New History Lab: Using Material Culture to Recreate Early Mordern Kinship Networks and Political Alliences

New History Lab: Using Material Culture to Recreate Early Mordern Kinship Networks and Political Alliences

by Cathryn Enis, 'Sources, Controversies, and Rediscovering Affective Significance', Saturday, 30 January 2010. From "The New History Lab," a blog sponsored by the University of Leicester, UK, written by a variety of authors. See list of past blogs and topic diagram for other items of interest.

In her research into relationships in Elizabethan gentry in Warwickshire, Cathryn has had to use material culture as evidence, rather than as illustration - an infact, she considers it a vital part of building a rich picture of identities and kinships. It is not just the traditional document that can be read as historical resource.

There are limits to what a document can represent. They may well be a rich resource of information, but they are always open to interpretation and they always leave out much. It may well be that standardised documents, such as wills as Cathryn illustrates, may tell us as much about generalised convention as about particularity and individual relationships.

The relationship which people have with material culture itself might be used to illuminate meanings that lie behind their documented use and giving of it. Objects are not simple things - rather, they are symbols, recognition of which a purely factual reading of documentation cannot always provide. {For the remainder, go to original post.}