Objects of Affection: The Book and the Household in Late Medieval England by Myra Seaman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Objects of Affection: The Book and the Household in Late Medieval England by Myra Seaman Michael Johnston Myra Seaman. Objects of Affection: The Book and the Household in Late Medieval England. Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. Pp. xi, 284. $130. Of late there has been something of a vogue for monographs or edited collections focusing on a single Middle English manuscript. Myra Seaman's excellent and fascinating book joins this host of recent publications. These studies all share a belief that medieval multitext codices are complex cultural objects, demanding sustained attention from a diversity of critical angles. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 61, the subject of Seaman's analysis, is certainly worthy of such a detailed treatment. What sets this study apart from most of its predecessors, however, are its formalist and theoretical commitments. Certainly, Seaman handles the manuscript's codicological, linguistic, and historical evidence quite ably, but her primary intervention—an innovative one, at that—is to suggest that we bring the [End Page 419] critical toolkit of what she terms "object-oriented studies" (18) and affect theory to bear on Ashmole 61. This book's synthesis of codicology—long one of the most traditional of disciplines—with some of the highest of high theory will cause readers who come from each respective field to stretch and read out of their comfort zone. This is a good thing, to be clear. (Cards on the table: I come to this review as someone who spends most of his time among the codicologists, but I also believe it can only be good if codicologists talk to others more frequently.) All too often, behind closed doors, the book historians will grouse about the theoreticians of our discipline lacking traditional scholarly skills, while the theoreticians will grouse about the book historians being naïvely positivistic. Seaman is thus to be applauded for studiously locating her argument at the nexus of these two isolated wings of our discipline. The central argument of Objects of Affection is that manuscripts, as objects, create affective relationships with their readers, and in the case of Ashmole 61 that relationship is often mediated through the constellation of objects within the texts. Seaman's readings of the texts in Ashmole 61 place the ideology of the household at the center of this entire process. In order to think through precisely how these objects create such responses, Seaman draws on a range of object-oriented studies (this whole body of theory is cogently summarized on pages 16–24). As she notes, such theoretical approaches embody a wide tent of theories, with divergences between and disagreements among them, but what unites them all is that they seek to decenter the human as the subject acting on a world of objects, instead locating agency within objects themselves. As a result, in an object-oriented formulation, poems are not merely inert things awaiting a human subject to endow them with meaning, but are themselves material agents acting on the world. The manuscript, as a collection of such texts, is endowed with a special material force of its own. After the introduction, Seaman proceeds by chapters organized around the objects within Ashmole 61's texts. So Chapter 1, "Objects of Instruction," looks at the didactic texts in the manuscript, finding that objects' agency in these texts works on the reader's affect in order to teach lessons needed for the maintenance of the household. Similarly, Chapter 2, "Objects of Mercy," examines the manuscript's moral exempla and romances in great detail, suggesting that the Christian form of forgiveness advocated by these texts "is routinely enabled and even fulfilled … through the intervention of non-human subjects" (92–93). Chapter 3, "Objects of Correction," considers the function of objects within some of Ashmole 61's moral exempla; [End Page 420] romances; and the strange, disarming poem known as "The Debate of the Carpenter's Tools," arguing that these texts "encourage human audiences to understand their own agency as one element in a conglomeration of human and non-human affective agencies" (136). Chapter 4, "Testimonial Objects," tackles what many would consider the most boring texts in the manuscript: Maidstone...