A few years ago, a distinguished scholar of Renaissance art and a leading theorist confronted me with the question: ‘Why do medievalists still maintain a nostalgia for the object?’ It was at the moment when the ‘visual turn’ was veering onto the ramp of phenomenology, so I immediately understood the point he was making: at a time when most other art historians were privileging perception and reception, medievalists seemed hopelessly to be focused on art's material presence and physical attraction and thus to operate in an intellectual culture that did not engage current theoretical debates.

This was, of course, the impression of someone outside the field. If medievalists were, in fact, pining for precious objects, they were doing so only after centuries during which the unique nature of the things that they study had largely been made to vanish as these objects were subsumed into other forms of artistic production; first, following the European revolutions, when church treasuries were emptied into museums and private collections and thus transformed into ‘objets d'art’ and then, during the past hundred years, when they were further ‘de-objectified’ by a prevailing interest in iconography – with its contingent search for models – that elided the material differences among works.