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Strange matter
Medieval disruptions of time
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Edited by:
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2025
About this book
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.
Author / Editor information
Contributor: Andrew James Johnston
Andrew James Johnston is Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin
Topics
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Frontmatter
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Contents
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List of Figures
vii -
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List of contributors
viii -
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Acknowledgements
xi -
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Introduction
1 -
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I Materiality in motion
19 -
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1 How to do things with things
21 -
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2 Suspenseful gifts
44 -
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3 Playing with linear time
67 -
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II Ephemeral materialities
93 -
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4 A strange object of aesthetic desire
95 -
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6 Cosmopolitical Shakespeares (on Macbeth’s bubbles)
134 -
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III Material (after)lives
157 -
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7 The multiple lives of the Ruthwell Monument
159 -
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9 Meta-poetic matter in John Lydgate’s Troy Book
223 -
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10 Marco Polo’s boqtaq
244 -
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Bibliography
267
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
September 2, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9781526175977
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9781526175977
Keywords for this book
Material objects; temporal otherness; medieval literature; early modern texts; hybridity; materiality; cultural artefacts; Bruno Latour; human-object relationships; nature-culture divide; temporality; historicity; polychronicity; ephemerality; transculturality; thing studies; object biographies; medievalism; periodisation
Audience(s) for this book
For a non-specialist adult audience
