The Senses in Late Medieval England

The Senses in Late Medieval England

Author: C. M. Woolgar

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 9780300118711

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Oxbow says: This fascinating study of how people understood and used their senses in the late medieval period draws on evidence from a range of literary texts, documents and records, as well as material culture and architectural sources.


The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England

The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England

Author: Annette Kern-Stähler

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2016-05-02

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9004315497

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The essays collected in The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England examine the interrelationships between sense perception and secular and Christian cultures in England from the medieval into the early modern periods. They address canonical texts and writers in the fields of poetry, drama, homiletics, martyrology and early scientific writing, and they espouse methods associated with the fields of corpus linguistics, disability studies, translation studies, art history and archaeology, as well as approaches derived from traditional literary studies. Together, these papers constitute a major contribution to the growing field of sensorial research that will be of interest to historians of perception and cognition as well as to historians with more generalist interests in medieval and early modern England. Contributors include: Dieter Bitterli, Beatrix Busse, Rory Critten, Javier Díaz-Vera, Tobias Gabel, Jens Martin Gurr, Katherine Hindley, Farah Karim-Cooper, Annette Kern-Stähler, Richard Newhauser, Sean Otto, Virginia Richter, Elizabeth Robertson, and Kathrin Scheuchzer


Sensory Reflections

Sensory Reflections

Author: Fiona Griffiths

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2018-10-22

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 3110562863

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This volume draws on emerging scholarship at the intersection of two already vibrant fields: medieval material culture and medieval sensory experience. The rich potential of medieval matter (most obviously manuscripts and visual imagery, but also liturgical objects, coins, textiles, architecture, graves, etc.) to complement and even transcend purely textual sources is by now well established in medieval scholarship across the disciplines. So, too, attention to medieval sensory experiences—most prominently emotion—has transformed our understanding of medieval religious life and spirituality, violence, power, and authority, friendship, and constructions of both the self and the other. Our purpose in this volume is to draw the two approaches together, plumbing medieval material sources for traces of sensory experience - above all ephemeral and physical experiences that, unlike emotion, are rarely fully described or articulated in texts.


The Senses and the English Reformation

The Senses and the English Reformation

Author: Matthew Milner

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 9780754666424

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Challenging the assumption that medieval Catholicism was overly sensual, whilst Protestantism rejected any element of worship appealing to the eye, ear, or nose, this study asks fundamental questions about the relationship between religion and the senses. The book begins with an examination of pre-Reformation beliefs and practices, establishing intellectual views on the senses in fifteenth-century England. Having established the parameters for the role of sense before the Reformation, the second half of the book mirrors these concerns in the post-1520 world, looking at how, and to what degree, the relationship between religious practices and sensation changed as a result of the coming of Protestantism.


The Sense of Smell in the Middle Ages

The Sense of Smell in the Middle Ages

Author: Katelynn Robinson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-09-09

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 042981593X

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Odors, including those of incense, spices, cooking, and refuse, were both ubiquitous and meaningful in central and late medieval Western Europe. The significance of the sense of smell is evident in scholastic Latin texts, most of which are untranslated and unedited by modern scholars. Between the late eleventh and thirteenth century, medieval scholars developed a logical theory of the workings of the sense of smell based on Greek and Arabic learning. In the thirteenth through fifteenth century, medical authors detailed practical applications of smell theory and these were communicated to individuals and governing authorities by the medical profession in the interests of personal and public health. At the same time, religious authors read philosophical and medical texts and gave their information religious meaning. This reinterpretation of scholastic philosophy and medicine led to the development of what can be termed a medically aware theology of smell that was communicated to popular audiences alongside traditional olfactory theory in sermons. Its impact on popular thought is reflected in late medieval mystical texts. While the senses have received increasing scholarly attention in recent decades, this volume presents the first detailed research into the sense of smell in the later European Middle Ages.


The Spectacle of the Body in Late Medieval England

The Spectacle of the Body in Late Medieval England

Author: Estella Antoaneta Ciobanu

Publisher: Editura Lumen

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 9731663150

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The volume The Spectacle of the Body in Late Medieval England represents a study on the human body representation in medieval England by approaching the concept of the spectacle as a space of manifestation. The author clarifies the ways of understanding the body as a physical and metaphorical reality, but also the medieval conceptualization of violence. On top of that, the author is making an investigation on the violent character of spectacles' representation in pursuit of picturing this subject more clearly and more relevant. The approach of the volume is dominantly Christian reviewing the representations of the body through outstanding figures of Christianity (crucifixion of Jesus Christ, body of Virgin Mary).


World of Echo

World of Echo

Author: Adin E. Lears

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1501749617

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Between late antiquity and the fifteenth century, theologians, philosophers, and poets struggled to articulate the correct relationship between sound and sense, creating taxonomies of sounds based on their capacity to carry meaning. In World of Echo, Adin E. Lears traces how medieval thinkers adopted the concept of noise as a mode of lay understanding grounded in the body and the senses. With a broadly interdisciplinary approach, Lears examines a range of literary genres to highlight the poetic and social effects of this vibrant discourse, offering close readings of works by Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, as well as the mystics Richard Rolle and Margery Kempe. Each of these writers embraced an embodied experience of language resistant to clear articulation, even as their work reflects inherited anxieties about the appeal of such sensations. A preoccupation with the sound of language emerged in the form of poetic soundplay at the same time that mysticism and other forms of lay piety began to flower in England. As Lears shows, the presence of such emphatic aural texture amplified the cognitive importance of feeling in conjunction with reason and was a means for the laity—including lay women—to cultivate embodied forms of knowledge on their own terms, in precarious relation to existing clerical models of instruction. World of Echo offers a deep history of the cultural and social hierarchies that coalesce around aesthetic experience and gives voice to alternate ways of knowing.


A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages

A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages

Author: Richard G. Newhauser

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2014-10-23

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1474233139

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Understanding the senses is indispensable for comprehending the Middle Ages because both a theoretical and a practical involvement with the senses played a central role in the development of ideology and cultural practice in this period. For the long medieval millennium, the senses were not limited to the five we think of: speech, for example, was categorized among the senses of the mouth. And sight and hearing were not always the dominant senses: for the medical profession, taste was more decisive. Nor were the senses only passive receptors: they were understood to play an active role in the process of perception and were also a vital element in the formation of each individual's moral identity. From the development of specifically urban or commercial sensations to the sensory regimes of holiness, from the senses as indicators of social status revealed in food to the Scholastic analysis of perception, this volume demonstrates the importance of sensory experience and its manifold interpretations in the Middle Ages. A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages presents essays on the following topics: the social life of the senses; urban sensations; the senses in the marketplace; the senses in religion; the senses in philosophy and science; medicine and the senses; the senses in literature; art and the senses; and sensory media.


The Moral Sense of Touch

The Moral Sense of Touch

Author: Arthur J. Russell

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13:

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"The moral sense of touch : teaching tactile values in late medieval England" investigates the intersections of popular science and religious education in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the project draws together a range of textual artifacts, from scientific manuals to private prayerbooks, to reconstruct the vast network of touch supporting the late medieval moral syllabus. I argue that new scientific understandings of the five senses, and specifically the sense of touch, had a great impact on the processes, procedures, and parlances of vernacular religious instruction in late medieval England. The study is organized around a set of object lessons that realize the materiality of devotional reading practices. Over the course of investigation, I explore how the tactile values reinforcing medieval conceptions of pleasure and pain were cultivated to educate and, in effect, socialize popular reading audiences. Writing techniques and technologies literary forms, manuscript designs, illustration programs shaped the reception and user-experience of devotional texts. Focusing on the cultural life of the sense of touch, "The moral sense of touch" provides a new context for a sense based study of historical literatures, one that recovers the centrality of touch in cognitive, aesthetic, and moral discourses.