Strange Matter - (Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture) by Martin Bleisteiner & Jan-Peer Hartmann & Andrew James Johnston (Hardcover)

About the Book

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 innovative perspectives on objects from the Middle Ages and the various ways they inform and complicate our perception of temporality.

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

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.

About the Author

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