Material Remains: Reading the Past in Medieval and Early Modern British Literature. Ed. by Jan-Peer Hartmann and Andrew James Johnston

Abstract

As I write this review, the treatment and perception of material remain very much in the public eye, as news reports and social media alike are dominated by accounts of the lying in state of the late Queen Elizabeth II, with people queuing for hours, days, at a time to view her mortal remains in Westminster Hall in London. The materiality of the pageantry and its historical origins have been much debated. The Queue to view the casket (capitalized into a phenomenon) is itself being cited by some commentators as one of the greatest ever pieces of public theatre and can be productively read in relation to the examples of ‘archaeo-theatrics’ cited by Jonathan Gil Harris’s chapter in Material Remains: Reading the Past in Medieval and Early Modern British Literature (2021). These events are exceptional in so many ways, but the capacity of the physical to embody the intangible, or more broadly, how humans relate to the physical world around us, has long been studied by archaeologists, art historians, and anthropologists amongst others. Scholars of literature may have arrived more recently at this destination, but as John Hines, the author of the final essay in Material Remains, highlights, ‘a welcome development in literary studies of the last decade or so has been the emergence of a serious and extensive engagement not only with the history but also with the archaeological materiality of the past in relation to literature’ (p. 240). The material turn in literature began in earnest in the 1990s, but from 2001, when it was used by Bill Brown in a piece of the same name in Critical Inquiry, Thing Theory has emerged as a dominant framework of literary enquiry.1