Artifacts: How We Think and Write About Found Objects by Crystal B. Lake

Abstract

Reviewed by: Artifacts: How We Think and Write About Found Objects by Crystal B. Lake Megan L. Cook Crystal B. Lake. Artifacts: How We Think and Write About Found Objects. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. 272 pp., 4 black and white photos. $34.95. ISBN: 978-1-4214-3650-0. The central thesis of Lake’s work is twofold: first, that her titular category, the artifact, exists as a specific and specifically meaningful category of object, and second, that in the long eighteenth century, that meaning had a distinct political valence that animated writing about artifacts across a wide range of genres and contexts. Both of these arguments derive from the premise that, as historical objects, “artifacts could [End Page 212] communicate matters of fact that no living person could know for themselves” (12). This ability to communicate the past comes with both affordances and limitations. Lake defines an artifact as “a fragment, but one that remains sufficiently intact to support reconstruction of the object’s full shape and history” (6). Its relationship to its moment of origin or use is therefore a vexed one: while the artifact may, as a primary source, appear to offer neutral evidence about the past, “never enough of an artifact persists for either the reconstructions or the resulting interpretations of the object to be conclusive” (6). For Lake, this incompleteness may derive from an artifact’s fragmented state or, more generally, from its detachment from its historical moment. It is in its incompleteness, Lake argues, that the artifact becomes a profoundly generative category of object. Without a doubt, the objects considered in Artifacts are engines of textual production, inviting study, analysis, and speculation in outsize relation to their relatively modest physical dimensions. This book is divided into two parts, the first establishing a broad conceptual and historical framework for the idea of the artifact and the second consisting of case studies on four specific artifactual categories: coins and medals, manuscripts, weapons, and grave goods. While the book’s subtitle characterizes artifacts as “found objects,” the discovery of such objects is not a major consideration here (exceptions occur mostly in fiction, such as the ostensible found manuscript containing the story of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto or the statue in Shelley’s “Ozymandias”). Instead, the writers in Lake’s study tend to focus on the interpretation of these objects, bringing them to bear on the era’s most intractable philosophical and political conflicts about history, governance, sovereignty, and the explanatory power of physical evidence. Lake’s first chapter, following the work of Arnaldo Momigliano and a host of more recent thinkers, including Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, Carlo Ginzburg, and Rita Felksi, establishes eighteenth-century antiquarianism and the study of artifacts as a discourse keyed into the central political concerns of the day. Depending on the way it was interpreted, an artifact might support a royalist or republican position, and might offer evidence in favor of either vitalist or materialist understandings of matter. In such a [End Page 213] context, artifacts function as vibrant, networked objects that invite interpretation and reinterpretation, Felski’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” brought to bear on Ginzburg’s “clues.” In her second chapter, Lake delves more deeply into the intellectual and social contexts in which artifacts circulated during the eighteenth century, focusing on the objects displayed in the famous Don Saltero’s coffeeshop in Chelsea and references to them in periodicals like Richard Steele’s Tatler and Joseph Addison’s The Spectator. The perspective cultivated in these publications, Lake argues, was deeply invested in qualities that anticipate Sianne Ngai’s category of the “interesting,” a category to which artifacts must certainly also belong. Thus, while the case studies of artifacts that follow explore writing across a range of eighteenth-century genres, periodical culture and its sensibilities remain a mainstay throughout. In each of four case studies, Lake combines consideration of texts that seek to understand or document artifacts in their material particularity with those that treat them in a more fictive or literary way. The first explores numismatics, including both coins and medals, in the work of John Evelyn, John Dryden, Joseph Addison, and Charles Johnstone’s popular satire Chrysal...