Professor Catherine Richardson
Dr David Stirrup
Professor Jennie Batchelor

Professor Catherine Richardson: So, how did you get into working on material culture? 

Professor Jennie Batchelor: Well for me it was, actually reading a book, it was reading Samuel Richardson's Pamela, which is an 18th-century novel published in 1740 and it's a really strange, wonderful novel about the kind of persecution of this young servant girl in the house. And the first thing that struck me was just how absolutely full of material detail this novel was about interiors that this servant girl inhabits and particularly her dress which is described in absolutely minute detail throughout the novel and in ways that made me quite quickly realise just how little I actually knew about this period that I was coming to know and love, because it was quite clear to me that that every single item of Pamela's dress that was being described in this novel had meaning, it had significance, it was absolutely integral to her. Richardson was playing up the drama and the tension of his novel and I just wanted to know more. I wanted to be that reader that he thought he was writing for in the time. And so that's that was the start of it and then from there I got very very interested in thinking about you know the book itself as it as a material object. I mean the period I work in, the 18th century, most books didn't come to their readers in this lovely bound form we see before me, you know they came stitched, they were literally sewn together by people and made their way into their readersŐ hands in that way. So this kind of text and textiles and their really complex mutual reinforcement in the period was something that really engaged me from very early on actually. 

Professor Catherine Richardson: Yeah that's really interesting, so that sense that in fact the language of the book is telling you much more through the objects that itŐs identifying than is necessarily there literally on the page.

Professor Jennie Batchelor: Absolutely, that there's a whole range of meanings which would absolutely not have been lost on their readers. There's a kind of fluency that we need as readers to acquire in that kind of language of material detail, which you know in historical periods we have to work a little bit to reconstruct but boy it pays off I think in the reading in the rereading. 

Professor Catherine Richardson: Yes, it's interesting what you say there about the servant girl as well because a lot of my interest in the earlier sort of 16th, 17th-century period in material culture is trying to access the lives of people who were not literate, people lower down the social scale and women I guess in particular and just trying to think about how we can access their ways of responding to the world and recording the world which are not textual ways, so through stitching, through needlework but also through their interaction with the material environment, I suppose. And, I really want to know about the period I work on where people wrote, where people read, where they kept things, so chests like this one, you know, that people might have kept their very important documents in. How does that material context for their reading and writing, what does that do to our understanding of their literary and textual response to the world and also that extension of what we mean by recording the world in other forms.
Professor Jennie Batchelor: So for you Catherine then, recovering that material engagement with the world it sounds like it's something which is inherently political in some ways or could be political for many of these people even if they didn't necessarily see it that way themselves. 

Professor Catherine Richardson: Yeah, I think that's very true because their purchase on a political with a small P environment in a period where the public sphere is, we're told, developing is so limited and yet there's a there's a rich cultural life there that I want to engage with. So it's also very political for me because I don't want to exclude that majority of the population from my engagement with literature in a period when Shakespeare's writing so a period that we associate very strongly with a rich literary culture and I think that probably has resonances for you.  

Dr David Stirrup: It's really interesting, I think my work on Native American literatures and cultures is very different to both of your work obviously but that meeting point of aesthetics and politics is absolutely central. And there are two kind of key ways in for me to material culture although that term material culture is a real bone of contention for Native people but they're both decolonising narratives in a sense, so on the one hand we have the relationship between indigenous communities and museums and what we might see as the material culture of indigenous peoples becoming the kind of artefact of colonialism through museum, museumization, the ongoing museumification of indigenous cultures. But that, in a sense, also brought me to another interest which is the function and the political significance of writing itself to Native communities and writing has been used as a colonising tool in all sorts of ways and there's a developing discourse around the idea of alternative literacies, of literacies of on the one hand of the claiming of writing as indigenous practice but on the other hand the understanding and the reclaiming of pre-alphabetic forms as a form of literacy, at least as a form of narrative, that predates colonial imposition and to a degree liberates a kind of indigenous politics, an indigenous aesthetics from the idea of colonial entrapment. If indigenous people write in English are they not always already assimilated or you know colonial subjects to a degree and how can they escape that. And I come to that through a whole range of different forms of narrative practice, which to all intents and purposes we might call art, but it's art with a very specific function. 

Professor Catherine Richardson: So, you talked about art and you talked about aesthetics, how does that fit into our sense of disciplinary perspectives on these questions, so do art historians study the kind of materials that you work on as art? 

Dr David Stirrup: Yes they do, so the indigenous art and indigenous literature has been undergoing a kind of disciplinary transformation over a number of years in that they were once the domain of ethnographers and anthropologists right and much of what I write about and much of what I'm interested in would once have been written about by anthropologists. They have over the last sort of 30 or 40 years increasingly been drawn into the domain of art history, literary study and so on where they often sit in slightly complicated relationship, so, for instance, when I'm looking at oral traditions, the relationship of the oral to the written is never easy ground to tread. Similarly, for art historians the kinds of objects that I'm interested in in particular often sit outside the kinds of conventionally accepted boundaries of art in the Western art sphere. 

Professor Catherine Richardson: Yes me too. My material is often seen as vernacular in a pejorative sense and therefore not worthy of art historical study. 

Professor Jennie Batchelor; And that would be true in my period too I mean one of the things that I became very interested in I mean going back to my example of Pamela, one of the key moments in the novel is when the heroine prolongs her stay in the house with this man who is persecuting by embroidering his waistcoat. I became very, very interested in needlework which, you know, talking about alternative literacies I mean many women in the 18th century and of course in the early modern period too learnt to sew before they learned to write, you know this is how they learnt those fine motor skills. But you know where does embroidery sit,  the study of embroidery in disciplinary terms, well it's certainly not art, there is that there's a of course a very buoyant and a lively craft community and people who work on the history of craft but you know these are these are low art forms if they're even considered to be art forms at all. So this is kind of work that doesn't become visible in so many of the conventional disciplinary fields around which you know universities and teaching curricula are structured I think.

Professor Catherine Richardson: And that's why it's really important isn't it to think about its relationship, I think, for all of us to literary studies and to narrative form and to ways of making sense of the world. Can we have a look at. [gestures at leaflet on the table] 

Dr David Stirrup: Well yeah I mean I brought this along particularly because it's about stitching and you know it has real resonance with the work that both of you do. These are moccasin tops and these are put together for a recent art exhibition but of course they very much invoke and continue a traditional practice that has a very clear utilitarian function and it's a practice that was, beading was done by men and women but moccasins were often made by women, so it has a real resonance again with the kind of work that you're doing and in this instance these are just moccasin tops that were commissioned by an artist called Christy Belcourt for a project to commemorate and honour their missing and murdered Aboriginal women in Canada of whom there have been over 1,200 in the last 30 years. I think she ended up receiving something like eighteen hundred of these. 

Professor Catherine Richardson: And I guess there's the questions of skill and design and delicate practice here would connect all our interests. 

Dr David Stirrup: Absolutely and I think they also they speak, so in material cultural studies we often begin with the idea of the object as text or the object as a readable thing and I think one of the things that interests me about this kind of work is that they're readable in a sense that each item tells a specific story about the missing person that they're intended to honour. They also tell us a story about the relationship between the maker and the materials and the maker and that narrative of the missing and murdered women and then of course for many of them pictographically they tell a story as well. 

Professor Catherine Richardson: Yeah and  there's something here isn't there in the way in which this project was put together and I know some of the way the work that Jenny's been doing about contemporary response to either contemporary political situations or situations in the past through kind of craft practice.

Professor Jennie Batchelor: Absolutely, I mean I think one of the things that's become very clear to me through a recent work that I've been doing in part of an exhibition that I recently curated which was a wonderful celebration of 18th-century needlework, which use patterns that probably haven't been worked with for about two hundred years. One of the things that became very clear to me from this huge swell of enthusiasm which we rode when people offered their work for our exhibition I think is that you know we're living in an increasingly virtual world, a digital world, where we're losing connection to these very intricate, delicate, important material occupations, things we do with our hands other than swiping tablets and so forth, and I think you know there's many people feel a very keen sense that this is work which is endangered, that is being threatened, that needs to be recuperated, that has much to offer modern-day individuals but also that enables us to engage with our past in really important ways. 

Professor Catherine Richardson: Yes and to put that alongside a literal engagement, a more traditional literary engagement with the texts from the past, yeah is a really interesting way forward.