Early Modern Herbals and the Book Trade

Between 1525 and 1640, a remarkable phenomenon occurred in the world of print: England saw the production of more than two dozen editions identified by their imprints or by contemporaries as 'herbals'. Sarah Neville explains how this genre grew from a series of tiny anonymous octavos to authoritative folio tomes with thousands of woodcuts, and how these curious works quickly became valuable commodities within a competitive print marketplace. Designed to serve readers across the social spectrum, these rich material artifacts represented both a profitable investment for publishers and an opportunity for authors to establish their credibility as botanists. Highlighting the shifting contingencies and regulations surrounding herbals and English printing during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the book argues that the construction of scientific authority in Renaissance England was inextricably tied up with the circumstances governing print. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core at doi.org/10.1017/9781009031615.

The Long Twilight of Gold: How a Pivotal Practice Persisted in the Assemblage of Money

Why has gold persisted as a significant reserve asset despite momentous changes in international monetary relations since the collapse of the classical gold standard? IPE theories have little to say about this question. Conventional accounts of international monetary relations depict a succession of discrete monetary regimes characterized by specific power structures or dominant ideas. To explain the continuous importance of gold, we draw on insights from social psychology and new materialist theories. We argue that international monetary relations should be understood as a complex assemblage of material artifacts, institutions, ideas, and practices. For much of its history, this assemblage revolved around the pivotal practice of referencing money to gold. The centrality of gold as experienced by policymakers had important effects. Using archival and other evidence, we document these effects from the 1944 Bretton Woods conference through the transition to floating exchange rates in the mid-1970s; most IPE scholars underestimate the role of gold during this period. Power relations and economic ideas were obviously important, but they contributed little to a fundamental development: the long process of reluctantly coming to terms with the limitations of specie-backed currency, and the progressive and still ongoing decentering of gold in international monetary relations.

Childhood in the memoirs of Russian female historians of the second half of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries

The present paper studies ego-documents of Russian female historians written in the second half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries, with a focus on the works of N.I. Gagen-Thorn, E.V. Gutnova, M.M. Levis, V.N. Kharuzina, S.V. Zhitomirskaya, E.N. Shchepkina, and N.D. Flittner. How do these authors, in their childhood descriptions, discuss their professional choices? By producing ego-documents, the female historians wanted to preserve their memory of childhood events in the form of a new historical source. In so doing they followed the principles that they also adhered to when wri- ting historical essays. At the same time their texts are very subjective: each reflects the respective researcher's personal experiences. Each text is unique, and there are few overlaps with the memoirs of other female historians of their time, or with those of younger colleagues. In many ways, the women were influenced by authors of the Russian memoirist tradition; they often adhered to self-censorship (even when there was no clear ideological pressure from society). As a result, the narrative about childhood turned into a narrative about the prerequisites for the self-identification of women as scientists. Memories became a form of self-representation, and this conditioned the selective nature of childhood narratives; later success in the profession was projected back onto childhood memories. The childhood narratives of Russian female historians differ from texts of their male colleagues: women preferred to describe their impressions with references to material artifacts and to everyday rituals, writing carefully about their emotional experiences. One of the most important subjects in these womens memoirs and diaries was when they for the first time experienced the gender conflict in their lives: when they understood that their scholarly ambition runs against the common attitudes about gender attitudes that they had internalized in early childhood.

Bach and Material Culture

Bach’s music is often interpreted as transcending the material conditions of everyday life. This chapter, by contrast, argues that Bach scholarship could be enriched via approaches taken from the study of material culture. It places Bach within the vibrant consumer culture of early-eighteenth-century Leipzig, exploring his postmortem inventory and his keyboard publications in the context of how the town’s bourgeoisie used material goods to show their status and identity. It investigates Bach’s printed and manuscript music in terms of the social practices surrounding these material artifacts. Finally, the chapter relates Bach’s working practices to debates about the interplay of human and material agency. It discusses how he experimented with the material characteristics of instruments such as organs, and analyzes his compositional practice as an interaction between player-composer and contrapuntal materials.

Bootstrapping Ordinal Thinking

In this chapter, the authors apply cognitive neuroscience, gene–culture co-evolution, and extended cognition to account for the evolution of an unusual neurologically grounded trait—the ability to arrange items in ordered sequences. Cognitive neuroscience strongly suggests that the human ability to conceive of and use ordinal sequences such as alphabets and calendars relies on dedicated neural resources, yet ordinal sequences such as these do not exist in nature. There is thus the provocative possibility that ordinal thinking evolved as a specific response to cultural phenomena. But which, and how? Applying the perspectives of extended cognition and gene–culture co-evolution (neuronal recycling in particular), the authors explore the likelihood that ordinal cognition arose through the manipulation of material artifacts, with stringing beads for thousands of generations being one possible scenario.

Semiotic Analysis of Petroglyph «Ancient Turks and the Mother Goddess Umay/Umai»

The study of historical artifacts from a scientific point of view is acknowledged in the literature. A clear understanding of our historical roots is connected with the study of cultural heritage from empirical and especially quantitative bases of research already done by scholars like Rudenko (1927) and Gavrilova (1965). Yet, another important method of studying historical material objects is semiotic analysis, which allow studying prehistorical visual culture artifacts as a system of signs, which may be deciphered, and related to deducible meaning and sense in the context of ethnographic, cultural and specifically semiotic references which bear on location, identification and understanding of such material. Our research in this article is dedicated to a study of certain visual material artifacts from the geographical region of the Eastern Altai. In particular, we study petroglyphs on a boulder that was discovered during the excavations of the Kudyrge burial ground near the Chulyshman River, which according to some sources belong to the Turkic culture of the early period, and have recently begun to arouse the interest of scientists. Various empirical methods have been used to explore the stone monument (statue) called “Kudyrginsky plot”. Some of the techniques as those of pioneering research scholars like Rudenko and Gavrilova, include archaeological, historical, historical-chronological, historical-comparativemethods, as well as approaches including analysis and synthesis of the obtained data. In turn we supplement the existing methodological approaches with a semiotic-ethnographic analysis of the information available on the “Kudyrginsky plot”. We argue that semiotic analysis of ancient artifacts, following methods established by Reday (2019) and Martel (2020), can offer adequate information for the understanding of a rich historical heritage sight like the Kudyrginskyplot.

SELL YOUR CARDS TO WHO: NON-FUNGIBLE TOKENS AND DIGITAL TRADING CARD GAMES

The remediation of analog trading card games into digital platforms troubles notions of ownership and highlights the flows of capital through the ecologies of TCGs that previously relied on material artifacts. $2 is a digital trading card game that utilizes Non-Fungible Tokens to address concerns over ownership. However, in the wake of the sale of a $69 Million dollar NFT at Christie's art auction, crypto-art has been embroiled in discourse with respect to artist exploitation, environmental, and other concerns endemic to blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies. This paper examines the implications of NFTs in digital card games via the material histories of trading card games and the way digital TCGs accelerate the extraction of capital from player communities by bypassing traditional secondary markets. $2 proposes to solve these issues of ownership and assure players their cards will retain their value. However, the game relies on the continued existence of the publisher's platform, blockchain infrastructure, and player interest. The game also ignores how cards become valuable. Despite mimicking the artificial scarcity associated with TCGs, it does not take into account the impact metagame trends have on the value of cards. By looking at NFT implementations in games such as $2 we can identify several issues with the technology that might otherwise be overlooked in favor of more common critiques. This also highlights several implications remediation and adaptation herald for digital versions of analog games.

Regulating sense and space in late Renaissance Florence

This article examines the sounds and smells of late Renaissance Florence by analysing stone inscriptions posted in public streets and squares by the city's policing officials, the Otto di Guardia, during the Medici grand ducal period (1569–1737). The plaques contain sensory regulations prohibiting sounds, smells and sights considered socially and environmentally polluting. Unpublished archival records, printed materials and material artifacts reveal how sensory legislation developed as an increasingly public element of late Renaissance Florentine governance, while at the same time revealing how Florentines often resisted or ignored sensory regulation. Digitally mapping the sensory legislation plaques visualizes the intersections of sense, space and social history in new ways.

Embodied Religious Belief: The Experience of Syahadatain Sufi Order in Indonesia

Several types of research on religion in Indonesia emphasise more on religious knowledge and belief and less on other approaches such as material aspects. Religion is always related to material aspects such as mosque buildings, veils or robes for prayer, or holy water obtained from grave visitors. This study uses embodiment approach and material theory of religion to the imposition of special fashion in prayer that gives consequences on awareness and attitude of a new morality in-group cohesion. This study is a case study through participatory observations and interviews of new members of Syahadatain congregation, Cirebon, Indonesia for three years. The result of the study shows two significant findings namely first, the establishment of rituals through special fashions exerts an influence on discursive awareness and moral behaviour; and second, the driving factor of the emergence of new moral behaviour from the practice is the social gaze. This study recommends the need for the study of material artifacts such as clothing can be an alternative to the study of religion in Indonesia using the embodiment approach.

Remembering Materiality: A Material–Relational Approach to Organizational Memory

In this paper, we develop a material–relational approach to understanding organizational memory. We focus on the inherent materiality of mnemonic devices—material artifacts that anchor shared memories of the past. Mnemonic devices work to constitute social groups of organizational stakeholders bound together by mutual affinities to these devices, known as mnemonic communities. While we know that the materiality of mnemonic devices represents information about the past that is interpreted by members of the mnemonic community as a narrative that is important in the present, our approach focuses on how engagement with the material aspects of mnemonic devices can create relationships of affinity among people remembering together. To develop our conceptualization, we first apply insights from the literature on materiality and its emphasis on how materiality is the basis for non-verbal and relational communication. From this, we theorize four material attributes that affect how mnemonic devices constitute relational connections that create embodied, cartographic, and temporal boundaries for organizational mnemonic communities. We then conceptualize how these distinct material attributes accumulate, intersect, and interact with each other and with the narrative representations of mnemonic devices and how in turn these interactions may bind stakeholders together. By emphasizing the material–relational aspect of mnemonic devices, our paper theorizes a broader and potentially more powerful set of affinities between stakeholders and organizations and, on this basis, enhances extant research by articulating different paths to the emergence of mnemonic communities.