Considering the glass case: Material encounters between museums, visitors and religious objects

Abstract

This article considers the often overlooked, or looked through, museum display case. Glass cases provide physical barriers between museum exhibits and visitors. Their efficacy is what keeps them hidden. But when the case obstructs a visitor–object interaction, their presence becomes strikingly obvious. The usually discerning cases are blamed for disrupting, distancing and inhibiting museum experiences. Yet, cases can facilitate many encounters that aid visitors’ abilities to connect devotionally with exhibits. To explore the active role that glass cases play, this article employs an actor–network approach to examine interactions at an exhibition on medieval Christian relics, where the cases acted as channels and barriers within the process of veneration, as well as the means to erase traces of religious practices. Situated in debates about materiality and lived religion, this article considers the role of mundane material objects in visitor–object encounters and the mediated nature of religious experiences in non-devotional spaces.