The Subject Behind the Object: The Language of Things in the Time of the Crusades

Abstract

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.