Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book still in good condition. Book has gotten wet at some point and some pages show crinkling and marking. Still a very usable reference book. Price reflects condition. See images. A great book.

About the book >.>.> Influential work of anthropologist Alfred Gell Ilene Forsyth had already noted in her magisterial The Throne of Wisdom that embedding relics activated certain wooden statuettes of the Virgin Mary. In the Middle Ages a belief in such spiritual powers dwelling in special objects was very real and it shaped the user’s experience of an object as well as the maker’s role. These were powerful motivat ing factors in the production of certain objects and works of art even though they were not the sole factors at play. The distinction between potent and inspirited materials is key: for medieval Christians only the latter were truly sacred. Rethinking matter and materials more gener ally has had a significant impact on medieval art history. Since the 1980s a “New Materialism has grown out of the work of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and F?lix Guattari.” They challenged the opposition between form (morphe) and mat ter (hyle) that ruled Western thought for much of the past two thousand years. Reflecting on organic and inorganic chemistry Deleuze and Guattari deconstructed the hylomorphic dichot- omy arguing that form arises from matter rather than being externally imposed like amino acids determining the macrostructure of a protein The potential for morphogenesis lies within matter rather than being imposed from outside. Yet matter does not determine all form. Manuel Delanda an interlocutor of Deleuze and Guattari calls the potential variety of forms available within a material its “virtual capacities derived from the same Latin term for power cited by Suger virtus. (MP)