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...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
Summer 2018
June 01 2018
History and Its Objects: Antiquarianism and Material Culture since 1500
History and Its Objects: Antiquarianism and Material Culture
since 1500
. By Peter
N.
Miller
(Ithaca
, Cornell
University Press
, 2017
) 312
pp. $39.95
Michael Yonan
Michael Yonan
University of Missouri
Search for other works by this author on:
Michael Yonan
University of Missouri
Online ISSN: 1530-9169
Print ISSN: 0022-1953
© 2018 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc.
2018
by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of
Interdisciplinary History, Inc.
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2018) 49 (1): 142–144.
Citation
Michael Yonan; History and Its Objects: Antiquarianism and Material Culture since 1500. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2018; 49 (1): 142–144. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01236
Download citation file:
Sign in
Don't already have an account? Register
Client Account
You could not be signed in. Please check your email address / username and password and try again.
Could not validate captcha. Please try again.
Sign in via your Institution
Sign in via your InstitutionEmail alerts
95
Views
Advertisement
Cited By
Related Articles
Who was the Founder of Empiricism After All? Gassendi and the ‘Logic’ of Bacon
Perspectives on Science (June,2021)
John Farmer and the Making of American Genealogy
The New England Quarterly (September,2007)
Author, Author: A Short Story of the Rise, reign and ruine of the late Antinomians, Familists, and Libertines (1644) Reappraised
The New England Quarterly (September,2021)
The Early Royal Society and Visual Culture
Perspectives on Science (June,2019)
Related Book Chapters
Antiquarianism and Idolatry: The Historia of Religions in the Seventeenth Century
Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe
Ever Since
The Infinite Playground: A Player's Guide to Imagination
Performance and Technology Since 1960
Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation
Progress and Trends since 1972
Spatial Hearing: The Psychophysics of Human Sound Localization