Introduction

Why study things? Or put another way, what can we learn from objects that we can’t find out from the reading of texts? There’s no simple answer to these questions but, as we shall discover in the course of this course, there’s no getting around the ubiquity of things.

Learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

• Understand what material culture is
• Understand the origin of material culture as an area of study in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century
• Understand the concepts of 'object biography' and the 'life cycles' of things.