This Special Issue focuses on a narrative that enjoyed immense popularity in medieval and early modern Western Europe: the story of Troy. More specifically, the papers compiled in the volume address multiple questions associated with the problem of touch in medieval literature, and, in so doing, explore the relevance that issue may have for attitudes toward materiality in late modernity. Embracing a broad understanding of touch as a transformational epistemological category, as a way of knowing, of apprehending, of understanding entities, especially in material terms, but also as one of forming new relations, of producing new knowledge, of generating innovation and of expressing a desire for bridging the gap between the past and the present, the special issue thus takes a deliberately expansive view of the phenomenon to shed fresh light on the thick social and affective relations in which the Troy story came to be embedded across time.