Introduction: Medieval disruptions of time – Martin Bleisteiner, Jan-Peer Hartmann and Andrew James Johnston
Part I: Materiality in motion
1 How to do things with things: Material objects in the multicultural Mediterranean – Sharon Kinoshita
2 Suspenseful gifts: Gemstones as mediators in medieval German travel narratives – Falk Quenstedt
3 Playing with linear time – Valerie Allen
Part II: Ephemeral materialities
4 A strange object of aesthetic desire: Chaucer’s theatre as cinema – Andrew James Johnston
5 Vitreous temporalities – Stephanie Trigg
6 Cosmopolitical Shakespeares (On Macbeth’s bubbles) – Julian Yates
Part III: Material (after)lives
7 The multiple lives of the Ruthwell Monument – Jan-Peer Hartmann
8 The movements of the Franks Casket – Joshua Davies
9 Meta-Poetic matter in John Lydgate’s Troy Book – Martin Bleisteiner and Wolfram Keller
10 Marco Polo’s boqtaq: A medieval object and its afterlives – Kim M. Phillips
Index

Strange matter: Medieval disruptions of time offers exciting new perspectives on objects from the Middle Ages and the various ways they inform and complicate our perception of temporality.

The Middle Ages were intrigued by the different forms of materiality physical objects could take. In meditating on their provenance, mode of production and/or transformation(s) over time, medieval texts enable the artefacts in question to operate as potent repositories of temporal ‘otherness’. This capacity for time-related alterity appears also to lie at the heart of the post-medieval fascination with – quite literally – all things medieval. Drawing on texts and artworks ranging from the early medieval Franks Casket via Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Thomas Bradwardine’s mathematical writings to stained glass windows, carved ivory horns from Fatimid Egypt and the boqtaq brought back by Marco Polo from his journey to the court of China’s Mongol emperor, the essays assembled in this volume transcend the boundaries of the Anglophone world and showcase medieval studies’ important contribution to overcoming the limitations of a reductive, Eurocentric perspective on non-Western cultures.

As it engages critically with the specific temporal otherness that modernity has been inclined to associate with medieval texts and artefacts, Strange matter enters into productive dialogue with recent trends in criticism, such as thing studies and the growing field of ‘object biographies’ in cultural studies and museology.