Religious identity and material culture intersect in Irish society and literature. Churcharchitecture, religious artefacts, and ritual paraphernalia find their origins in theDevotional Revolution, when under the influence of Cardinal Paul Cullen, IrishCatholic practices were standardised and aligned with Rome. During this period, thebuilding of outsized churches, along with the ritualized bodies of believers, becamesignifiers of an increasingly respectable and confident Irish Catholic identity. The1932 Eucharistic Congress illustrates the merging of church and state, and theutilisation of modern modes of production, dissemination, and consumption. VaticanII’s makeover of the liturgy allowed for modern designs in architecture and print totransform the experience of the Mass. Religion and nationalism increasingly sharedthe same iconography and cultural vocabulary in twentieth-century Ireland. Such aconflation of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Irish’ finds another material counterpart in theMagdalene Laundries, which now stand as a symbol of the church/state institutionalabuse of Irish women and children.

Chapter 6 concerns the contentious issue of the role of the concept of life in the Logic and its consistency with the artifact-centered conception of teleology defended in chapter 5. There is a common tendency in the literature to think that the Life chapter implicitly imports references to the biological domain in the Logic itself. It is here argued instead that Hegel’s Life chapter must be read in “topic-neutral” terms: in a way that requires application neither to the natural or cultural domains. Once it is read in this neutral way, we can see that “logical life” is simply the notion of a self-determining purpose. However, the concept of life as developed by Hegel is not at all opposed to the artifactual domain; this is especially because the social and cultural domain (social ontology) give us prime examples of “living artifacts,” the kind of artifacts that can be based in a process guided by thought.

This chapter explores the sociopolitical significance of folk instruments, positing them as vital embodiments of cultural identity and history. Through a series of case studies (primarily, the banjo and the Appalachian dulcimer), the chapter illuminates the dynamic interplay between tradition and innovation, revealing how folk instruments are not simply static objects but actively evolving symbols of resilience and cultural memory. Through a critique of traditional taxonomies that often marginalize these instruments, the chapter advocates for a more inclusive framework that recognizes and centres the agency of makers and users. Further, by applying a postcolonial lens, it highlights the importance of embodied aesthetics and the complexities of musical practices within folk traditions. Drawing on the work of Kofi Agawu, it explores both the manufacture of instruments as well as their varied use patterns over time and geographical space. Finally, it situates folk instruments in relation to archies and processes of canonization.

This chapter addresses the evidence for the burial of moneyed laymen. The latter are, perhaps not unexpectedly, both ubiquitous and largely invisible in this collection. The necrosima includes only one hymn specifically addressing the death of a husband and father. By contrast, the majority of its forty “generic” hymns contemplate a male lay Christian subject, mourned by his children, anxious about abandoning his family, and plagued by anticipation of the harsh judgement he might receive. These hymns become a site for working out the necrosima’s theology of possessions – a topic that appears explicitly in some of the collection’s most paraenetically focused hymns, including, for example, madrāshâ 28 (“In funere principum, & Divitis cuiusque”/“On the burial of a prince or some kind of rich man”), but is a prominent theme in much of the corpus. This chapter accordingly examines anxieties about wealth and poverty, and the ethical pedagogy inherent in the necrosima, including its emphasis on charity.

In the first paragraph of the modern translation of the Rationale divinorum officiorum of William Durand (c. 1230–1296) are markers of the change this book seeks to chart. One is immediately visible. The translator, Timothy M. Thibodeau, chose to distinguish through the use of italics what he then identifies, through the use of brackets, as biblical texts. Those italics and those brackets do not simply mark the modern sense of “source,” of a particular relationship between Durand and Scripture, that postdates Durand himself. They distinguish Scripture and, in so doing, obscure Durand’s understanding of revelation and its relationship to “ecclesiasticis officiis, rebus ac ornamentis.” There in the opening paragraph of the Prologue and throughout the Rationale, Durand presents a different relationship entirely among ecclesiasticis officiis, rebus and ornamentis, and biblical history, prophecies, psalms, Gospels, and Epistles.

This chapter examines the social and material preparations that households made for an impending birth. Family members were fascinated by the look and size of women’s bellies, so much so that women’s stomachs were often highlighted in portraits and they featured prominently in correspondence. Married women’s ‘big bellies’ were celebrated because they displayed the fruitfulness of the family, whereas unmarried women sought to conceal their pregnant state. The process of buying and borrowing things for childbirth including linen, baby clothes and birthing stools have often been represented as hallmarks of a celebratory and extravagant female culture that excluded male family members. This chapter finds instead that male family members were key players in this material culture. Added to this, correspondence shows that men were active in imagining the appearance and nature of unborn children in ways that embedded them within their family-to-be. This material and emotional investment was, however, entirely dependent on marital fidelity by wives. Men’s domestic and fiscal honour was intertwined with the performance of women’s bodies.

In the exclusive world of private press publications, book making consists in a practice of gathering a collection and documenting a community of sentiment around Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. This chapter starts with the repurposing of frontispieces in a book acquired by Walpole in 1760, Joseph Ames’s A Collection of Individual Letters, to capture the material culture of specimen collecting that underpins the early history of the book. Book parts function as building blocks for other books, recursive and mobile components in different copies and different titles, from collections of separately printed unique poems and pamphlets gathered under the bespoke title page ‘Detached Pieces Printed at Strawberry-Hill’ to extra-illustrated copies of Description of the Villa … at Strawberry Hill (1774, 1784). Miscellaneous visual and verbal additions to copies of Description mark out the owner and amateur, the sculptor, and the domestic printer’s practice in disciplinary strands of knowledge production (artistic, antiquarian, typographical, classical).

This introduction begins by explaining the role of consumers and consumption in both pre-industrial and modern economies, with particular emphasis on the decisive role of the peasantry. The book is framed within a paradigm shift that recognises medieval peasants as key agents of social and economic change. This chapter provides a state-of-the-art review of the connection between consumption, material culture, and living standards in scholarship, identifying gaps and unanswered questions that this book seeks to address. It also highlights the significance of food-related possessions in the material culture of ordinary people, the region under analysis (the Kingdom of Valencia), and the sources under examination (probate inventories, public auction records, and others). The introduction concludes with a general outline of the book’s four parts and presents the central argument: that peasant decision-making as consumers during the later Middle Ages had a positive impact on the overall economic development of a leading Mediterranean polity – thus revealing the power of peasant consumers.

The notion that curse tablets were used to cause harm whereas amulets were used to provide protection is a misleading oversimplification. Curse tablets have often been removed from the category of religion and consigned to the illusive one of magic. However, the existence of those tablets designated as prayers for justice illustrates that the desires which drove curse tablet creation were varied. To ascertain to what extent the use of curse tablets and amulets fitted in with polis religion, different aspects of them are examined, such as the ritualistic nature of their creation, their use of formulaic inscriptions and evidence for their use, or lack of use, of reciprocity. Examples of amulets and curse tablets are presented from the fourth century BCE through to the second century CE and from a large geographical scope. Examples from across the Greek world illustrate a paradoxical unity and sense of religious community amongst those who engaged in these practices. The incredibly personal nature of the inscriptions on curse tablets and the wearing of amulets provides an insight into Greek religious practice at an individual level.

This chapter explores the stories of urban and rural protesters, female boycotters and spinners, Black rebels and runaways, and Indigenous combatants who engaged in protests, boycotts, and mob action to assert their political and personal legitimacy on the eve of the American Revolution. The study of material culture demonstrates that the quest for liberty became central to American life through things; objects ranging from the mundane to the elite made the lofty, abstract goals of political protest tangible to men and women throughout the British colonies. Physical artifacts – whether built spaces, printed visuals, homespun fabrics, seized cargo, or tokens of war – illustrated a convergence of material culture and collective action in the 1760s and 1770s. The material culture and performance of protest played an important role in fueling the social and political unrest that pushed the colonies toward revolution.

A close study of Benjamin West’s history paintings from the 1770s reveals the artist’s imagination of America and the goals of his patron rooted in the service of a continuing British empire. West’s powerful misrepresentation of the colonial past made this visual paradigm appealing even after the political and cultural rupture of the American Revolution. Paying close attention to the artist’s work and its continuing allure for audiences today reveals how imaginative, and inaccurate, history paintings such as this have come to be embraced as actual history.