Volume 5: Issue 1

Object Narratives Photographic Postcard Commemorating Antonio Verástegui Lucy O’Sullivan

A postcard commemorating a young “martyr” of Mexico’s Cristero War named Antonio Verástegu engages the spectator in an act of witnessing that entails both religious and political consequences.
Medium Studies Colonial Materiality: Silver’s Alchemy of Trauma and Salvation Helen Hills

Embedded in power relations, coloniality, and matters of purification, early modern silver was a particularly generative site. Might its peculiar paradoxes be usefully thought in terms of a materiality of trauma?
Essays Material Technologies of Empire: The Tobacco Pipe in Early Modern Landscapes of Exchange in the Atlantic World Beverly Lemire

The look and shape, feel and function of the tobacco pipe footnote the transformational features of the early modern Atlantic world: landscapes of exchange.
image Essays Locking Eyes with the Sun: Perception, Landscape, and the Fame of Greenstone in a Sixteenth-Century Nahuatl Narrative Allison Caplan

A narrative describing interactions between a human knower, sun, and precious stones enables a new interpretation of Nahua accounts of precious stones releasing vapors, while also providing greater insight into the nature of sensory experience in Nahua thought more generally.
Object Narratives Moses Jacob Ezekiel, Eve Hearing the Voice Samantha Baskind

In 1876, Moses Jacob Ezekiel, the first Jewish American artist of international stature, sculpted the world’s first woman, to which he gave the title, Eve Hearing the Voice.
Essays Art, Religious Memory, and Mormon Polygamy Marie W. Dallam

What happens when part of the religious history a person believes in turns out to be incorrect?