Technology and Culture

Materielle Kultur und Konsum in der Frühen Neuzeit [Material culture and consumption in the early modern era] Edited by Julia A. Schmidt-Funke. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2019. Pp. 298.

This collection of papers, originating from the working group Material Culture and Consumption in Premodernity, focuses on the cultural history of things, in other words, an inquiry into material culture of early modern times. The study of objects in society is currently en vogue, the editor contends, and the gap between the research fields of material culture (seen from the cultural perspective) and consumption (from that of economics) is closing. The introduction to the volume provides a survey of the principal approaches taken by research and ends with the question of whether it is possible to attach a specific characteristic material culture, or a distinctive signature, to the early modern era—one that leaves behind the prevalent historical narratives of modernization. The editor outlines consumer demand for non-European goods from the Americas and Asia, and in examining a look at objects of everyday life, asks whether research has succumbed to the lure of luxury.

The contributions to this volume are divided into five promising—albeit rather vague—pairs of concepts. Under "materials and makes," Andrea Caracausi's article examines one early-modern European commodity: silk ribbon and its production, trade, and consumption in Italy. In the article that she contributed to the collection, Julia A. Schmidt-Funke chooses a museum artefact, a painted faïence jug, which she evaluates as a hybrid artefact owing to the European borrowings of Asian motifs and as a unique serial piece with an identification of the manufacturer.

Under the conceptual pair "forms of consumption and manners of usage," Elizabeth Harding writes on "spoon cultures," focusing on the instrumental and symbolic use of a piece of cutlery. Janine Maegraith reconstructs meat consumption within two different contexts and periods, referring [End Page 595] to a telling diary from the Thirty Years War. Under "aptitudes and demands" Caroline Cremer shows that "miniaturizations," the artful reduction of life to small scale with tiny objects, were both a fascination and a challenge. Filigree models and miniature paintings required concentration and body control, not only in their making but also in their reception. Christiane Holm devotes her attention to the drug table in the educational Francke Foundations at Halle. Her object history focuses not on the collection (the ergon) but on the collection repository (the parergon), which furnishes concrete situations for perception and cognition.

Within "relations and motions," Michael Wenzel treats the biography of an object, a carved onyx Mantuan anointment vial, with an extensive documentary trace of its long odyssey as a work of art from Mantua within the context of war and plunderage.

Under "knowledge and perceptions," Berit Wagner discusses Titian's Death of Actaeon from the point of view of art history, offering an alchemical interpretation of the work, which he views as evidence of the "material turn" of sixteenth-century painting. Finally, Kim Siebenhüner shows how astonishment and knowledge about foreign wares led to systematization of knowledge and the development of merchandise studies.

Altogether, this volume presents a variety of topics, some of which break from the volume's aim, choosing instructive analysis of individual objects over systemic comparison. Important older studies and disciplines such as object-oriented ethnology, or "Sachvolkskunde," are not reviewed. Although the main interest of ethnology continues to lie in modernity, the papers on the treatment of things are inspiring—for example, the studies by Edit Fél and Tamás Hofer on "Sachuniversum," the universe of objects, and their reuse and further exploitation, as is characteristic of the early modern era. Despite the volume's call for interdisciplinarity, approaches in the history of technology are barely received. Having long since abandoned its fixation on manufacturing and production, the...