| Unit name | Worldly Objects: Art, Environment and Materiality |
|---|---|
| Unit code | HART30049 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | H/6 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
| Unit director | Professor. Williamson |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
None |
| Co-requisites |
None |
| School/department | Department of History of Art (Historical Studies) |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
At the heart of this unit are the linked concepts of environment and ecology, materials and materiality, and agency and power. The unit aims to provide students with an overview of these concepts as they pertain to medieval visual and material culture. The relationships between humans and the natural world, and between humans and natural materials, will form a central part of our investigations. In considering ‘the environment’, it is often thought that the key concepts and ideas deal with the modern world. This unit will extend our thinking by connecting ideas of environment back to the middle ages. We will use approaches from history, history of art, literary criticism, and elsewhere, to inform our study. Our focus will be on the ecology of medieval art, and we will study objects (mostly commonly designated as ‘art’ objects) produced from materials that come from the natural environment, returning to an era before synthetic or non-natural materials existed.
We will also study the interaction of human beings with those objects, and with the environment that produced the materials from which those objects are made. One of the principal ideas with which this unit will engage is the notion of human agency, and the agency, or power possessed by objects, materials and the natural world. The unit will examine the ways in which humans shape naturally-occurring materials, so as to make the objects that they want to use and possess, but we will also consider the ways in which the objects, and the materials from which they are made, worked upon human beings, and shaped their various views of the world, and their actions within the world. Finally, we will consider how our understandings of earlier attitudes to the natural world and to natural materials might affect, and nuance, our engagement with the natural world now.
On successful completion of this unit students will be able to demonstrate:
(1) a clear understanding of key themes, historiographies, and methodologies within environmental humanities;
(2) a clear understanding of the properties and cultural associations of 8 key materials used to fabricate art objects in the Middle Ages
(3) skills to critically evaluate primary textual and material sources and scholarly theories related to medieval art and environmental humanities at a standard appropriate to level H/6.
(4) skills in the researching, reading and presentation of complex material at a standard appropriate to level H/6.
3 hours of seminars weekly
One 3,500 word essay (50%) [ILOs 1-4] and one 2-hour exam (50%) [ILOS 1-4]
Jeffrey J. Cohen (ed.), Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, Oliphant Books, 2012 (open access free e-book)
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things, Duke University Press, 2010
Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (eds.), Material Ecocriticism, I.U.P., 2014
Jeffrey J. Cohen, Inhuman Nature, Oliphant Books, 2014 (open access free e-book)
Active Objects, Issue 4 of Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art (open access e-journal, available at http://differentvisions.org/issue-four/)
Hoarders and Hordes: Responses to the Staffordshire Hoard, Special Issue of Postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, Volume 7, Issue 3, October 2016
