This book seeks to answer the question, What is the history of thinking about how to study the past through things? To respond, Miller has written a historiography concerned with analyzing historical predecessors to modern material-culture studies. Succinctly, the book is “an outline theory of how people have thought about objects as evidence” (10). It is also an intriguingly personal book in which scholarly inquiry is structured around human experiences, some of which are events from Miller’s life, such as pondering Hermanus Posthumus’s painting Landscape with Roman Ruins (1536) while taking a train from Bern to Berlin. Others are more purely intellectual experiences, such as Miller’s detailed engagement with thinkers like Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (about whom Miller authored an important book), Johann Christoph Gatterer, Karl Gotthard Lamprecht, or Gustav Friedrich Klemm.1 Miller’s grounding claim is that the current interest in material culture emerged from a long historical process...

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