Objects and Identity

Chair: Anna-Marie Linnell

"Changing places - animal artefacts and the journey from nature to culture" by Gill Moore

Taking as its theme the translation of the material objects deriving from big-game hunting across physical, natural, social and cultural boundaries this paper will focus on what Arjun Appandurai has described as the social biographies of these artefacts and on the effects of the journeys and transitions they make. It will examine the boundaries which these objects traverse and the transformative effect of the time they spend in liminal and uncoded spaces as they progress between the fields of nature and culture which were such pivotal tropes in the long  nineteenth century.

Predominantly focusing on the development of Charles Peel's collection of big-game trophies, much of which now resides in the Royal Albert Memorial museum in Exeter, it will trace the progress of this type of artefact with particular reference to their loci of display, their audiences and their fluctuating role and visibility during this period.

“Specs, Ethics, and Objects: Making use of images in early modern popular print” by Callan Davies

How do we use advice?  The authors of early modern moral tracts and popular didactic texts require it of us; the emblem theorist Henry Estienne sees moral figures as designed ‘to instruct us’ (The art of making devises trans. Thomas Blount 1646, B4v) and, accordingly, the emblem writer George Wither suggests those instructions ‘may be made use of’ (Emblemes 1635, A1r).  The importance of using such texts raises some interesting questions about the presentation of ethical advice, not least in a period where things are frequently deemed essential to knowledge.

Perhaps for this reason, the early modern period has a peculiar tendency towards materialising abstract thought.  Indeed, popular print and especially broadsides (single-sheet prints) often incarnate moral lessons in what I term object-images – the conceptualisation of ethical advice as a physical thing: gloves, ladders, and apple-pies.  Despite much recent research on broadsides, no attention has been directed towards the importance of objects in relation to popular print’s ethical intentions.  Merging the recent bibliographic, materialist, and literary approaches to the broadside, this paper will argue that Autolycus’s hawking and ballad-selling in The Winter’s Tale synthesises object, image, and text, before concentrating on a unique printer’s proof of a 1589 “poster,” A Spectacle fo[r] Pe[r]iu[r]e[r]s, to examine how an object might materialise moral thought in the context of the period’s sceptical enquiry.

“Transformations of the Apple as Object, Image and Idea: traditional symbolic orders and new media content” by Richard Wells

My thesis derives from a surprising contention: the apple, this most commonplace of objects, is among the most strikingly pervasive, versatile and powerful signifiers in Western culture. Surprising, in that the scholarly community has hardly noticed. Fragmentary studies exist within disciplinary specialisms, but they have not been comprehensively linked to make historical and conceptual sense of the phenomenon as a whole.

This presentation focuses on the currency of apple imagery in contemporary mega-visual culture, where it is most noticeable in advertising and branding. The sheer diversity of associations evoked by the apple is at first bewildering, but I will argue that by exploring the full range of the semantic field we can see that the field is coherently structured through encoded patterns. Distinctive clusters of meaning strongly cohere around three key concepts which I’ve identified as: New Life; Knowledge; Desire. These structuring and dynamic concepts then enable exploration of the vexed connections between the apple’s historic and the contemporary manifestations, as object, image, and idea, illuminating technologies of production and consumption, complex works of art and radical cultural movements along the way.

It is fair to say that a traditional symbolic order still holds public sway, its reach extended rather than dissipated by new media technologies: not least because the apple remains the model object for registering paradigm shifts and for contesting cultural values.