Through six extensive case studies, this fascinating book unpacks and eruditely fleshes out early globalisms in material and object-oriented terms, demonstrating how such an emphasis and the perspective of art history can enhance the currently expanding field of global history. Chronologically, the book focuses on the long twelfth century (ca. 1050–1250), during which the connections between Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Central and South Asia dramatically expanded and mobility between these regions increased along multiple axes. The six long empirical chapters, the bulk of the book, are divided into two overarching parts. The first, “From al-Andalus to Germany: Objects, Techniques, and Materials,” includes chapters exploring (1) a corpus of highly mobile bronze Christian censers, whose metallic bodies are seen as nodes of material, narrative, and spiritual connections stretched between Palestine, Byzantium, Northern Caucasus, and Nubia; (2) the transfer, from Spain to Central Europe, of technological knowledge, artisanal technique, and artistic forms of trimetallic (leaded) niello and its ideological conversion into an expression of the trinitarian doctrine; and (3) the repurposing of coconuts from South Asia into western European liturgical objects and reliquaries. The second part, “From Iraq to India and Africa: Technologies, Iconographies, and Marvels,” comprises chapters that address (4) magic metal bowls with medicinal functions produced in the northern Abbasid caliphate and Iraq and southern Anatolia; (5) a monumental equestrian relief from a rock-hewn church in Ethiopia and its links to Syria and Iraq as well as southwestern India; (6) an image cycle in an Iraqi manuscript that collects stories of wonders and adventures and that lays bare the connections between South Asia, East Africa, and Islamic lands. The book ends with a short conclusion.

Each of the long chapters can to some extent stand as a self-contained case study. But the key to understanding Tales Things Tell lies in its theoretical introduction. Two critical concepts—perhaps more descriptive than analytical—for Flood’s and Fricke’s study are “archive” and “flotsam.” The first addresses the highly uncertain knowledge concerning the artifacts, techniques, and materials under consideration. Often, these “global things” arrive to us undocumented. On many occasions the objects studied carry no or very little “metadata”—no inscription or textual accompaniment that could explicate the meanings attached to them. Or, as with the corpus of bronze censers (dated sixth to ninth century), we cannot be sure even of their most approximate dating, which begs the question of what the proper context for understanding might even be. An uncertain three- to four-hundred-year timespan during the first millennium CE would likely place an object beyond the consideration of a historian and student of texts like me. But the authors argue that the displaced objects in question need to be treated as their own archive. Their uses, associations, and global circulation can be detected from the objects and their embodied technologies themselves. Decoding such object-bound archives, in turn, activates salient particulars and parallels—material, textual, and other—stored in and dispersed to similar archives elsewhere on the globe. This notion of the archive may be jarring to a historian, however. It essentially conflates, not unproblematically, (often) purposeful, selective, and external storage of information about a given phenomenon with the phenomenon itself.

The second central concept is that of flotsam, by which is meant that the objects and techniques explored in the book are essentially vagaries, in material, referential, and stylistic terms. In their entirety or in their constituent parts—and through their modes of production, assemblage, and reception—these techniques and objects have washed ashore in cultures other than those of their origin. Or, by riding the global currents for a long time, they have been so transformed that speaking about their origins or a coherent authorship or singular act of creation for them is no longer meaningful. If Bruno Latour’s agent-network theory (ANT) has never made much sense to you—as often it does not, to historians—it amazingly just might after reading this book. In another sense, the flotsam metaphor means that the trajectories, transformations, and survival of these objects on the beaches of history is to some extent a matter of chance.

Studies in global history speak sometimes from a tacitly assumed “everything-everywhere-all-at-once” position (e.g., The Cambridge World History, vol. 5, Expanding Webs of Exchange and Conflict, 500 CE–1500 CE, edited by Benjamin Z. Kedar and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks; some of the contributions to “The Global Middles Ages,” Past and Present no. 238 [2018], edited by Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen). The more than occasional lack of evidence for the links scholars claim tends to be subsumed under highly unspecified, often untraceable “networks,” mostly of an economic character; “the global” being eventually explained by itself. This is emphatically not the case in Tales Things Tell. It is a rigorously argued book that demonstrates how global art history can be fruitfully pursued from below. Flood and Fricke spell out and substantiate every single link or transfer. Their analysis is driven by an ever-constrained and ever-contextualized, yet ever-widening erudition. Even when the authors engage in informed speculation, their guesswork is grounded by the concrete historical circumstances. Thinking about how this or that piece of flotsam may have—or could not possibly have—traveled is enabled and anchored by pointing to the identifiable trade communities or artisanal workshops operating in this or that city, the chance of sighting this or that motif or image, and so on.

The interpretations of the objects or techniques Flood and Fricke consider unfold along traceable paths. Their archival exploration usually begins with the most directly apprehensible features of the objects or phenomena—their material and form—situating these, where possible, in their immediate contexts. And from there, by peeling off layers of information from the object and enveloping it with layers of interpretation, they gradually expand their case. With every scaled layer the referentiality of an object hooks up with ever wider—local, regional, global—networks, whether through its material, ornamental, technological, or ideological features.

Chapter 3, for example, focuses on a thirteenth-century reliquary from the Münster cathedral. This composite object features a body of polished coconut mounted on a Westphalian silver chalice,  topped with a repurposed Islamic figurine of a lion, made of rock crystal from East Africa. The leonine body, which holds a relic of the holy blood, has been altered to become an Agnus Dei with the addition of a new head. Beginning with these immediate features, the inquiry expands through comparisons with earlier Egyptian flasks, with contemporary rock-crystal ostensoria, and with a corpus of chalices made from coconuts and ostrich eggs from northern and southern Germany, Austria, Italy, and elsewhere. The formal aspects of these objects are further combined with the meanings of the specific relics the goblet contained and the intercessory prayers and heavenly linkages they may have inspired. The outer layer of the analysis addresses the circulation of knowledge of coconuts, including the conviction that these “fruits” came not from India generally, but specifically from Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the purported location of the Earthly Paradise. Rather than trace any direct inspiration, which would contradict seeing the object as flotsam, the authors treat it as a nexus of globality and ask about its (exotic) referentiality, changing uses, and modes of display. The tradeoff with this impressive and labor-intensive microhistorical approach is that it cannot be easily scaled up and is difficult to generalize. How does this case change our understanding of the milieu of Münster cathedral? What are its broader implications?

The way the authors select an object, technique, or material for a case study seems equal parts arbitrary and motivated. The selections appear arbitrary because such curious pieces of global flotsam never arrive to us unconnected, self-contained, or in any state of discrete primacy. There is no privileged entry point; we always already encounter unmoored and prolonged mobility. In other words, to listen to the tales told by things globally entails forever arriving midsentence, within a tangle of meandering, half-forgotten stories without any clear origin, stories that have been evolving for a good while, in many languages at once. At the same time, the specific objects selected for each chapter as entry points into those widely circulating, polyphonic stories are very compelling. They embody or lead to exciting intersections and puzzles and are therefore good cases to depart from, methodologically speaking, particularly given how intellectually productive they are in Flood’s and Fricke’s hands and how expansive are the readings they inspire. Yet one wonders: are these cases typical or outliers in the global context? What is the bigger lesson to be drawn here?

These are, admittedly, the qualms of a historian. It should be stressed that there are many important takeaways from a reading of Tales Things Tell, not just for art historians but also for historians, archaeologists, museum curators, and others. For Flood’s and Fricke’s thrilling insights and methods to become transferrable to other disciplines, however, they would perhaps need to be spelled out in more generalizable and prescriptive terms. To garner the broader appeal they deserve, and to function as antidote to the everything-is-connected or diffusionist approaches to global history, the ways of reading showcased in this book would have benefited from being deployed in more sustained dialogue with the broader conceptual frameworks through which global historians try to pinpoint the crucial forces shaping global flows. Still, the ideas, concepts, and rewarding case studies collected in this beautifully illustrated book can help us think differently about how early and later material globalisms can be explored in bottom-up fashion.

Wojtek Jezierski

Wojtek Jezierski is professor of history in the Department of Historical Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His most recent book is Risk, Emotions, and Hospitality in the Christianization of the Baltic Rim, 1000–1300, published by Brepols in 2022.