Mobility of Objects Across Boundaries 1000-1700

During the period 1000-1700 major transformations took place in material culture. Quite simply, more objects were manufactured and used than ever before and many objects travelled across geographic, political, religious, linguistic, class and cultural boundaries. By starting with a focus on past objects, this volume brings together essays from art historians, historians, archaeologists, literary scholars and museum curators to reveal the different disciplinary approaches and methods taken to the study of objects and what this can reveal about transformations in material culture 1000-1700.

Contributors: Katherine A. Wilson, Leah R. Clark, Alison M. Leonard, Steven P. Ashby, Michael Lewis, Robert Maniura, Sarah Hinds, Christina Antenhofer, Alexandra van Dongen, Bettina Bildhauer, Julie De Groot, Jennifer Hillman, Ruth Whelan, Christopher Donaldson, Thomas Pickles.

Katherine A. Wilson is Senior Lecturer in History, University of Chester. She is the Principal Investigator of an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Network Grant and Follow on Funding for Impact and Engagement on the subject of The Mobility of Objects Across Boundaries 1000-1700, partnered with the University of Oxford and the Grosvenor Museum, Chester. Her monograph The Power of Textiles: Tapestries of the Burgundian Dominions (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018) reveals textiles as objects that contributed to the projection of urban social status and the cultural construction of political authority by medieval rulers.

Leah R. Clark is Director of Studies of Art History for the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford. Her research explores the roles objects play in creating networks in the fifteenth century through their exchange, collection, and replication. She is author of Collecting Art in the Italian Renaissance Court: Objects and Exchanges (Cambridge University Press, 2018), co-editor (with Nancy Um) of a special issue ’The Art of Embassy: Objects and Images of Early Modern Diplomacy’ of the Journal of Early Modern History, (2016) and co-editor (with Kathleen Christian) of a textbook on the global Renaissance, European Art and the Wider World 1350-1550 (Manchester University Press, 2017).