Mary E. Barnard

This is an elegant, imaginative book, smartly written and conceived. A major contribution to my research on material culture, it is an exemplary study of the way material objects dialogue with written texts to recover the past and create cultural memory as an archive of unearthed artifacts. The process is one of excavation and crafting, the rediscovered object becomes a place of exchange between words and pictures, antiquity and early modern times, an artist and another.