This post is intended to give some intellectual and experiential background to this book, Animism, Materiality, and Museums: How Do Byzantine Things Feel?, which was published earlier this month (it is available in open access). It represents a still provisional statement of my own thinking about the vitality of matter in the Byzantine world, how we might understand historical objects outside Cartesian categories, and how we might allow such historical objects to speak, if not with their natural voices, then in voices that are true and authentic to some of their meanings and work. My own experience of taking, or...
On their own terms
