Multisensorial musings on miniature matters

Abstract

This issue of ‘Das Mittelalter’ explores the voice of small things.2 We approach artefacts that are no bigger than one’s hand not as silent witnesses to people’s lives, but as agents that actively engage with human beings through the senses, shape their social identities and evoke emotions.3 For close to forty years or more, archaeologists have argued that medieval people understood objects to have particular social meaning as indicated by the curation of heirlooms, the re-use of prehistoric axes as grave gifts, or the special relationship to devotional objects such as pilgrim badges.4 A similar situation exists across other cognate disciplines from discussions of seals in art history or the particular meanings of things in plays as discussed by literary scholars.5 When the miniature scale is addressed, it often is in terms of the uniqueness of an object with a particular emphasis placed on craftwork and materials or related to their biographies and histories of use. Much less attention has been paid to bodily, sensorial and emotive experiences, that is, the ‘corporeal choreographies’ that can result from the engagement with the diminutive.6