Images and objects as sources for medieval history

Historians tend to think of thernselves as ‘ward people’, and the discipline of history is generally conceived of as the study of the past through documents and texts. Since the 1990s, however, as part of a broader ‘visual turn’ in cultural analysis, many historians have come to recognize that images and objects, too, provide invaluable evidence concerning the human past. Although this ‘visual turn’ has in large part been prompted by recent technological developments that have rendered images - especiaHy in the form ofvideo and digital media - nearly ubiquitous and increasingly infiuential, it is nonetheless deeply relevant to the study of the European Middle Ages. Because the majority of its inhabitants were unable to read, medieval Europe was a highly visual (as weH as oral/aural) culture. Identity was displayed through clothing and insignia, religion was taught through preaching and pictures, and authority was established through costume, gesture and posture. Agricultural decisions were made not by consulting manuals ar calendars but by scanning the fields and the skies. Documents were authenticated not by signatures but by seals: images imprinted on wax. The later Middle Ages, mareover, saw a veritable ‘image explosion’, as a growing bourgeoisie stimulated the market far art and luxury goods, intensified lay piety broadened the audience far religious imagery, and new techniques of image-making were developed. Medieval images and artefacts thus participated fuHy in, and constitute rich resources far the study of, medieval politics, society, economy, culture and religion. In some cases they shed light on subjects about which written sources are largely silent.