Everyday Political Objects

Christopher Fletcher is a Chargé de recherche (Associate Research Professor) with the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) affiliated to the University of Lille. He specializes in late medieval political culture and the history of masculinity. His books include Richard II: Manhood, Youth, and Politics, 1377–99 (2008) and The Palgrave Handbook of Masculinity and Political Culture in Europe (2018).

1. Introduction: Useful Things 2. Rings of Power: The Interpretation of Early Medieval Objects of Adornment 3. The Practical and Symbolic Uses of the Medieval Horn: From Power Object to Common Instrument 4. A History of Domestic Disorder: The French Royal Household in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century 5. The Prince and His Coffer: The Material Functions and Symbolic Power of an Everyday Political Object at the End of the Middle Ages 6. Teapots, Fans and Snuffboxes: The Portable Politics of Gender and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain 7. Wooden Shoes and Wellington Boots: The Politics of Footwear in Georgian Britain. 8. The Fan during the French Revolution: From the Elite to the People 9. Resisting with Objects? Seditious Political Objects and Their ‘Agency’ in Restoration France (1814-1830) 10. A Sonorous Politics of Everyday Objects: Coal Workers’ Charivaris during the Anzin Strike of 1884 11. Political Fashion: Elegance as Subversion in the Congos of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries 12. ‘Citizen Browning’: The Banality of a Revolutionary Object, c. 1905-c. 1912 13. Bringing Audible Propaganda into the Everyday: The Politicization of the Phonograph Record from its Origins to the SERP, 1888-2000 14. Image, Voice and Voivodes: Communist Diafilm in Romania, 1950-1989 15. The Trajectory of a Spear: The Materiality of an Everyday Political Object in North-Western Burkina