Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child

Childish Things

C h i l d i s h T h i n g s 59 An early-fourteenth-century miniature knight on horseback, discovered in the muddy foreshore of the River Thames in the 1980s, now sits on display behind a glass case in the Museum of London (see Plate 6).1 It is a hollow, three-dimensional man and mount cast in pewter (tin–lead alloy), standing just over two inches tall. City smiths likely manufactured such replicas for the children of a growing urban middle class, although given the taste for chivalric imagery and miniaturization across the social spectrum, adults, too, may have coveted a portable figurine of this type.2 The armor and rigging have suggested a date late in the reign of Edward I (d. 1307), which incidentally coincides with the first recorded instance of toy in English.3 But the thing may just as likely present a nostalgic image of the Edwardian knight, and its provenance may be closer to mid-century.4 Just as one would never date a matchbox replica of a Ford Mustang by make and model, we must be cautious: Edwardian cavalrymen were not unlike classic performance vehicles. Edward, “hammer of the Scots,” was known for his ambitious military campaigns and castle building. Probably adults who had a sentimental attachment to the romantic imagery gave such toys to children as memorials to what was then already an anachronistic idea of the man-at-arms.5 Lacking headgear and a left arm, the horseman will always remain hard to place. Yet despite impediments, the figurine is convivial and compelling in its material facture, eloquent about everyday life and labor in medieval London. Although elusive to history, the material support of the image is not beyond perceptual grasp. It can be held and beheld. Materializing 60 CHILDISH THINGS the past, the object is an insistent presence even now, giving rise to conjecture—as if compelling idle and enchanting thoughts others associate with a childlike or primitive fantasy—about the vitality of the thing itself. Putting aside limitations of archaeology or documentary history, the physical object exhibits an eventful historicity and essential facticity. In this respect, the metal horseman is part of the very armature of history. The thing is not dated or even datable because it arises as a saturated phenomenon or what we can call a factum (“something done or made”), as a matter of fact preceding and exceeding any moment in which it appears. Such small yet nevertheless prodigious objects pose knotty ontological problems for those who wish to think along with and not just about cultural artifacts, speculating about the life of hard-tempered things. The freestanding object inspires the following questions: What possible uses could someone make of the thing? What would the object make of one deploying it? How does the thing tend to act, move, order, relate, or play? It is in response to those questions that the following discussion will proceed by going as far as possible into the forms, relations, and uses of the object, if only to exhaust those contexts one by one, seeing whether and to what extent the thing shows up as itself. Contextualization is not enough, though I will provide plenty. I aim rather after the ontology of the miniature plaything, seeking to account for the density and dynamic substance of the matter at hand, hoping that such an encounter will open up other critical paths. Today our well-honed critical instincts promptly set up obstacles to any account of das Ding an sich, conscious as we are of the discourses and historical differences that get between subjects and objects. Epistemology tends to trump ontology, often on the assumption that critique is otherwise impossible; the other side of critique is thought to be a naive realism, naturalism, or fetishism. The pewter knight is especially vulnerable to anachronistic projections deriving from sentimental modern attachments to what the past (especially childhood) must have been like “back then.” And yet I will insist that the object (objectus in the etymological sense of something thrown down, standing against, placed between or before) already constitutes an obstacle to pure fantasy, mystification, idolatry, or ideation; the object is that to which humans are subject and out of which subjectivity is coconstituted (after subjectus, thrown or brought under). The objective CHILDISH THINGS 61 thing is detectable as a prior stimulus to thought and action and exists...