Gift-Giving and Materiality in Europe, 1300-1600

Gifts as Objects

Lars Kjaer, Gustavs Strenga

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781350186101
• eBook ISBN: 9781350183711
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Gift-giving played an important role in political, social and religious life in medieval and early modern Europe. This volume explores an under-examined and often-overlooked aspect of this phenomenon: the material nature of the gift. Drawing on examples from both medieval and early modern Europe, the authors from the UK and across Europe explore the craftsmanship involved in the production of gifts and the use of exotic objects and animals, from elephant bones to polar bears and 'living' holy objects, to communicate power, class and allegiance. Gifts were publicly given, displayed and worn and so the book explores the ways in which, as tangible objects, gifts could help to construct religious and social worlds. But the beauty and material richness of the gift could also provoke anxieties. Classical and Christian authorities agreed that, in gift-giving, it was supposed to be the thought that counted and consequently wealth and grandeur raised worries about greed and corruption: was a valuable ring payment for sexual services or a token of love and a promise of marriage? Over three centuries, Gift-Giving and Materiality in Europe, 1300-1600: Gifts as Objects reflects on the possibilities, practicalities and concerns raised by the material character of gifts.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: The matter of the gift
• 1 ‘With this rynge’: The materiality and meaning of the late medieval marriage ring
• 2 Of ivory, gold and elephants: Materiality and agency of pre-modern chairs as gifts
• 3 Gifts and conflicts: Objects given during the entry of Archbishop Silvester Stodewescher in the Riga Cathedral (1449)
• 4 ‘The Polar Winds have driven me to the conquest of the Treasure in the form of the much-desired relic.’ (Re)moving relics and performing gift-exchange between early modern Tuscany and Lithuania
• 5 ‘The gift’ and the living image: Exchange between human and nonhuman actors in fifteenth- to sixteenth-century Prato
• 6 Demoniac’s gratitude: Corporeality and materiality of votive offerings to St Nicholas of Tolentino (1325–1550)
• 7 Alms boxes and charity: Giving to the poor after the Lutheran Reformation in Denmark
• 8 Taken objects and the formation of social groups in Hamburg, Gdańsk and Lübeck
• Gifts: Concluding Remarks
• Index
• Imprint