New edited volume by Matthias Pohlig and Barbara Schlieben: „Grenzen des Sozialen: Kommunikation mit nicht-menschlichen Akteuren in der Vormoderne“ (The boundaries of society: Communication with non-human actors in the pre-modern era)
Trials of animals and objects, conversations with ghosts and revenants, with witches, God and the devil: in pre-modern times, people communicated actively with the non-human world. They turned their various apparitions into addressees and thus into their social counterparts, into actors. For, at this time, the boundaries of society were not clearly defined between humans and the rest, but were much more complex and fragile.
This edited volume explores these diverse communicative relationships in an interdisciplinary dialogue, presenting theoretical considerations in search of ways to conceptualize society as it extended beyond human beings while empirical case studies focus on communication with non-human actors. The contents and especially the modes and historically specific conditions of communication with non-humans are at the centre of the volume which also asks how such communication changed over time.
The volume has been published as Grenzen des Sozialen: Kommunikation mit nicht-menschlichen Akteuren in der Vormoderne (The boundaries of society: Communication with non-human actors in the pre-modern era), ed. by Matthias Pohlig and Barbara Schlieben (Göttingen, 2022).