This essay develops a perspective from the field of American Studies, which on the surface of things could hardly be more distant from the historical focus of this volume. Americanists hardly venture into the premodern period, coterminous as the idea of “America” is with the end of this historiographical era. Neither do they concern themselves with the geographical areas under investigation here. Yet the interdisciplinary focus of the Heidelberg research center “Material Text Cultures” strikes a chord with my field, foremost perhaps in its strategic alignment of materiality with cultural studies. In itself, American Studies has an interesting position vis-à-vis the idea of “culture”. A relative latecomer to the ensemble of modern language studies and philologies, it distinguished itself strategically from its paramount predecessor English by decentering literature and by poaching on various other disciplines such as sociology and history in order to take on the expansive form of American Cultural Studies now taught in institutions worldwide. Alongside the still vital role of literature in this scheme, the field saw the emergence of visual culture, popular culture, media history, film and television studies, and music as central nodes of research. In recent years, scholars have begun to explore the function of objects within processes of cultural evolution, leading to a surging amount of studies on what is now referred to as American material culture. By and large, however, such studies understand material culture as encompassing tools, objects collected in museums and archives, memory sites, as well as the materials of everyday existence. 1 Literature, then, figures mainly as an archive of fictional records about material culture, as in Bill Brown’s seminal work on thing theory and the role of objects in fiction. 2 Yet, in a very basal form literature itself has always been a form of material culture, reliant on the circulation of raw materials and artifacts. Modern, typographic cultures need material media as much as pre-modern, non-typographic ones. Here, then, fields as disparate as Classics, archaeology, mediaeval studies and modern literary studies find a common research perspective: to unearth, recover, analyze, and interpret the traces and records of lives lived in the past and to build upon these artifacts our accounts of how cultures communicated about themselves and about each other 10, 100, or 1,000 years ago. For the time being, I will attempt to downplay the vast historical gap that divides these fields and focus on some concrete but also some very abstract connecting lines between the classical period, the Middle Ages and the modern Anglo-American scene.