Much of Stielau’s research focuses on the social relationships that form around and with objects. Moments of crisis in early modernity, such as wars, financial emergency, and religious change, test the limits of those relationships and throw them into stark relief. The fate of gold and silver artifacts in such moments is particularly revealing, for they can be invested with great symbolic value but they always remain capable of being melted and transformed: into different symbolic objects, or into currency. The “molten potential” of metals has fascinated Stielau beginning with research for her 2015 dissertation and her publications have explored questions of affect, value, and ontology with regard to gold and silver artifacts and currency in numerous case studies.

The culmination of this work is her current monograph, which she will be completing during her NOMIS Fellowship. Entitled Molten: The Value of Silver Treasure under the Threat of Dispossession, 1600–1650, the book tracks silver cups and other precious objects through the tumultuous decades of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1638) and contemporaneous conflicts in northern Europe. This period of catastrophic infrastructural damage and loss of life mobilized and displaced long-held cultural treasures in large numbers. Silver articles were taken as booty, as funds for military defense, or as ransom to protect life and limb. They were also concealed for protection and hoped-for later retrieval. The pressures that war placed on silver plate expose the ambivalent status that such artifacts held as both raw financial assets and resonant keepsakes signifying the identity of individuals and communities.