’. Theory, Culture & Society 14.4 (1997): 1–30.
Knowles, David. The Historian and Character and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008.
Kuhn, Annette. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. London: Hodder &
Stoughton, 1995.
Kwint, Marius. ‘Material Memories’. Tate: The Art Magazine 15 (1998): 47–9.
Kwint, Marius, Christopher Breward, and Jeremy Aynsley, eds. Material Memories: Design
and Evocation. Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 25/11/17, SPi

Select Bibliography 247

Labanyi, Jo. ‘Doing Things: Emotion, Affect, and Materiality’. Journal of Spanish Cultural
Studies 11.3–4 (2010): 223–44.
Lamb, Jonathan. The Things Things Say. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007.
Lemonnier, Pierre. Mundane Objects: Materiality and Non-Verbal Communication. Walnut
Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012.
Lydon, Jane and Tracy Ireland, eds. Object Lessons: Archaeology and Heritage in Australia.
Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2005.
McNamer, Sarah. Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion.
Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.
Manning, Erin. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, MA, and London:
MIT Press, 2009.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC, and
London: Duke University Press, 2002.
Mathiassen, Tove Engelhardt. ‘Protective Strategies and Emotions Invested in Early Modern
Danish Christening Garments’. Textile 14.2 (2016): 208–25.
Matt, Susan J. ‘Current Emotion Research in History: Or, Doing History from the Inside
Out’. Emotion Review 3.1 (2011): 117–24.
Matt, Susan J. and Peter N. Stearns, eds. Doing Emotions History. Urbana, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 2014.
Miller, Daniel. The Comfort of Things. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008.
Miller, Daniel. Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009.
Miller, David, ed. Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
Moran, Anna and Sorcha O’Brien, eds. Love Objects: Emotion, Design and Material Culture.
London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Nagy, Piroska. Le Don des larmes au Moyen Âge: Un Instrument spirituel en quête d’institution
(Xe–XIIIe siècle). Paris: Albin Michel, 2000.
Overton, Mark, Jane Whittle, Darron Dean, and Andrew Hann. Production and
Consumption in English Households, 1600–1750. London and New York: Routledge,
2004.
Plamper, Jan. ‘The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara
H. Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns’. History and Theory 49.2 (2010): 237–65.
Plamper, Jan. The History of Emotions: An Introduction, trans. Keith Tribe. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014.
Prown, Jules David and Kenneth Haltman, eds. American Artifacts: Essays in Material
Culture. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2000.
Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Riello, Giorgio. Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013.
Riello, Giorgio. A Foot in the Past: Consumers, Producers and Footwear in the Long Eighteenth
Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Riello, Giorgio. ‘Things That Shape History: Material Culture and Historical Narratives’.
In History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources, ed.
Karen Harvey, 24–46. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Robertson, Kellie. ‘Medieval Things: Materiality, Historicism, and the Premodern Object’.
Literature Compass 5.6 (2008): 1060–80.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/11/17, SPi

248 Select Bibliography

Robinson, Emily. ‘Touching the Void: Affective History and the Impossible’. Rethinking
History 14.4 (2010): 503–20.
Rosenwein, Barbara H., ed. Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Rosenwein, Barbara H. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2006.
Rosenwein, Barbara H. ‘Theories of Change in the History of Emotions’. In A History of
Emotions, 1200–1800, ed. Jonas Liliequist, 7–20. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012.
Scheer, Monique. ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have
a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’. History and Theory
51.2 (2012): 193–220.
Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. London: A. Millar, 1759.
Smith, Kate. Material Goods, Moving Hands: Perceiving Production in England, 1700–1830.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014.
Smith, Pamela H. The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Stearns, Peter N. American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style.
New York and London: New York University Press, 1994.
Steedman, Carolyn. Dust. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001.
Steedman, Carolyn. An Everyday Life of the English Working Class: Work, Self and Sociability
in the Early Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Steedman, Carolyn. Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Styles, John. The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
Styles, John and Amanda Vickery, eds. Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and
North America 1700–1830. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2007.
Tarlow, Sarah. ‘The Archaeology of Emotion and Affect’. Annual Review of Anthropology
41 (2012): 169–85.
Tarlow, Sarah. ‘Emotion in Archaeology.’ Current Anthropology 41.5 (2000): 713–46.
Tesnière, Marie-Hélène and Prosser Gifford, eds. Creating French Culture: Treasures from the
Bibliothèque Nationale de France. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
Thomas, Helen. The Body, Dance, and Cultural Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003.
Tresidder, Jack, ed. The Complete Dictionary of Symbols in Myth, Art and Literature. London:
Duncan Baird, 2004.
Trigg, Stephanie. ‘Introduction: Emotional Histories—Beyond the Personalization of the
Past and the Abstraction of Affect Theory’. Exemplaria 26.1 (2014): 3–15.
Truitt, E. R. Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art. Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, Ivan Gaskell, Sara Schechner, and Sarah Anne Carter. Tangible
Things: Making History through Objects. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Vickery, Amanda. Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. London: Yale
University Press, 2009.
Woolgar, C. M. The Senses in Late Medieval England. New Haven, CT and London: Yale
University Press, 2006.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/11/17, SPi

Index
Actor Network Theory 9, 29 Bachelard, Gaston 241
adulthood 229, 233, 236, 239 Bagnoli, Martina 28 n., 40 n., 41 n., 86 n., 87,
affect 100, 102 90 n.
affection 65, 69, 121–2, 124, 149, 159, 197, Balliol, John 200
203, 205, 236 n., 238 Bannockburn 192, 194, 204
affective economies 176, 203 Barthes, Roland 78, 115 n.
affective fields 15, 176, 194 Basile, Giambattista 78 n., 81–2, 84, 92, 158 n.
affective modelling, see emotional modelling battles 46, 52, 57, 143
affective networks 98 Agincourt 63, 69
agency 4, 8, 11–13, 29, 41, 51, 54, 57, 62, Bannockburn 204
72–4, 78, 84, 87, 90–2, 117, 130, 195, 198 mock battle 149 n.
agitation 203, 217, 231 sea battle 136
Ahmed, Sara 98 n., 176, 204 n., 231 spoil 117
Alexander III of Scotland 194 n., 199 see also war
amulets 54–5, 57 Begiato, Joanne 7, 154 n., 162, 167 n., 229–42
Andersen, Hans Christian 79 Belle, Elizabeth [Dido] 212–13
anger 30, 73, 129, 202, 204, 240 Bennett, Jane 3, 30, 41–2
Anselm of Canterbury, St 101 Bernard of Clairvaux 98 n., 100
anthropology 5, 9–11, 14, 15, 22, 157, Berlichingen, Götz von 142–3, 146, 148
175, 177 Bible, the 31, 104 n., 167–8
anticipation 27, 101, 151, 163 Wycliffite 105 n.
anxiety 52, 125, 158, 162, 163, 171 biofeedback 100, 108
Arbroath, Abbey of 193 birth 6, 31, 45, 51, 57, 154–74
archaeology 3, 9, 12, 15, 16, 18, 21, 48, 54, see also childbirth; rebirth
75, 88, 90–1, 157, 175–7, 183–7, 198 blindness 63, 66, 69, 71 n.
archives and libraries 7, 17, 18–19, 115, 128, blood 6, 38, 74, 167–8, 184, 219, 234
130, 155, 168, 179, 209, 211, 213–19 of Christ 35, 58–9, 61, 63–4
Archives Nationales (France) 218, 223 body, human 5, 6, 8, 12, 110–11, 113, 133–5,
Bodleian Library 63, 131 137, 143–4, 146 n., 147 n., 148, 151–3, 233
Huntington Library 120, 121 (Fig. 7.2), 129 adornments of 47, 54, 56, 64, 73
London Metropolitan Archives 154 n., 155 n., burial of 201, 209, 223
156, 162 (Fig. 9.2), 164 (Fig. 9.4), 165 of Christ 27, 38–40
(Figs. 9.5 and 9.6), 169 (Fig. 9.7), 170 clothed 74
(Fig. 9.9) dismemberment of 136, 146, 148
National Archives (UK) 123 n., 215, 217–18 immortal 90 n.
National Archives of Scotland 215 n., 217 of the king 200
New York State Library 130, 131 (Fig. 7.3) of St Mary Magdalene 30–5
North Register House 221 and shoes 75, 85, 87, 89
Scone Palace 211–17 of the Virgin Mary 38–40, 46
Somerset Archives 218 of worshippers 91–2, 98
archiving 5, 7, 17, 18–19, 130 see also bones; blood; heart; spit; sweat;
armour 138–41, 143, 145 tears; teeth
art 1, 11, 20, 35 n., 100, 134, 137, 156, 166, Bogost, Ian 8 n., 29, 41 n.
188–9, 190 Bombardiers 133, 135–7, 139–42, 148
art history 1, 14, 29, 35 n., 45 n. bones 27, 33, 90, 135 n., 143, 147, 167
Arthur, Ruth M. 229 books 1, 6
artisans 4, 6, 134, 138–40, 143, 145, 151 of hours 20, 53, 55–6
Ascham, Roger 118–19 notebooks 7, 209, 211–12 n., 214–18,
Aulnoy, Madame d’ 77, 82 220–4, 237
Austin, J. L. 10 Bound Alberti, Fay 168
awe 27, 62, 92–3, 183, 187, 192, 200, 202, Bourdieu, Pierre 7 n., 22, 52 n., 200, 201 n.,
204, 206–7, 234 211 n.
Aynsley, Jeremy 16, 241 n. brass 86, 183, 185, 221 n.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/11/17, SPi

250 Index
Breward, Christopher 16, 76 n., 241 n. crystal 5, 28–30, 33, 36, 39, 41 (Fig. 2.6), 42,
Brodie, Antonia 157, 158 n. 61–2, 70, 135
Brown, Bill 9, 11–12, 13, 29, 114 n., 115 n.; Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 16
see also Thing Theory cultural studies 5, 15 n., 22, 74, 199 n.
Brown, Dauvit 193 n. curators, curating 1, 7, 8, 17–18, 68, 103, 176,
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert 17 184–5, 187, 190
cures 50, 54, 57, 63, 66, 111–12
Calvin, John 64, 86–7 Czerw, Catherine 188
Camden, William 202
caressing 97, 98, 107, 113, 237 Daston, Lorraine 3, 135
ceramics 166, 171, 185 David II of Scotland 201
Certeau, Michel de 71 Day, Angel 118, 129
chemises 233 death 9, 23 n., 40, 50–2, 57, 59–60, 66–8, 78,
of Chartres 48– 54, 56 80, 86–7, 115 n., 123, 137, 146–7, 168,
of the Virgin Mary, see sainte chemise 170, 185, 218
Chen, Nancy Wei-Ning 240 de Grazia, Margreta 19
Christ 6, 8 n., 30, 31–7, 45–6, 48, 58–71, 106, DeJean, Joan 115–16, 124
127, 233 delight 184, 188
cross of 30, 203 Derrida, Jacques 17, 219
tears of 233, 235 Descartes, René 22
see also body, human; Sainte Larme design history 9, 16
christening 21, 89 n., 158, 238 n. desire 16, 17, 19, 36, 37, 66, 70, 71, 78 n.,
childbirth 6, 31, 45, 51, 57, 136, 154–74 102, 120, 121, 124, 125, 134
childhood, children 33, 72, 77 n., 235, despair 126, 181–2, 186, 189, 191
239, 240 devotion 1, 4, 5, 27, 30, 33–6, 41, 51– 3, 56,
see also museums and galleries 65– 7, 98, 101, 103 n., 104 n., 106, 113,
Charles I of England 115, 125, 126, 130, 131 161, 192, 200, 232 n., 234, 237
Chaucer, Geoffrey 17 n., 117 disability 122, 127, 134, 137
Chronicle of Lanercost 193 n., 203 disgust 4, 16, 234
Cicero 116, 118, 129 Dixon, Thomas 3, 10 n., 58 n., 230 n., 231
Clark, Gillian 160 Dolan, Alice 18 n., 21, 154 n., 158 n., 237 n.,
Clarke, Helen 190 239 n.
clockwork 139, 140, 145 dolls’ houses 229, 233, 236–40
clothing, see chemises; shoes; textiles donations 52–3, 202
colonialism 1, 177, 178, 207, 219, 231, 238 Drayton, Michael 118–19, 122, 126, 128
coins 54, 75, 160, 177 n., 178 n., 183, dread 4, 107, 112
185, 189 drought 60, 67
bending of 55–6 Dutch East India Company (VOC) 6,
collecting 9, 20, 21, 27, 33, 43, 45, 50, 55, 68, 175–91, 238
103, 143, 166 n., 190, 229, 236, 240 dyes 75, 76
colour 62, 115, 119, 122, 145, 158, 159–60,
166–7, 171, 197 economic value 202
compassion 2, 35 n., 63, 102 n. Edward II of England 192 n., 194, 204
compunction 59 elation 184
Connon, Wallace 204 embarrassment 7, 196, 205
consolation 69, 149 embodiment 4–6, 10–11, 15, 20–1, 52, 58, 64,
consumption 3, 4, 53, 75, 76, 156, 232 73, 76, 91–2, 98 n., 105, 106 n., 113,
involuntary 234, 235 n. 133–5, 149, 153, 159, 164, 166, 171,
consumer culture 73, 75, 149, 234 229, 233
copper 5, 28, 36, 37, 42, 188 embroidery 6, 76, 82, 83 (Fig. 5.4), 86–7,
Coronation Chair 192, 195, 197, 199, 200, 157–62, 170, 171
202, 203 emotional accretions 114, 234
courtship 157, 159 emotional atmosphere 15, 21, 241
Cowen Orlin, Lena 20 emotional attunement 15
Cox, Marian Rolfe 80, 81 emotional autobiographies 229, 230, 239
craft 4, 64, 74, 133, 136–7, 141 n., 142, emotional triggers 13, 30, 119, 237, 239
143–4, 149–50, 152, 156, 161–5, 171, emotional communities 5, 20–1, 29, 35, 42,
200, 232 73, 238
craftspeople 134, 138, 140 emotional debris 114–32
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/11/17, SPi

Index 251
emotional modelling 35, 110 gifts 52–3, 59–60, 62, 80 (Fig. 5.2), 81,
emotional practice/emotion as practice 3, 4–6, 149–50, 158–60, 163, 238
56, 59 see also donations
emotional regulation 8, 14, 52, 57 Gilchrist, Roberta 20, 52 n., 54, 84 n., 90 n., 92
emotional value or worth 6, 13, 15–17, 45, 47, glass 2, 5, 7, 17–18, 28–30, 36, 41, 50, 59, 61,
49–50, 56–7, 74, 163, 195, 234, 239 69, 81–4, 91, 152, 185, 188–90, 205
emotions tumbler 175, 189
performance of 22, 200, 201, 207, 242 glasses 229
emotives 10 gold 33, 35–8, 48–9, 52 n., 53, 75–6, 81, 83,
empathy 2, 14, 91, 211 86–7, 170, 229
Enlightenment, the 22, 74 Golden Legend, The 30–1, 37, 40
envy 202, 225 Gombrich, E. H. 176, 187
Evans, Ian 88 Graf, Urs 151–2
evil 158, 234 grammar 115, 118, 220
excitement 18, 179, 183–4, 186–7, 190–1, gratitude 120
239 Gray, Almira 241
ex votos 53 greed 27, 183–4, 186, 189, 239
grief 4, 54, 120, 149, 182, 240
fables 156, 165–7 Grimm, Brothers 77–84
faith 58, 61, 67, 69, 92, 165, 171, 234 guilt 4, 112, 209, 213, 219
fairy tales 73–4, 77–85, 87, 91–2, 158
Farge, Arlette 218, 223 habitus 22, 200
fear 1, 4, 12, 31, 36, 51, 57, 62, 105 n., 113, hair 34, 39, 59, 90 n.
122, 148, 181–2, 188–9, 191, 200, Hamilton, Ian 192 n., 193 n., 204, 206
205–6, 238, 241 Hamling, Tara 19, 230 n.
of death/dying 52, 146, 233 hand grenade 182
of dismemberment 147 handling 97–8, 102–10, 112, 233, 235, 237
of loss 54, 186 hands 6, 7, 14, 17, 27, 66 n., 97, 105–6,
of the supernatural 73, 78, 91, 234 108–11, 113, 119, 122–3, 133–7, 140,
of war 124, 125 142–5, 148–51, 182, 209, 219, 233
see also anxiety handwriting 114, 121–4, 130, 214, 215, 217,
Fernandez, James 14 220, 222
Ferres, Sir John 121–2 happiness 63, 99, 104, 119, 236
fin’amors 10 Harley, Brilliana 115, 124, 125
fire 30, 46–7, 51, 57, 90, 130, 233 Harris, Oliver J. T. 15, 176, 194
flags 162, 179, 193, 234 Hartog, Dirk 175–91
Fletcher, Guy 13, 16, 49 hatred 4, 66, 129
Flohr Sørensen, Tim 15, 176, 194 health 120, 127, 162–5, 238
flowers 159, 163–4, 166–7, 171, 232, 236 hearts 6, 65 n., 69–70, 98–100, 114, 118–19,
folklore 6, 54–5, 72–3, 78–80, 82, 84–5, 121, 125, 126, 147, 156–7, 160, 162,
90–2, 164 163, 168–71, 201, 204, 219 n., 232
Fontana, Giovanni 139, 151 Heidegger, Martin 70
Foucault, Michel 115 n., 137 Henry I of France 60
Foundling Hospital, London 154, 156–7, 159, Henry IV of England 200
163–4, 238 hindsight 231, 239–41
Frevert, Ute 3, 9 history of emotions 1–3, 5, 8, 10, 18, 21 n.,
Freycinet, Louis de 180 22, 58, 59, 131, 231
Fry, Elizabeth 236 Holdaway, Rose 189
Fulwood, William 118 Holinshed, Raphael 206
Fumerton, Patricia 19 Holloway, Sally 6, 18 n., 21, 232, 237 n., 238,
fury 31, 236 239
holy matter 13, 20, 50, 51
Gainsborough, Thomas 166 Holy Tear, see Sainte Larme
gaze 35, 40, 151 home 4, 56, 163, 204–5, 217–19, 233–4,
Gell, Alfred 11, 29, 51 235 n., 240–1
gender 6, 15, 20, 33, 74, 133, 143, 150–1, hope 4, 56–7, 69, 157–8, 161–7, 171, 204,
156, 229, 233, 240, 242 238, 241
see also women horror 240
Geoffrey, count of Anjou 60 Houlbrook, Ceri 88, 90, 92
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/11/17, SPi

252 Index
Howe, Charlotte 212–13, 223 n. Lubin, St 43–7
Hudek, Antony 231 n., 233 n., 242 luck 75, 88–9, 162
Hugh of Lincoln 27 luxury 83, 86, 93, 101
Hugh of St Victor 98 n., 101–2
Hunt, Simon 19 McNamer, Sarah 35 n., 101–2
McNeil, Peter 74, 76
identity 20, 66–7, 82, 128, 155, 171, 183, magic 13, 38, 52, 54–5, 61, 66, 71, 72–4,
186, 200, 238–41 77–93, 104, 206, 229, 234
images 29, 33–43, 48, 50, 56, 61, 99–102, see also supernatural, the
112, 139, 155–7, 163–71, 188–90, 229 n. Manning, Erin 98–104, 113
Industrial Revolution 4, 20 Mansfield, William Murray, Earl of 209–25
see also mass production manuscripts 17, 31, 34, 53, 56, 97–113, 114–15,
ink 6, 114, 122, 151, 154, 164, 167, 171, 119, 123–5, 130–2
188, 235 Margolin, Victor 21, 232
inkblots 115, 119–22 Mary Magdalene, St 27–41, 60, 67–8, 233, 239
innocence 166–9 Massumi, Brian 98–102, 107, 112
iron 6, 28, 37, 75, 78–80, 89–90, 198, 233 mass production 232
hands 133–53 see also consumer culture; Industrial Revolution
maternity, see mothers, motherhood
James IV of Scotland 201 Mathiassen, Tove Engelhardt 89, 158, 238
James VI of Scotland 201, 207 Matthews David, Alison 233
Jaritz, Gerhard 3, 21, 22 Mauss, Marcel 92
John of Fordun 196, 206 memento mori 39
Johnson, Samuel 9 memorabilia 161, 237
joy 66, 73, 80, 92, 112, 120, 160, 171, 236 memorials 53, 91, 111, 171, 180
memory 16, 20, 36, 39, 49–51, 57, 59, 64, 67,
Kauffman, Linda 128 77, 87, 106, 122, 156, 186–90, 193–4,
Keepe, Henry 197, 202 200–1, 235–6, 239–41
Kempe, Margery 100–1 mercy 34, 63, 66–7, 71
Kieschnick, John 13 merriness 122, 236
kissing 52, 56, 66, 233 Michael IV (the Paphlagonian), emperor of
Kwint, Marius 16, 166 n., 240, 241 n. Constantinople 60
Kyeser, Konrad 139 Michelet, Jules 218, 225
microfilm 209, 214–19, 221
Labanyi, Jo 22 Miller, Daniel 3, 15, 175 n., 176, 194
lamentation 31, 66 miracles 38, 45–6, 48, 50, 54–5, 59–60, 63,
language theory 209–11, 220–1 66–7, 70, 87, 92­­–3, 112
Latour, Bruno 29 n., 41, 70–1 misericordia, see mercy
Lazarus 59–60, 63, 66–8 Mittelhausen, Hans von 143
lead 28 n., 43, 48–9, 52, 56 Monluc, Blaise de 147–8
leather 75–6, 80, 85 (Fig. 5.5), 89 (Fig. 5.7), Moran, Anna 21
91, 144, 161 n., 209 mothers, motherhood 1, 6, 31, 50, 66, 80, 89,
Legenda Aurea, see Golden Legend, The 121, 126–7, 129, 154–71, 232, 236, 238
letters and letter-writing 1, 6–7, 64, 65 n., motion 5, 64, 74, 91, 98, 108–11, 140, 144,
69, 114–32, 136, 149 n., 156, 182, 184, 154–71, 195, 231
233, 235 mourning 54, 162, 196, 201–2, 204
letter carriers 124–6, 132 museums and galleries:
letter-writing manuals 116–19, 129 Freemantle Museums 187
Liber Extravagans 193–4 London Foundling Museum 156–7, 169
Lingis, Alphonso 97–8, 113 (Fig. 9.7)
literary studies 1, 5, 6, 10, 12 Los Angeles County Museum of Art 85
Locke, John 167, 209, 213 (Fig. 5.5)
Longueville, Lady Margaret 115, 129 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1,
loss 36, 63, 130, 158, 182, 186, 190, 196, 28, 80 (Fig. 5.2), 166 n.
201–2, 240 Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Fribourg 143, 144
Louis XI of France 49, 52–3, 64 (Fig. 8.2)
love 2, 4, 9, 10, 12–13, 16, 21, 65 n., 66, 69, Musée de l’Histoire de la Médecine,
98, 101–2, 118, 120, 122, 124–5, 129, Paris 145
157–71, 198, 200, 205, 229, 239–41 Musée des Beaux Arts, Chartres 46 n., 47, 48 n.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/12/17, SPi

Index 253
Musée national du Moyen Âge, Paris 43, 44 Pennant, Thomas 195–6
(Fig. 3.1) performatives 10
Museo Stibbert, Florence 144 Petrarch 116
Museum of Geraldton 188 pewter 43–4 (Fig. 3.1), 53, 177–80
Museum of London 7 n., 43, 156 Perrault, Charles 82–3, 158 n.
National Museum of Archaeology, phenomenology 8, 22, 98 n.
Dublin 86 (Fig. 5.6) Philip of Burgundy 49
Neu Ruppin Museum 142 photography 20, 215
Northampton Boot and Shoe Museum 88 piety 44, 53, 58–9, 68, 71, 98, 102
Poldi-Pezzoli Museum, Milan 144 pilgrims and pilgrimage 1, 32, 38, 43–57, 61 n.,
Quilt Museum, York 156, 159 n. 63, 106
Rijksmuseum 1, 77 (Fig. 5.1), 150 (Fig. 8.4) pilgrimage tokens 43–57
V&A Museum of Childhood 156, 162 n., Pinney, Christopher 15, 191
165 n., 166–7, 171, 229, 233, 236, 238 pipes, clay 183
Victoria & Albert Museum, London 156, Pisa 133, 136
157 n., 170 n. pity 63, 102
Western Australian Museum 176 n. Plamper, Jan 18, 73 n., 230 n.
York Castle Museum 162 n., 167 n. Plato 219
pleasure 30, 77, 93, 104, 113, 188, 209, 236
names, naming 21, 53, 90, 138, 154, 161, Pococke, Richard 197–8
163–4, 171, 178–9, 193–4, 206–7, Pope, Beata, countess of Downe 115, 120–2
210–11, 216, 221–2 postal emotions 115–16
nails 58, 63, 75, 89–90 pregnancy 158–9, 162
Nazism 234 Prichard, Sue 156, 157 n.
neuroscience 22, 64, 102 pride 4, 53, 179, 183, 187, 191, 200–2, 204
nostalgia 36–7, 142, 201–2, 233, 238–40 processions 60, 66–7, 69, 205
Notre-Dame of Chartres, Cathedral 43–57 prostheses 87, 134–5, 137–40, 142–6, 149, 151
nuns 72, 87 Proust, Marcel 236
Prown, Jules David 14
Object-Oriented Ontology 5, 8, 9, 29, 51, 62 psychology 9, 16, 17–18, 98 n., 100, 157, 209,
objects: 235 n.
afterlife of 52, 230, 238 punctuation 214, 219–20
charisma of 40, 232–4
consumer 73, 75, 149, 233, 234, 235; Quilligan, Maureen 19
see also consumer culture
domestic use of 16, 87, 90, 190, 237, 240–1 Randles, Sarah 58 n., 88, 89 n., 90 n., 92 n.
ephemeral 41–2, 58, 210, 233 rebirth 136
hand-made 4, 6, 154–71, 175, 202, 232–4 Reddy, William M. 3, 10, 230 n.
imagined 72, 73, 118, 206, 229, 232, 236 Reformation, the 13, 64, 85
inscriptions on 4–5, 20, 29, 157, 180, 202 regret 34
machine-made 232–3 relics 1, 5, 12, 36, 46, 49, 50–2, 58–62, 64–71,
mass production of 36 n., 232–3; 73–4, 84–7, 89, 90–2, 109, 197, 230–1,
see also Industrial Revolution 233–4, 235
supernatural powers attributed to 2, 5, 6, 11, of St Mary Magdalene 27–33, 38–40
51, 54, 55, 72–3, 76, 78, 79, 85, 89–93 of Virgin Mary 45
see also agency; collecting see also reliquaries; sainte chemise; Sainte Larme
O’Brien, Sorcha 21 relief 112, 152, 158
Oh, Hyun-Jung 240 religion 14, 37, 51, 54–5, 59, 66, 90, 92,
O’Hara, Diana 157 102–3, 127, 196, 234
Olsen, David 219, 221 Catholicism 13, 85–7, 168, 171
oral histories 211, 214 n., 240 Protestantism 13, 64, 85 n., 86, 161, 168
Ovid 66, 77, 114–19, 122, 124–5, 126, 128, religious practice(s) 3, 13–14, 54 n., 56, 57,
129 n., 132 67, 90, 92, 98, 102, 103 n., 112
reliquaries 5, 28–30, 32–3, 35–7, 38–41, 46,
pain 36, 38–9, 147, 149, 162, 211 48, 50, 59, 60–1, 63–4, 68, 71, 75, 86–7,
Paré, Ambroise 138, 145, 147, 151 144, 235, 239
Parker, Rozsika 157, 170 n. Rensselaer, Maria van 115, 126–8, 130–1
Penberthy, Marianne 189, 190 n. renunciation 6, 156, 158, 162, 164, 171
penitence 30, 33–4, 39 resentment 217
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/11/17, SPi

254 Index
revulsion 2, 233 sorrow 66, 102, 157–8, 168, 171
rhetoric 64, 118, 123 sound 103, 144, 214, 220, 235, 236
Richardson, Catherine 19, 20 n., 230 n. souvenirs 16, 44 n., 46–7, 49–50, 57, 162,
Richardson, Samuel 219, 222 166 n., 171
Riello, Giorgio 74, 75 n., 76 n., 157, 166 n. speech 62, 117, 209 n., 211, 214, 216 n.,
ritual 5–6, 13–14, 22, 52, 54–5, 56, 63, 67, 218–19, 220–2
73, 81, 89, 112, 198, 200–1, 207, 234 see also voices
coronation 194, 197, 200 spit 74
processions 66–7, 69, 205 Stallybrass, Peter 19
Robert I of Scotland (the Bruce) 201, 206 Stearns, Peter 3, 10 n., 230 n.
Robert Mannyng of Brunne 98–9, 102–13 Steedman, Carolyn 7, 17, 235
Robertson, Kellie 20 Stewart, Susan 17
Robinson, Emily 18, 210 n., 211 n., 236 n. Steyns, Jan 182–3
Rochberg-Halton, Eugene 16 stickiness 109, 204, 207
rope 17, 182 stone(s) 61, 64, 70, 84, 90, 183, 224 n.,
Rosenwein, Barbara H. 3, 10–11, 20, 21–2, 233, 235
29 n., 30 n., 73, 176 n., 230 n. Stone of Scone 7, 192–208, 234
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 219–20 Stuart, Arbella 115, 123–4, 156 n., 157, 159 n.,
160 n., 166 n., 235 n.
sainte chemise 45–8, 50–2, 57 Styles, John 154 n., 155 n.
Sainte Larme 6, 58–71, 235 subjectivity 14, 74, 133, 146, 148
saints suffering 102, 133, 147, 168, 211, 241
bodies of 30, 32, 35, 46, 87, 233, 235 of Christ 64
see also Lubin, St; Mary Magdalene, St; suffragettes 193–4, 203
Virgin Mary supernatural, the 2, 5, 6, 11, 51, 54, 55,
Saltonstall, Wye 119 72–93, 104 n., 233–4
Sampson, Ellen 73–4, 78 n., 92 n. see also folklore; magic
Scheer, Monique 22, 52, 71, 101 n., 200–1 Swann, June 73 n., 88–9, 92
Schimmelpenninck, Mary 239 sweat 74, 91
scissors 168, 182 symbols, symbolism 5–6, 8, 16, 20, 36, 50,
Scone, Palace of 194, 211, 215 n., 216–17, 60, 69, 74, 76, 78, 91, 156–8, 160–1,
221 n. 163–9, 171, 186, 188, 200–1, 203–4,
Scudéry, Madeleine de 115–16, 128–9 206–7, 234
senses 14, 107, 110, 209, 223, 242 sympathy 85, 116–18, 127, 211
see also sight; touch
sentiment 17, 69, 118, 202, 205, 232 tactility 2, 97, 105–6, 109, 113, 135, 237
sentimentalism 20 Tarlow, Sarah 3, 18
sentimental value 4, 13, 16, 49, 135 talismans 54, 75, 160
September 11, 2001 14 tangibility 235–7
Shakespeare, William 117–18, 121–2 tears 4–5, 6, 31, 34, 58–71, 74, 114, 161–2,
shame 4, 27, 34, 112, 126, 196, 204, 210, 223 211, 221, 225, 233, 237
shells 190, 236 tear stains 6, 114–15, 119
ships 175–8, 180–90 see also Sainte Larme
shipwrecks 176, 180, 183, 186–90, 238 teeth 5, 27, 38–9, 42, 67 n.
Historic Shipwrecks Act (1976) 185 terror 112
shoemakers 74–5, 79, 87, 90 n. textiles
shoes 1, 6, 21, 72–93, 229, 232, 234, 239 bedcovers 161, 163
chopines 72, 81, 82 (Fig. 5.3) blankets 158, 159–60, 169, 192
deliberately concealed 73, 78, 88–93, 234 cockades 156, 160–1, 232
high heels 76, 77 (Fig. 5.1) linen 21, 46, 50, 155, 157, 158–61, 165,
slippers 81, 82, 83 (Fig. 5.4), 85 (Fig. 5.5), 166 n., 171
87, 91 pincushions 155–6, 162–4, 165 n., 166–7,
sight 35–6, 40 n., 66, 205, 236 171, 232, 238
silver 28, 37–9, 41 (Fig. 2.6), 42–3, 64, 75, 76, printed 154, 156, 164 (Fig. 9.4), 165–7,
81, 83–4, 128, 144, 160, 167, 185, 188–9 171, 232
silver gilt 48–9 quilts 156–7, 158–9, 161, 163, 166 n., 232
sin 77, 105, 107–9, 112–13, 167–8 ribbons 76, 154–6, 160–2, 168, 171
skin 6, 75, 97, 99, 105, 160, 182 silk 81, 83 (Fig. 5.4), 86, 87 n., 115, 155,
Smith, Adam 16 n., 211 159, 160, 161 n., 162 n., 168–9, 190
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/11/17, SPi

Index 255
wool 159, 168 Vita Edwardi Secundi 193, 203, 206
see also clothing Vitelli, Paolo 133, 135–6
thing power 175 Vlamingh, Willem de 179–80
Thing Theory 9 n., 11–12, 13, 29, 58, 115 n.; voices 7, 15, 133, 144, 209–11, 213–19,
see also Brown, Bill 221–5, 235, 241
time 2, 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 15–16, 22, 60 Volkersen, Samuel 181, 183
time travel 66, 237–42
tin 43, 48 Wagner, Ulrich 143–4, 149
torture 38 Walsingham, Thomas 200
touch 6, 7, 14, 17–20, 27, 35–6, 46, 48, Walter of Guisborough 197, 199
50–1, 56, 59, 62, 63, 70–1, 75, 85, 87, Walker Bynum, Caroline 14, 17–18, 20, 33 n.,
91, 97, 99–100, 106–7, 109, 112, 130, 46 n., 51 n., 59 n.
135, 163, 168, 195, 204, 208, 218, war 13, 60, 64, 115, 117, 124–5, 133–40,
233–4, 236, 237 142–3, 146, 148, 151, 197, 203, 231
see also tangibility water 4, 36, 39, 54–6, 61–2, 64, 69, 70, 175,
transcription 84, 123 n., 143 n., 209–11 n., 182, 186–7, 189, 190, 224
212, 214–15, 217, 220–1, 223 wax 47, 115, 126, 164
trembling 62, 69 weapons 55, 117, 133 n., 138–41
Turberville, George 119, 122 Wedel, Lupold von 202
Turkle, Sherry 16 Western Australia 175, 176 n., 178 n., 179 n.,
180, 186 n., 187–8
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher 17, 231 n., 233 n., 237 Whitehead, Yvonne 189
universities: Wollstonecraft, Mary 224
Harvard University 17, 238 women 6, 51–2, 76, 117, 123, 141 n., 149–51,
University of Cambridge 3 n., 17 155–65, 169, 171, 212–13, 229, 237, 240
University of Melbourne 58 n., 192 n. see also gender
University College London 15 wonder 73, 76, 78, 84–5, 87, 91–2, 149, 183,
186, 200, 202, 207
Van der Graeff, Adriaan 182 wood, wooden objects 30, 37, 134, 140,
Vejlby, Anna Schram 232 151–2, 179, 180, 184–5, 202
Venice 135–7, 140, 141 n., 149 planking 181–2, 184
Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, see Dutch poles 179–80
East India Company (VOC) woodcuts (print) 125, 138, 150
Vickery, Amanda 4, 154 n., 156 n. Woolgar, Christopher 109
Victorian era 20, 240 Wyss, Ulrich 143–4, 149
literature 210
Virgin Mary 33, 35, 45–6, 50, 63 n., 234 Zinzerling, Justus 202
see also body, human; relics; sainte chemise Zipes, Jack 77 n., 81 n., 82, 84, 93 n.