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"MATERIAL CULTURE": the concept is a commonplace in anthropology. Yet its present attraction for literary historians is surely because it retains for them an air of perversity. It sounds like an oxymoron. However much literature departments have changed over the last decades, they emerged out of two very different concepts of "culture": national culture; culture as the "best" artistic production of the past and present (Shakespeare, Beethoven, Picasso). These latter concepts of "culture" seem to rise above-even to be in opposition to-the "merely" material. "Materials" like paper and ink and binding used to be incidental to "Shakespeare," for instance. True, they were minutely and illuminatingly examined by bibliographers at the beginning of the twentieth century, but primarily so that they could find the traces of Shakespeare himself behind the materials that both hide and deform him.
The process of divorcing a supramaterial "culture" from its "mere" material supports begins in the Renaissance. Alberti, for instance, advocated that artists should forego the use of gold leaf in their paintings so as to emphasize their skill rather than the value of the materials they were using. Cultural value here begins to emerge in opposition to economic value (although, paradoxically, the cheapness of the pigments might be more than compensated for economically by the added value of the artist's genius). The attempt to elevate cultural objects above material or economic value finds a curious analogy in the changing meanings of the English words "priceless" and "valueless." Prior to the fifteenth century, "price" (from the Latin pretium) meant not only "price, value, wages," but also "reward" and "honor, praise." But "pris"/"preis" split during the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries into three differentiated words: "price," "praise," "prize." Increasingly, "praise" and "prize" were distinguished from mere "price." Praise is above price; it is "priceless"-a word the OED first records in Shakespeare's work.
Here we confront a paradox. For something to be "priceless," it must be worth more than its financial value. "Valueless" has the same semantic form as "priceless": to be without value, to be without price. But whereas the "priceless" is raised above economic valuation, the "valueless" sinks below it. "Valueless" is also first recorded in Shakespeare in the last decade of the sixteenth century, where its sense, in opposition...