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Podcast: New Books in Art
Episode: Alexander Langlands, "Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts" (Norton, 2017)
Description: Alexander Langlands is a British archaeologist, historian, writer, and broadcaster. His most recent book, Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts, was published by Norton to great acclaim in 2017 and has just been reissued as a paperback. Cræft is an antiquated spelling of “craft” and in the book, Langlands explores what the word meant when it first appeared in English over a thousand years ago. Our modern understanding of the term, Langlands argues, is at some remove from its original meaning. When it first began to appear in the writings of Anglo-Saxons, the term...