The essays collected in Medieval Romance and Material Culture aim to investigate “material culture and materiality through medieval romance, and vice versa” (18). In his introduction, Nicholas Perkins, the volume's editor, groups the contributions into distinct categories of materiality. These include space; interpersonal interaction, whether in relation to gender or strategy; and manuscript history. The essays in this final category investigate the physical book's movement of romance genres across time. Perkins outlines this set of categories in his introductory reading of the fourteenth-century Erle of Tolous, shifting from space to objects to interaction to codex (17).

I would suggest another set of categories in order to foreground other questions that the volume's essays raise. Some investigate the very nature of their archive's materiality. Others trace the means by which one kind of materiality shades into another. At still other places, the collection considers the mediated, or medial, nature of the material. Certain essays explore the instrumentality and uses of objects. Finally, aspects of the collection interrogate the extent to which an experience of material culture is constituted by its viewer's response.

These alternate categories for the collection's essays address some important questions about material culture and materiality. As a critical term, material culture has been understood to refer to artifacts that indicate a community's thought structures or values. But as studies of material culture have increasingly intersected with discourses of media and virtuality, questions about the “materiality” in material culture necessarily arise. How, for example, do material manifestations enact transitions from one expressive or ontological category to another? What does an audience experience as material or real, and how does that experience register? Many essays in this collection theorize the materialities they consider in order to speak to such questions.

The essays that tackle most directly the issue of materiality's nature and meaning include those by Siobhain Calkin, Ad Putter, and Henrike Manuwald. For Calkin, when medieval romance translates Christian objects into Saracen space, it offers an “opportunity for reflection” (60) on the very materiality of such objects. Romances surprisingly reveal that the object's agency to enact miracles increases as it becomes less animate (63). While Putter takes up a topic represented in several essays—that of the materiality of the book—his essay focuses uniquely on the relationship between physical space and ontological category. Specifically, in illustrating how scribes accommodate the bob and wheel in English poetry, Putter shows how the ambiguous placement of a phrase can allow it to engage in different poetic operations at once (153). This study opens up questions not just about the materiality of the page or book but also of form, formal identity, and the negotiation between physical space and more conceptual levels of definitional patterning. Finally, developing this continuum between the textual and physical or visual is Manuwald's essay on French ivory caskets and their depiction of Tristan as fool. This analysis asks how visual objects adopt narrative identities (223).

Rosalind Field, Neil Cartlidge, and Nancy Bradbury all consider mediation and the transformation of one material context into another. For Field, the twelfth-century Romance of Horn not only enables reflections between its external material landscape and an interior emotional one, but also re-mediates that latter, intangible landscape as a realm of the social and material in the form of emotional communities (25). Reading the Lai de Melion (extant in a thirteenth-century manuscript), Cartlidge sees the werewolf's ability to mediate between material manifestations as negotiating a colonial Irish landscape whose own material identity hovers between the fantastic and the actual. Moving in time to the Victorian era, Bradbury identifies the physical book as an agent of mediation between medieval and modern worlds. The Victorian construction of the “Thornton Romances”—with their artisanal touches of typography and their strong influence on the medieval revival artists of this period—arbitrates with particular vividness this age's preoccupation with medieval accoutrements (259).

Material culture not only requires mediation across different manifestations but also raises questions about the instrumentality of the object, as the essays by Elliott Kendall and Megan Leitch acknowledge. To Kendall, the Avowyng of Arthur (c. late fourteenth century) has an “economic imagination” that focuses on cooperative or conflictual exchange (111), so that within the contexts of game theory and cooperation theory, elements of material culture assume instrumentalizing functions as exchange objects. Similarly, for Leitch, the materials of chess—boards and pieces as opposed to abstractions of rule or strategy—allow for a rupture of ritual. Objects thus exhibit uses independent of the game's ideational content.

For some contributors, the constitution of material culture depends upon forms of reader response or sensory acknowledgment. Robert Rouse considers readerly activity in terms of familiarity with London; in that context, to read St. Erkenwald, The Siege of Jerusalem, and Titus and Vespasian (with composition dates ranging between the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries) is performatively to construct perceptions of London and Englishness. Anna Caughey draws upon film theory's gaze to show how looking in Scottish romance brings actions and realities into being, “channel[ing] the sexual gaze into martial endeavor” (97). Finally, in a reading of MS Bodleian 264 and its addition of Marco Polo's Livre de grand Khan, Mark Cruse posits not only intertextual interaction but also manuscript illustration as “a form of reader response” (243) across time periods. Here again, complexities of response crucially constitute the object's material identity.

Finally, certain essays in the collection espouse a more stable sense of materiality in order to engage in various forms of source or context study or the reading of a particular image. Raluca Radulescu traces a history of the late fourteenth-century King Robert of Sicily through choices made in its copying. Aisling Byrne shows how Irish translations of English romances can contain unusual components that indicate the existence of lost English versions (193). And Morgan Dickson explores images of Horn and Tristan as harpers, as well as the traditions from which these images draw. Taken together, the essays in the volume represent a spectrum of approaches to both what material culture means and how romance characterizes its spectrum of operations.