Matter and Meaning: Early English New Materialisms

Abstract

New materialism is often understood as a modern theoretical solution to a modern ontological problem (that is, it critiques the forms of violence against human and nonhuman beings that the Enlightenment birth of “humanity” and “humanism” engendered). This cluster’s introductory article argues that the Anglo-European Middle Ages, rather than being historically absolved from the effects of Western Eurocolonialism and Enlightenment hierarchies, are rather a particularly strange and thorny forerunner to them. Through an examination of the Polychronicon’s treatment of the Fall, an event closely aligned with the transformation of matter, we show how specific aspects of new materialist critique, namely, liveliness, affective effects, and animate language, are anticipated in and central to early English conceptions of the scala naturae. We compare the approach in Higden’s Polychronicon to some examples of agential matter in non-Western cultural spaces prior to Eurocolonialism; these non-Western accounts help us to understand the limits of a medieval new materialism that centers European, and specifically English, voices, cautioning us against rethinking the history of new materialism without incorporating global perspectives.