At a recent seminar, somebody recommended to me Nicole Boivin’s “Material Cultures, Material Minds” (CUP, 2008). Would the person who did so own up? I jotted down the title but not the person who passed it on, and I should thank that person. This book is very solidly engaged in archaeology, with some surprising discussions of soil and suchlike; it says next to nothing about material objects which carry texts (in the narrowest sense of the word) and takes issue with with the model of textual interpretation as a model for understanding material objects. But in mounting this bracing challenge it offers a helpful overview of ideas about material objects and runs through umpteen different theoretical approaches most helpfully. It has helped me to chew over the ideas behind a piece I’m currently writing, and I’ll be ruminating on it in the introduction to that. So I’d recommend it for others grappling with discussion of material texts.