Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500-1800, edited by Paula Findlen

Abstract

Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500-1800, edited by Paula Findlen. New York, Routledge, 2013. xxiv, 389 pp. $45.95 US (paper). When I was a child of seven, my school teacher took me to task for using the word thing to describe--well, anything at all. It isn't precise, she said, and intelligent young ladies must use their words. The incident made so powerful an impression that even today, I find myself hovering over the keyboard with deep misgivings when t-h-i-n-g-s appear on the page. It was therefore with intrigue, excitement (and some alarm) that I approached this volume, an edited collection boldly asserting its very thingness. What, I wondered, could they possibly be up to? This volume, divided into six parts, examines early modern material culture through a range of very different approaches. Most of the essays have been written by historians, but covering a broad range of interests within that discipline; it also includes the perspective of communication and science studies (an essay by Chandra Mukerji) and Asian studies (Morgan Pitelka). Such breadth can make for uneven reading at times, but there is remarkable consistency, because all essays tell the story of the early modern world and how objects helped to make its emergence possible. In fact, our very understanding of this world is corporeal, and though shaped by many philosophies and economies, this wildly changing three-hundred-year period is just as much characterized by its ginseng (Carla Nappi), as it is by its beasts and birds (Marcy Norton) and its clockwork (Jessica Riskin). At the same time, the collection emphasizes the constantly changing nature of things. The three papers just mentioned are part of a section titled The Ambiguity of Things, and as Riskin explains, we often cannot even be sure we understand the real meaning of seemingly familiar things. The concept of clockwork, for instance, is fraught primarily because we have added our own latter-day (mechanical regularity) understanding to words that used to stand in for disquiet, fluidity, or conflict. The second section, Representing Things, also emphasizes change and the difficulty with which we can approach the meaning-making processes of the past. How can we know what was really being represented by the Dutch still-life painters (Julie Hochstrasser)? Can domestic inventories from the past help us to understand both the seen and unseen elements of the material world and the relative importance to those who made the lists (Giorgio Riello)? In Mukeiji's work, we are reminded that sometimes the surface is the reality; things--in this case costume --may have been considered appropriate identifiers of character in the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Change is, on the one hand, brought about by things; but, on the other, those very help us separate our own preconceptions from the work itself. The work itself is very much the subject of the third section, Making Things. In fact, Pamela H. Smith actually makes things--following the recipe for silver casting as a way of addressing the oxymoronic ... hook of practice, a book (thing) and yet a method for making (p. 198). This article also illustrates--quite literally, with images--the problem of having only words to render a thing to our understanding. Corey Tazzara's essay discusses the way new goods entered the market, and also how a market was created for new goods--the ever changing value and demand of in seventeenth-century Italy--thus revealing the way great economic change may be reduced to things (and consumers!). It is a shame that this section does not contain a third essay, perhaps one that discusses the market for minutia in the eighteenth century, or even one on medical things like forceps, which were used to shift the meaning of midwife from female practitioner to male surgeon. …