The essay collection 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.