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Strange matter

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Entering into productive dialogue with recent trends in criticism, Strange matter: Medieval disruptions of time scrutinises a wide range of European and non-European texts and artworks to generate ...
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  • 02 September 2025
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Strange matter offers exciting new perspectives on the premodern fascination with materiality and the various ways in which the Middle Ages and subsequent periods experienced things in time. Drawing on a wide selection of examples that range from medieval texts and artefacts of both European and non-European origin to Macbeth’s highly evocative meditation on bubbles, the essays compiled in this volume look beyond the confines of the Anglophone world. As they engage critically with the specific temporal otherness modernity has so often ascribed to medieval texts and artefacts, the contributors also enter into productive dialogue with recent trends in criticism, such as thing studies and the growing field of ‘object biographies’ in cultural studies and museology.
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Price: $140.00
Pages: 318
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Series: Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture
Publication Date: 02 September 2025
ISBN: 9781526175960
Format: Hardcover
BISACs: Literary studies: ancient, classical and medieval, Literary studies: c 1400 to c 1600, European history: medieval period, middle ages
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Martin Bleisteiner is an editor and academic translator based in Berlin

Jan-Peer Hartmann is a fellow at the Interdisciplinary Research Group ‘Aitiologies’ at the Freie Universität Berlin

Andrew James Johnston is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin

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