Material culture presents a paradox. As John Glassie writes, it is “culture made material,” yet “culture is immaterial. Culture is pattern in mind, inward, invisible and shifting.” Material remains usually amount to scraps and tracks, or objects largely separated from their earlier contexts, their significance inferred more than established. Emily Dickinson recognized the problem in her untitled poem #344:

“Here though fled” is the story of most vernacular objects historians come across. It remains a problem for the study of early modern Catholic Europe and America even though recent art historians, anthropologists, and historians have applied their talents to the study of various religious images as material culture and self-definition. Sensuous religious practices in Catholic Christianity make the connections between images and devotion especially compelling, but insights into their production, promotion, and regulation have been easier to come by than understanding their audience and reception. There is no easy resolution of Glassie's paradox. In a 1989 book that turned European art history decisively toward the power of all kinds of images – how they were received and used, as well as made and promoted – and challenged the idea of a sea change in the sixteenth century from cult images to the cult of art, David Freedberg declared that “the history of art is subsumed by the history of images,” by the relationships between images and people in history. Freedberg called attention to images usually overlooked by art historians – especially shrine images and things associated with them that devotees took to be a living embodiment of what they represented and where they came from. But his inquiry into “the efficacy of pictures” slighted actual responses to and uses of those images in their places and times in favor of psychological theories about response.