Editorial

[Corrigendum]

We didn't set out to have a theme; this is a pick-and-mix volume, filled with a wide array of subjects, regions and approaches, from the intricacies of a local fray between assailants in sixteenth-century Weymouth to a utopian experiment in communal living in early twentieth-century Japan: a History Workshop smorgasbord of different regions and historical characters. Yet as we set ourselves to editing, one theme clearly emerged in a number of the articles. The things – particularly personal and household possessions – which people have kept close to them in the past, and the ways in which such possessions can help us to reconstruct histories and meanings in the present.

This is most explicitly (in more than one sense) set out in Caspar Meyer's article on Greek vases. He takes 'the side-lining of materiality in historical writing' as a direct target, and explains how the study of Greek sexuality suffers in important ways from a lack of attention to the materiality of its evidence. The images on the vases have been too readily harnessed to discourse. These ceramic objects – which were, after all, ordinary household items – need to be seen, handled and examined in all their three-dimensionality, he argues, before we start theorizing about Greek sexuality. These vases are featured prominently, if in only two dimensions, on Bernard Canavan's wonderfully bold cover.

The contingencies of survival from the past are striking. An aristocrat's notebooks were more likely to survive flood, fire or cleaning than those of a shopkeeper or farmer, as Brodie Waddell points out. This makes the forty years' worth of old almanacs scribbled in between the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries by William Bufton, an Essex tradesman, not only a remarkable written source, but also a valuable material survival. These were more than just ego-documents: as Waddell points out, the possession and storage of a collection of such notebooks was a social and political act. Other things have survived in even more random and contingent ways. Ceri Houlbrook introduces us to 'concealed deposits' – objects from old shoes to animal remains, stuffed into chimneybreasts or buried under floorboards, that appear to have been deliberately concealed 'for no obviously practical purpose and probably with no intention of retrieval'. Whatever the original purposes, the twenty-first century finders of these objects endow them with all kinds of imagined meanings – even superstitious and magical properties that may be quite different from the original owner's relationship to these items.

As Sasha Handley writes in her article, 'objects have an unparalleled capacity to condense the passage of time' and their visceral, sometimes bloody and bodily properties, can evoke grief, love and pain. Of course, we should not presume that things are familiar to us, or that they had the same meaning to people in the past. Nor are objects innocent bystanders to the past. In many of the articles there are things which shape-shift, or are used in ways that could not have been anticipated. Handley's example of an early modern bedsheet, embroidered with the entwined hair of the countess of Derwentwater and her husband James Radcliffe, is a startling instance. Radcliffe was beheaded on Tower Hill for his role in the Jacobin uprising of 1715 and his wife's embroidery was both a personal token of mourning and also an important act of religious and community expression. This ostensibly mundane object is saturated with profound meanings, which Handley guides us to decode.

Things can also be weapons, used to inflict pain and death. An unfamiliar object in this volume is a cowl-staff that was used to inflict a mortal injury on an opponent during a brawl in a Dorset town in 1534. This was a long stick with a hook on the end, normally used for carrying a basket – 'a work tool, albeit one that could be used offensively', as Jonathan Healey writes in his article about this fight. He goes on to show how a detailed dissection of the petty affray in which it was used to such deadly purpose can reveal much about the making of...