The Lives of Objects: Material Culture, Experience, and the Real in the History of Early Christianity

Our lives are filled with objects-ones that we carry with us, that define our homes, that serve practical purposes, and that hold sentimental value. When these are broken, lost, left behind, or removed from their context, they change. An object out of place can feel alien, take on a different use, or become trash. The lives of the objects change when our relationships to them change.

Left-behind objects are a source of fascination for scholars of the ancient world, and the field of Jewish and Early Christian studies is no exception. Maia Kotrosits offers a fresh perspective, looking beyond physical material to consider how collective imagination shapes the formation of objects and the experience of reality. Bringing a psychoanalytical approach to her analysis of material culture in ancient religion and history, she examines objects of attachment-relationships, ideas, and beliefs that live on in the psyche. By looking at objects of attachment, Kotrosits illustrates how people across time have tied value systems to the materiality of life. Engaging with the fields of classics, history, anthropology, and literary, gender, and queer studies, Kotrosits shows how different disciplines address historical knowledge and how looking closely at an expanded definition of materiality-one that considers both physical objects and their subtexts-can help us make connections between antiquity and the contemporary world.