In this episode of The Multicultural Middle Ages podcast, T. Liam Waters (UC Berkeley) and Ana C. Núñez (Stanford) use New Materialism as a disciplinary approach to the Middle Ages, exploring the connections between medieval cultures, times, and places.

Ready-to-hand, memorable things make the immaterial past materially present for our direct, sensory apprehension as well as our cognitive reasoning, but they are also very nearly thinking things themselves, full of memories that we do not and cannot have for ourselves.

How do the literary, visual, and plastic arts fashion questions about the object world and our relation to it?

In her 2016 book Pond, Claire-Louise Bennett poses the incompatibility between words and things as a comic problem—and then offers a formal response to that problem.