Objects of Belief

These eight essays on how religious objects were imagined and used provide fresh insight into the role of materiality in medieval religious culture. They demonstrate how believers granted extraordinary significance not only to objects sanctified by ritual or awe-inspiring in their rarity, but mundane everyday things, as well as concepts beyond sensory experience. From rosaries to embroidered knots, from the Eucharist to ritual puppets, from John Colop's common-profit book to the leather 'skin' worn by Christ-actors in the cycle plays, the objects examined here cross or unmake conventional boundaries between religion and superstition, medieval and early modern, Catholic and protestant.

The volume is indebted to the rapid growth in attention to objects across a range of fields in recent years, much of it future-oriented and situated amid the difficulties of our own present. Yet these essays share the conviction of much historical and cultural research on objects that there is no access to the stuff of our world except through the lens of human imagining. Rather than seeking a perspective outside human culture, they investigate the ways in which persons and communities become entangled with the objects that matter to them.

Contributors 'follow the things themselves' to develop new readings of major works and authors such as Nicholas Love, Julian of Norwich, Walter Hilton, Geoffrey Chaucer, the Cloud-author, and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, as well as less well-known works including miracles of the Virgin and Wycliffite writings.