Editorial

Abstract

We didn’t set out to have a theme; this is a pick-and-mix volume, filled with a wide array of subjects, regions and approaches, from the intricacies of a local fray between assailants in sixteenth-century Weymouth to a utopian experiment in communal living in early twentieth-century Japan: a History Workshop smorgasbord of different regions and historical characters. Yet as we set ourselves to editing, one theme clearly emerged in a number of the articles. The things – particularly personal and household possessions – which people have kept close to them in the past, and the ways in which such possessions can help us to reconstruct histories and meanings in the present. This is most explicitly (in more than one sense) set out in Caspar Meyer’s article on Greek vases. He takes ‘the side-lining of materiality in historical writing’ as a direct target, and explains how the study of Greek sexuality suffers in important ways from a lack of attention to the materiality of its evidence. The images on the vases have been too readily harnessed to discourse. These ceramic objects – which were, after all, ordinary household items – need to be seen, handled and examined in all their three-dimensionality, he argues, before we start theorizing about Greek sexuality. These vases are featured prominently, if in only two dimensions, on Bernard Canavan’s wonderfully bold cover.