NICHOLAS PERKINS, ed., Medieval Romance and Material Culture. Studies in Medieval Romance, Vol. 18. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2015. Pp. xiv, 285. isbn: 978-1- 84384-390-0. $99.As the title signals, these fifteen essays highlight the reciprocal relationship between romance and material culture. Focusing on romances circulating in Britain and Ireland from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, the volume emphasizes English tales yet also treats French and Scottish works, a lai, and the Victorian reception of a fifteenth-century compilation. Contributors emphasize diverse aspects of material culture: many consider manuscripts; others examine objects such as ivory caskets, bodies, relics, or images. The varied perspectives bring thematic breadth: physical space, gender, manuscript culture, and courtly pastimes figure prominently, and essays often evoke questions of identity. This scope results in a rich collection of value to a wide audience of scholars.Perkins opens the volume with an essay that serves as an introduction and a study of The Erle of Tolous. He demonstrates how reading oaths and exchange materially adds layers of complexity. After discussing the book's history and reception, Perkins concludes with summaries of the collection's articles. He also explains his rationale for the sequence of essays, beginning with the treatment of physical space and then moving to cooperation, exchange, and conflict; the formal and textual shape of romance; other media; and adaptation and reception.For this review, I will group articles more broadly, with one set dealing with intra- and extra-textual material objects, and the second centering on manuscripts. The first category includes most essays, including Perkins.' Elliot Kendall focuses on images of exchange, conflict, and cooperation in The Avowying of Arthur, arguing that cooperation is complex, adaptable, and benefits both the knight who cooperates and the community. Megan G. Leitch highlights conflict, analyzing the role of chess, especially in the Stanzaic Guy of Warwick and Caxton's The Foure Sonnes of Aymon, both of which reveal the political and social implications of homicide in high-stakes chess matches.Physical space and significant objects within texts or in the outside world are central in the articles by Rosalind Field, Siobhan Bly Calkin, Neil Cartlidge, Anna Caughey, and Richard Allen Rouse. Field investigates objects and gifts at courts in Brittany and Ireland in the Romance of Horn, linking material culture to emotional regimes. Calkin studies relics and images in The Sege of Melayne and Sir Ferumbras, showing the material power of devotional objects. Cartlidge explores the choice of Ireland as a setting in the Lai de Melion, contending that the werewolf 's transformations give concrete form to instability in political and ethnic identities. …