Written texts and the performance of materiality

This chapter aims to indicate the various ways that historians can analyse how language conjures things into being. It shows that a detailed analysis of words can investigate the role played by language as the medium in which information about objects is communicated. It argues that reading about things always involves some kind of call to the imagination of the reader – obviously on the stage, but also in the archive. In our perception of the significance of the relationship between words and things, reading is, it is argued, a kind of performance of objects in itself; a reanimation of the relationship between language, materiality and the imagination.