Sensual and Sensory Experiences in the Middle Ages

Sensual and Sensory Experiences in the Middle Ages
Author: Carme Muntaner Alsina
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2018-06-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1527512347

Where was the line between pleasure and irritation in the sensory overload caused by the sounds, colours, and smells of a medieval market? How could pain and suffering be relieved by hoping for, and desiring to experience, an intimate, almost familiar, contact with Christ? This volume shows the different aspects of sensory experiences that medieval people conveyed through documents, literary accounts, and religious practices. The unifying theme here is how pleasure, pain, desire, and fear appear in different—sometimes conflicting—combinations and settings: from the private space of the monastic cell to the shared hustle of the market. The geographic focus of this volume is Mediterranean Europe, although it also touches on other Western contexts. The combination of different points of view here provides an original contribution to the study of sensory experiences in the Middle Ages.

The Saturated Sensorium

The Saturated Sensorium
Author: Henning Laugerud
Publisher: Aarhus Universitetsforlag
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2015-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 8771249613

The Saturated Sensorium is a book about the senses and their media in the Middle Ages: a book about what it meant to sense and perceive something. The book highlights the integrated and unified nature of medieval senses and media. It discusses the inter- and multi-mediality of cultic and cultural artefacts as well as the sensorial and inter-sensorial dimensions of a wide array of cultural concepts and practices within medieval religion, art, archaeology, architecture, literature, music, food, social life, ritual, devotion, cognition, and memory. These domains of sensory and media history are dealt with, not as isolated anthology articles in only loose connection with one another, but as coordinate and comparative chapters of a coherent book each covering a principal branch of the cultural history of the medieval senses. Across a number of academic disciplines, specialists address the interdisciplinary and compound character of visus (sight), auditus (hearing), tactus (touch), olfactus (smell) and gustus (taste), showing that there was far more to the senses and to sense experience than these five classical Aristotelian categories might suggest. A plentiful variety of sensory modes interacted, crossed, and permeated each other in mutually entangled and braided ways. The saturated sensorium nurtured the sacred and secular practices of mediation, representation, and consumption; the embodied and mental concepts of sanctity, memory, and imagery; the physical and spiritual spaces of environment, cult, and burial; the material and visual culture of sacraments, sensation, and incarnation.

Rethinking the Medieval Senses

Rethinking the Medieval Senses
Author: Stephen G. Nichols
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2008
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780801887369

Organised within historical, thematic, and contextual frameworks, this collection of essays examines the psychological, rhetorical, and philological complexities of sensory perception from the classical period to the late Midddle Ages.

Touching, Devotional Practices, and Visionary Experience in the Late Middle Ages

Touching, Devotional Practices, and Visionary Experience in the Late Middle Ages
Author: David Carrillo-Rangel
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2019-12-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030260291

This book addresses the history of the senses in relation to affective piety and its role in devotional practices in the late Middle Ages, focusing on the sense of touch. It argues that only by deeply analysing this specific context of perception can the full significance of sensory religious experience in the Late Middle Ages be understood. Considering the centrality of the body to medieval society and Christianity, this collection explores a range of devotional practices, mainly relating to the Passion of Christ, and features manuscripts, works of devotional literature, art, woodcuts and judicial records. It brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars to offer a variety of methodological approaches, in order to understand how touch was encoded, evoked and purposefully used. The book further considers how touch was related to the medieval theory of perception, examining its relation to the inner and outer senses through the eyes of visionaries, mystics, theologians and confessors, not only as praxis but from different theoretical points of view. While considered the most basic of spiritual experience, the chapters in this book highlight the all-pervasive presence of touch and the significance of ‘affective piety’ to Late Medieval Christians. Chapter 3: Drama, Performance and Touch in the Medieval Convent and Beyond is Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

Sensory Reflections

Sensory Reflections
Author: Fiona J. Griffiths
Publisher: de Gruyter
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9783110562347

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 Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England

The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England
Author: Annette Kern-Stähler
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2016-05-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004315497

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

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
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2014-10-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1474233139

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.

Pleasure and Leisure in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age

Pleasure and Leisure in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age
Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 764
Release: 2019-08-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110623072

Jan Huizinga and Roger Caillois have already taught us to realize how important games and play have been for pre-modern civilization. Recent research has begun to acknowledge the fundamental importance of these aspects in cultural, religious, philosophical, and literary terms. This volume expands on the traditional approach still very much focused on the materiality of game (toys, cards, dice, falcons, dolls, etc.) and acknowledges that game constituted also a form of coming to terms with human existence in an unstable and volatile world determined by universal randomness and fortune. Whether considering blessings or horse fighting, falconry or card games, playing with dice or dolls, we can gain a much deeper understanding of medieval and early modern society when we consider how people pursued pleasure and how they structured their leisure time. The contributions examine a wide gamut of approaches to pleasure, considering health issues, eroticism, tournaments, playing music, reading and listening, drinking alcohol, gambling and throwing dice. This large issue was also relevant, of course, in non-Christian societies, and constitutes a critical concern both for the past and the present because we are all homines ludentes.

A Feast for the Senses

A Feast for the Senses
Author: Martina Bagnoli
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780300222951

"The late medieval world was marked by a culture of refinement and sophistication. The period's media of choice--paintings, manuscripts, prints, tapestries, embroideries, ivory sculpture, metalwork, and enamels--speak volumes about the pleasures of sensory engagement. This sumptuous new book brings together sacred and secular art to reveal the shared intellectual culture that governed perception in Europe in the 13th through the 16th centuries. The essays explore these themes through representations of religious practices, royal rituals, feasts and celebrations, music, and literature"--

Reformation of the Senses

Reformation of the Senses
Author: Jacob M. Baum
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018-11-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780252083990

We see the Protestant Reformation as the dawn of an austere, intellectual Christianity that uprooted a ritualized religion steeped in stimulating the senses--and by extension the faith--of its flock. Historians continue to use the idea as a potent framing device in presenting not just the history of Christianity but the origins of European modernity. Jacob M. Baum plumbs a wealth of primary source material from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to offer the first systematic study of the senses within the religious landscape of the German Reformation. Concentrating on urban Protestants, Baum details the engagement of Lutheran and Calvinist thought with traditional ritual practices. His surprising discovery: Reformation-era Germans echoed and even amplified medieval sensory practices. Yet Protestant intellectuals simultaneously cultivated the idea that the senses had no place in true religion. Exploring this paradox, Baum illuminates the sensory experience of religion and daily life at a crucial historical crossroads. Provocative and rich in new research, Reformation of the Senses reevaluates one of modern Christianity's most enduring myths.