The House

Caroline Walker Bynum has written extensively about medieval religious objects and about the background to medieval understandings of materiality in theology, natural philosophy, and science. Here she turns to a very different consideration of objects, asking how they reflect and sharpen personal and contemporary memories. Using autobiographical reminiscences of her mother’s Virginia girlhood a hundred years ago and of her own encounters with that Southern past, she considers how the story of two lost or destroyed objects—a photograph of a house and a portrait of a Southern beauty—help anchor the story of two lives, yet leave it mysteriously open as well.