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This paper takes as a starting point the slippage between bodies and things as an idea and moment to interrogate an epistemology accessible through materiality. I explore the methodology of materiality, suggesting that one of the major contributions of material studies is a renewed attention to the dynamics of materialism embedded in the objects themselves: those unnamed subjects who lie behind or just beyond an object’s presence, who played a role in its making, its movement and its meaning. To this end, the paper takes shape around a series of case studies of bodies and/as things drawn from the crusader world described by Jean de Joinville, namely stones, cloth and captives (bodies made into things). Attendant with these objects were deeper theological and ontological questions about the role of matter in relation to faith and the divine. The period of the crusades was a particularly revealing moment for the tensions and beliefs surrounding the work of material religion. By looking at these case studies I hope to bridge the divide between intellectual and theological concerns with materiality and the material presence of human labour in things and thereby to think sociologically with materiality. This is an invitation to take up the imperative behind material studies to go beyond words and see the subjects behind the objects.
This paper takes as a starting point the slippage between bodies and things as an idea and moment to interrogate an epistemology accessible through materiality. I explore the methodology of materiality, suggesting that one of the major contributions of material studies is a renewed attention to the dynamics of materialism embedded in the objects themselves: those unnamed subjects who lie behind or just beyond an object’s presence, who played a role in its making, its movement and its meaning. To this end, the paper takes shape around a series of case studies of bodies and/as things drawn from the crusader world described by Jean de Joinville, namely stones, cloth and captives (bodies made into things). Attendant with these objects were deeper theological and ontological questions about the role of matter in relation to faith and the divine. The period of the crusades was a particularly revealing moment for the tensions and beliefs surrounding the work of material religion. By looking at these case studies I hope to bridge the divide between intellectual and theological concerns with materiality and the material presence of human labour in things and thereby to think sociologically with materiality. This is an invitation to take up the imperative behind material studies to go beyond words and see the subjects behind the objects.
This article examines the material and ideological meaning of the three relics of the True Cross acquired by Louis IX in 1241 and 1242, which were venerated, along with the Crown of Thorns, in the Sainte-Chapelle, as part of the broader project of building Capetian sacral kingship in the High Middle Ages. Although cross relics flooded Western Christendom after 1204, these three relics, acquired directly from the Byzantine emperor, were specifically associated with Constantine and Heraclius and their historic military victories against enemies of Christian empire. The article identifies one of the three relics, known to contemporaries as the crux triumphalis in Latin and the croix de victoire in French, which Byzantine emperors were said to have carried into battle, as a relic that Louis IX then brought with him on his crusade of 1249–50 to Egypt, in hopes of martialing its historic power against the infidel in battle.
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