An object-oriented ontological examination of the agency of things, Bildhauer's book decenters the anthropological in favor of literary constructions of nonhuman matter as a diegetic force. In essence, it provokes with a posthumanist disavowal of Oscar Wilde's oft-quoted aphorism beginning with “[t]o be really mediaeval one should have no body,” incorporating a new materialist perspective of things divorced from the Cartesian subject-object paradigm (pp. 5–6). Five chapters supply close readings of canonical and less common German texts from the earlier period of Middle High German literature in the twelfth century (e.g., Herzog Ernst) to Hans Sachs in the sixteenth within the framework of a comparative, Global Middle Ages approach. Although not all of the comparative treatments are central, texts from Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Old English, Old French, Old Norse, and Classical and Medieval Latin literary traditions inform the reading of German texts as particularly linked in time and space to other literatures. The author chose to translate the names of German texts; the present reviewer has left them in the “original.”The introduction expresses reluctance for the term thing over object on grounds of ostensibly contagious etymological nationalism via a repudiation of Heidegger (p. 6), while also championing it as a new materialist/posthumanist term that promises and provokes, allowing for a redefinition of premodern engagement with materiality and the epistemology that informs it. The traditional scholarly understanding of medieval “thingness” relies on the persistence of qualities granted to entities with certain properties (e.g., solidity, countability), a paradigm Bildhauer seeks to challenge, among other approaches, by viewing narrative as the site of contact between things, people, and texts; the trajectory of traveling narrative itself, as will be noted below, in this sense mirrors the trajectories of things through narratives.In chapter one, the “aesthetics of maximum shine—of brilliance, splendor, luminosity, radiance” (p. 20) connects the acknowledged love of shine in the medieval period to interactions between material texts as objects and objects within the narrative, as well as literary style (geblümter Stil), and the characters and readers who interact with them, probing in ways literary, etymological, and philosophical some of the boundaries between the human and nonhuman. First turning to the heavily illuminated Wigalois B manuscript, Bildhauer posits that the text-internal “poetics of shine” (p. 37) renders the narrative a “shiny thing” (p. 38) much like its manifestation as a codicological object bearing gilded iconographic traces of the aesthetics of shine. Next, in Herzog Ernst, the lack of codicological shine, though buttressed by the existence of tapestries depicting the legend, does not detract from the constant presence of similar poetic interest in the splendor of things and the metaphorical and diegetic purposes they might serve. The ensuing discussion of Arabic, or generally eastern, transmission and the western orientalist gaze convincingly eschews reading fetishistic subject-object inversions in favor of an agentive, efficacious property of things. Here the argument moves deftly between modern thought and medieval texts, but this reviewer questions the lack of deeper engagement with medieval theories of light perception on the one hand and theological and iconographic traditions on the other. To offer one example, what might one make of shine as a stimulating, emotion-shaping force through the lens of not only the East as a symbol of the non-Christian other, but also the lens of Eastern Christianity? The shine of the liturgy celebrated at the Hagia Sophia in the 980s prompted Vladimir of Kiev's emissaries to question whether they were in heaven or on earth precisely because of the material beauty—visually, the golden, light-reflecting and -emitting shine—of the eastern church opposite the western, captured also in the iconographic traditions that accompany it.In the second chapter, nets and networks are nimbly pulled from postmodern conceptual metaphor into the materiality of net-works, granting fitting attention to the premodern dualism of nets: often invisible but tangible, material and immaterial (composed of strings and gaps between them), flexible but inescapable or difficult to escape, liminal but central. And yet even in the premodern, nets revert quickly to metaphor, either as symbols of power, hierarchies, and dynamics, or already in the form of elements of conceptual metaphor at the phraseological level. A close reading of nets in the Kaiserchronik and Sanskrit/Arabic sources from which it borrowed follows, arguing that the woven strings of nets also symbolize and function as models of narrative and structures of knowledge in the text.Chapter three expands upon recent directions in ecocritical approaches to “thing biographies,” not in the sense of it-narratives, stories of material things from a nonhuman perspective but centered on circulation through human societies over time, but rather in the sense of pragmacentric stories about or with agency. Here the focus of narrative is particularly necessary, as Bildhauer notes that the concept of agency falters if subjected to various constraints. Following first a tale of a coin by Hans Sachs and then the gray robe in Orendel of roughly the same period during the long transition out of the Middle Ages, however defined, spectra of thingness and humanness emerge from readings of the narratives with things as narrator, focalizer, and protagonist, passing several tests for agency within the narrative structure. Although rings are the main subject in the next chapter, here a brief discussion of the ring in Heinrich von Veldeke's Eneit also appears. As Bildhauer notes, building on Jane Bennett, Derrida, and others, the trajectory necessary for subject-things to have biographies is not necessarily telic, but movement away, “the contingency of the path of the thing, its ‘wandering’” (p. 129).Rings feature in chapter four as symbolic determiners of human agency along the spectrum from the fully-realized usual suspects to “underprivileged” (p. 131) categories of humans by providing a mediating—at times violent—role, granting to rings an agency not available to the female and/or non-Christian characters upon whom they act. An extended exegesis of Salman und Morolf reveals the many ways that rings act, that their own religious provenance gives rise to significant epistemological weight and function, and that a lack of female agency is not simply highlighted but that consent is categorically negated through the rings across gradients of gender and religion. A comparative jaunt through several canonical texts follows, revealing the common embodiment of rings as acquirers—not merely as symbols of acquisition. Viewing Salome's “ringification” through this lens provides a convincing model of objectification through pragmacentric readings.The final chapter beholds the thing biographies in Parzival and the Nibelungenlied, respectively of the Grail and the treasure hoard, continuing and building upon recent de-anthropocentric readings and directions in the scholarship of these most well-read texts. For the Nibelung's hoard, a series of readings of excess—too much to quantify, too much to transport, too much to possess—provides more than grounds for viewing the treasure as cursed: it acts, narratively, as a force whose mysterious attributes require assumptions from human characters and drive their actions, an example of the diegetic agency Bildhauer also sees in the Grail. The series of readings of ambiguities for that particular medieval thing par excellence which also avoids its materiality—it is of unclear physicality, portability, visibility, and type of agency (neither human nor divine but intermediary)—are perhaps less novel but nevertheless useful in aligning the Grail with other, seemingly dissimilar objects from the perspective of function and agency.In conclusion, Bildhauer summarizes the role of narrative trajectory independent of human actors, causality of the type described above from chapter five, and efficacy in the narrative framework and in other contexts as grounds for continued and increased engagement of new materialist approaches with premodern texts, epistemologies, and perhaps ontologies. Promising multidisciplinary and wide-ranging work of this sort always pushes against certain constraints and could be challenged; Medieval Things is no exception, offering a plausible model for developing further study while also in its engagement with postmodern materialist turns sacrificing larger discussions of the medieval worldview and its philosophical and religious underpinnings that, among other things, provide in the form of the theanthropic incarnation, the Eucharist, and iconographic representation a constellation of shifting matter where the human and the divine, as well as things and not-things, collide with serious implications for art and literature. However, in its close readings and refusal to attribute to symbolism what can also be understood, with good reason, as something more, the volume outlines a series of useful interventions and generates connective tissue between approaches that seem poised to bear additional fruit in Medieval Studies scholarship.