The essay collection Strange Matter. Medieval Disruptions of Time, co-edited by Martin Bleisteiner (Communications), Jan-Peer Hartmann and Andrew James Johnston (Cluster Co-Director and member of Research Area 3: "Future Perfect"), 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 papers compiled in the volume look beyond the confines of the Anglophone world and 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.

Johnston's chapter, "A Strange Object of Aesthetic Desire: Chaucer's Theatre as Cinema", investigates Chaucer's architectural fantasy of Duke Theseus's theatre in The Knight's Tale in terms of its implicit aesthetic potential, arguing that the combination of a mechanical/mathematical aesthetics with a diametrically opposed one of sensuousness produces a type of cinematic experience that focuses not merely on projecting moving images onto a two-dimensional screen, but turns space into an aesthetic site of human-made visual and corporeal dynamics.

Bleisteiner and Wolfram Keller (Research Area 3: "Future Perfect"), in their contribution "Meta-Poetic Matter in John Lydgate’s Troy Book", examine a form of afterlife at once literal and metaphorical: In Troy Book, the body of the slain Trojan hero Hector, suspended uneasily and uncannily on the boundary between life and death, participates in a variety of discourses concerning different stages of 'living-ness' while simultaneously marking a 'metatheatrical' moment that enables a look behind the scenes of Lydgate's de- and reconstruction of the Matter of Troy.

Martin Bleisteiner, Jan-Peer Hartmann, Andrew James Johnston (Eds.). Strange Matter. Medieval Disruptions of Time. Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2025.