If certain objects work well, no one notices them. As with "black
boxes, " their success may be gauged by their relative invisibility
-- and this was the indirect goal of the objects that Julian Yates
considers here: the portrait miniature, the relic, the privy (flush
toilet), the printed text, and the priest-hole (a secret hiding
place for Catholic priests in Protestant England).
Because each of these contrivances was prone to error, misuse,
and sometimes catastrophic failure, they become in Yates's analysis
an occasion for recasting the history of the English Renaissance as
object lessons -- "knowing from the point of view of the known." It
is through such lapses -- the texts and stories generated to
explain away a relic that is too easily faked, a miniature that is
too curiously real, the stench of a failing privy, a book that
persistently sheds its pages, or the presence of so much "papist
trash" in an ostensibly reformed England -- that Yates recovers the
silent work of "things" in cultural production.
Drawing object lessons from failing technological devices,
Error, Misuse, Failure plumbs the foundations of Renaissance
culture in England, recovering a curious language of mistakes,
dirt, and parasitism that associates the failures of these "things"
with the figures of Rome, Catholicism, and Sodom. Yates offers a
mode of historical inquiry rooted in material culture, sensitive to
the way humans induct nonhumans (animals, plants, and manufactured
things) into their communities. Historically, the book offers a new
set of stories about the rise of printing, the development of
domestic architecture, and England's Catholic community -- stories
that remind readers of the ways in whichattending to the history of
nonhumans requires a radical rethinking of historical landmarks and
boundaries.
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