Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History ed. by Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles (review)

This collection of interdisciplinary essays proposes that the "feel" of an object—its tangibility, solidity, and interactivity with the human body—is inextricably involved in how it makes us "feel." In focusing on the materiality of objects, it departs from much previous work on the history of emotions, which has primarily employed textual evidence even when considering the emotional lives of things. The introduction and opening essay, co-authored by the three editors, chart a careful middle course through the many theoretical perspectives available to material culture scholars. The authors suggest that historians avoid seeing objects as "wholly independent agents, as in Object-Oriented Ontology, or equal agents, as in Actor Network Theory" (9). That is not to say, however, that they see things as inert. Instead, they propose that objects can embody feelings in at least three ways: as expressions of feeling, as sources of feeling that are capable of "moving" people, and as media for communicating states of feeling. To Bruno Latour's "things in themselves lack nothing," this collection responds, in the words of Elina Gertsman, "and yet, and yet: ... their agency can be read through the beholding experiences oriented towards them" (41).

The volume's poignant, rigorously researched, and theoretically provocative essays examine objects ranging in origin from the twelfth to the early nineteenth centuries. The first of three thematic sections, "Potent Things," gives thought to what one might call the spiritual life of things: magic, the miraculous, and the supernatural. Its essays theorize the power of sacred objects to move people, focusing on pilgrimage tokens and religious relics. The second section, "Binding Things," traces the ways in which objects embody or tangibly mediate human relationships. Finally, the third section attends closely to what Susan Broomhall calls the "changing affective life" of material culture, as objects move from one historical situation to another (176).

Highlights of this collection include Lara Farina's discussion of how "book objects ... instigate affect" (100), with its generative suggestions of ways for scholars of premodern periods to employ contemporary affect theory, and Hilary Davidson's essay "Holding the Sole," with its striking readings of Grimm's and other folk-tales. Davidson's essay tracks the emotional significance of shoes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from the magic of the fairy-tale shoe and the saint's relic to the "liminal ambiguity" (89) of shoes concealed in the walls of homes. I was also delighted by the attention paid by this and some of the other essays to objects discarded. In Sarah Randles's essay on pilgrimage tokens from the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Chartres, the tokens are often found in the waterways into which they were tossed, in a practice that appears to have had the qualities of ritual.

The essays richly evoke the textured tangibility of the emotional artifact. In the case of the relics examined in the first section, even the briefest touch by a sacred object may convert another into "holy matter" (51). Farina considers "the uncanny touch of the book," of "hands moving on parchment" (112–13). Objects even become incorporated into the body along with their social relationships of craft and artistry (like the early modern iron hands in John Gagné's essay), marking it too as a socially embedded thing. Of particular interest for scholars of the eighteenth century is Sally Holloway's description of the fabric scraps and other objects left with foundlings as tokens by their mothers during the period. Diana G. Barnes's analysis of tear stains, ink-blots, and other "emotional debris" in mostly seventeenth-century letters will prove useful to scholars interested in manuscript and epistolary culture.

Careful accounting for both historical continuity and change is the most consistent theme among the essays. Helen M. Hickey, for example, tracks the changing emotional valences of La Sainte Larme of Vendôme, once celebrated for its reputed power to cure...