The craft of self
Thomas Sawyer (University of Chicago)

  

This sub-theme seeks papers that interrogate how skillful manufacture informs the formation of  personhood. How can the making of artifacts – real and imagined – support, uncover, or resist  concepts of identity and humanity? What was it like, for agents in the medieval past, to craft a  self? What crafted objects were medieval selves like, from the vantage of modern scholarship?  

The title of this sub-theme invokes Mary Carruthers’s seminal The Craft of Thought, on the  (belated) occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary. For Carruthers, medieval experience was a  made-thing, carefully designed and executed by machines of the intellect: to craft a self is to  craft one’s thoughts. 

The present thread seeks answers to the inverse of Carruthers’s motivating question: how might  the craft of made-things – e.g. books, buildings, relics, textiles, tools, or toys – have informed the  human agents who produced them, used them, modified them, resisted them, and (so often)  abandoned them over time? What are the constraints of materiality over the boundaries of selfhood? What are the affordances of the tangible object for understanding intangible  personhood? In this way, the title invites conversation between craft, in the sense of physical  manufacture, and craft as a form of social and historical praxis. How can evidence of skillful  manufacture reveal, extend, or shrink the boundaries of available self-presentation? For what  imagined audiences? What kinds of crafted selves are made public? What kinds are private? How – by what skill of judgment and perception – can one kind self be distinguished from  another?

Presenters might attend to multiple, competing temporalities: the historical agent’s present, their  inherited past, and their (imagined) future; the present of the medievalist, and the metaphors we  adopt for understanding; under the auspice of historicism or medievalism, as acts of uncertainty and imagination. 

Welcome are papers that identify types of personhood available to medieval agents, then connect  that type to made objects in the world; or papers that identify a type of artifact imbued with the  craft of its making, then explore the kinds of personhood such an artifact might afford. The case  study is welcome, and so is the theoretical exploration. The terms are expansive, exploratory, and  experimental. 

 

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