A few years ago I was preparing a paper for the inaugural conference of the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts. As I was thinking about how my research would fit the theme, I started asking myself ‘well what is a material text anyway?’ — followed shortly by the corollary, ‘what is an immaterial text?’ I ended up giving a paper on the paucity of illustration in Robert Boyle’s experimental works on air and what that visual lack — and indeed what the imagery-rich verbal descriptions that made up for it — told us about Boyle’s process of knowledge making and his limits for certainty when working on an intangible and diaphanous substance like air that was only perceivable through its interactions with other material objects.

Puck (left) discussing early modern printed books at Canterbury Cathedral with other Material Witness participants

The CHASE consortium’s Material Witness programme stimulates similar provocative questions. As well as excellent workshops at the Courtauld Institute of Art, the British Library, and Canterbury Cathedral where we have been given valuable opportunities to examine and learn about a variety of artefacts, developing and consolidating the practical skills we rely on to understand these material witnesses, we have also been prompted to think about more philosophical distinctions, about the nature of materiality itself, and about what we can learn more widely from the interrogation of the material.

Matthew Sillence’s wonderful talk on Norfolk medieval seals did just that. He ranged from a detailed explanation of the material components, fashioning processes, and structural concerns of seal production, to what the seals could reveal of notions of agency and identity (some of them were marked with teeth impressions), and what they symbolized of the relationship between God and man mediated through ecclesiastical authority in a complex theological metaphor where God (metal) and Christ (engraved surface) combine in the seal matrix, in order to produce collective impressions in the multitude of mankind (wax). The materiality of these acts of representation allows for the trace of immaterials such as identity and Godly authority to be physically impressed.

Puck Fletcher

University of Sussex