Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

Download or read book Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and Renaissance written by Curtis Perry and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2001 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phrase 'cultural materialism' names an approach to cultural analysis that interrogates the socio-economic conditions within which artefacts are produced as well as their participation in other ideological and material fields of culture. Disciplines that have traditionally studied cultural artefacts like literature and painting have increasingly focused on the material production and ideological operation of objects once thought of in idealized or purely aesthetic terms. By the same token, historians - whose work, of necessity, has always tended to deal with the material traces of culture - have increasingly been willing to consider the social and ideological importance of art. The increasing popularity of this cultural studies approach to the past has in turn spurred investigation into other kinds of materiality. Recent historical and literary scholarship, for example, has become increasingly aware of the ways in which the lived materiality of the human body informs a range of cultural discourses.