Material objects of the past and pre-modern poetry: Together they convey innovative forms of knowledge transmission, even though both are highly contested topics in the history of knowledge. The epistemic status of poetry has been the subject of explicit and implicit controversy since antiquity, with views ranging between the extremes of omniscience and ignorance. In this volume, poetic things across cultures, languages and periods are grouped according to their practical functions as artistic, sacred, antiquarian and martial. For the first time, they are seen as pieces of a mosaic leading to a poetics of knowing things – beyond didactic poetry.

With contributions by Frederic Clark |