Travelling Matters across the Mediterranean : Rereading, Reshaping, Reusing Objects (10th–20th centuries)

Abstract

In the last two decades, objects have become increasingly relevant to historical studies as the primary focus of research discussing cross-cultural relations. Objects are produced, used, modified, preserved, and destroyed according to historically specific political and cultural settings, thus providing researchers with information and insights about their original background. However, they can also throw light on a large array of cross-cultural encounters when their mobility is put to the fore. Objects can move by being bought, gifted, bartered, and sold, borrowed or stolen, collected and dispersed, just as they can be modified, repaired, reshaped, repurposed, and destroyed in the process. The Mediterranean, as a barrier and as a meeting place for different polities and communities, and as the setting of conflicted experiences of cultural, political, economic, and social transformation, easily lends itself to this kind of historical analysis. Featuring articles on Byzantine imperial silks and bronze doors from southern Italy, eastern luxuries in Istanbul and African bolsas from the Canary Islands, Arabic geographies and Hebrew religious texts travelling from shore to shore and from manuscript to the press, and the ‘dead’ bodies of holy women and men, this volume intends to tackle objects as sources and subjects of the history of cross-cultural encounters in innovative ways: focusing on the ‘second-handedness’ of displaced objects across the Mediterranean, the volume intersects different chronologies — from antiquity to the present-day — and varying scales, from the individual objects to the much larger one of the histories of their reinterpretation and repurposing.