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This book attempts to interrogate the literary, artistic and cultural output of early modern England. Following Constance Classen's view that understandings of the senses, and sensory experience itself, are culturally and historically contingent; it explores the culturally specific role of the senses in textual and aesthetic encounters in England. The book follows Joachim-Ernst Berendt's call for 'a democracy of the senses' in preference to the various sensory hierarchies that have often shaped theory and criticism. It argues that the playhouse itself challenged its audiences' reliance on the evidence of their own eyes, teaching early modern playgoers how to see and how to interpret the validity of the visual. The book offers an essay on each of the five senses, beginning and ending with two senses, taste and smell, that are often overlooked in studies of early modern culture. It investigates Robert Herrick's accounts in Hesperides of how the senses function during sexual pleasure and contact. The book also explores sensory experiences, interrogating textual accounts of the senses at night in writings from the English Renaissance. It offers a picture of early modern thought in which sensory encounters are unstable, suggesting ways in which the senses are influenced by the contexts in which they are experienced: at night, in states of sexual excitement, or even when melancholic. The book looks at the works of art themselves and considers the significance of the senses for early modern subjects attending a play, regarding a painting, and reading a printed volume.
heat of Beowulf ? It is multisensory, complexional, synesthetic, and not necessarily determined by early medieval sensory hierarchies, equally capable of extending or impairing, assisting or deforming the human sensorium and the experience of corporeality. It is an unstable ductus , a permutational diction, a porous structure. It is congruent with ruminatio and with the early medieval cardiocentric psychological model, and probably implies a monkish reader of a post-Benedictine-reform manuscript. It is not indifferent to the heat represented in the many fires of
closely with questions of sensory hierarchy, exploring how the primacy of the visual interacts with viewers’ other sensual experiences of art: ‘in what ways, this volume asks, were the operations of visual culture inflected with meaning because of the value attached to hearing, smell, taste and touch?’14 Sight was extremely important in early modern sensory configurations, but as Sanger and Walker acknowledge, so too were the other senses, requiring a critical approach to this period that is alert to a full range of senses. Another question of perennial interest to
’s Post , ‘Poetry for Cold Feet’ (23 January 1903). 42 Evening World , ‘Count Robert’s Thrills To-Day’ (6 February 1903). 43 C. Classen, ‘Engendering Perception: Gender Ideologies and Sensory Hierarchies in Western History’, Body & Society , 3:2 (1997), p. 4. 44 Kemp, ‘Are There Any More at Home Like You Count Montesquiou?’. 45 Saint-Louis Star , ‘Scion of the House of
and C. Brown, Race and the Senses: The Felt Politics of Racial Embodiment (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), pp. 14–15. 10 Onafuwa, ‘Allies and Decoloniality’, p. 8. 11 C. Classen, ‘Engendering Perception: Gender Ideologies and Sensory Hierarchies in Western History’, Body & Society , 3:2 (1997), p. 6. 12 Ibid. , p. 4. 13 A. Jolles, ‘The Tactile Turn: Envisioning a Postcolonial
perfumer bottles are valued mostly for that visual materiality. That they were once defined by the long-since-faded scents they dispensed seems hard to reconcile within current cultures of display. Exhibited in ways that render them meaningful within modern and postmodern sensory hierarchies and emphasize their visual materiality, these objects’ olfactory qualities are rendered obsolete. Emphasizing visual strategies of display makes a certain amount of sense, given the educational goals and aesthetic objectives of most museums in Europe and North America.15 Objects must
‘crisis in ocular centrism’ have been coined to emphasise the danger of monosensory studies. 8 Historians such as Graeme Gooday and Karen Sayer have challenged both the importance of vision and its centrality in the past by looking at the experiences of sensory loss and multiple sensory loss. 9 However, we lack studies that explain this sensory hierarchy and it is therefore crucial to analyse the historical grading of the senses through a monograph on monosensory loss, especially one that explains the cultural
smoke-filled domestic spaces, and a host of problems (like astigmatism or poor accommodation) often described as eagena miste (‘dimness of the eyes’)—as well as the normal presbyopia of aging. 102 This historical conjunction introduces at least some complexity to the vision-dominated sensory hierarchy, if not also the trace of a counternarrative of assistive or supplemental multisensoriality and a certain pressure on the position and function of sensory poetics with respect to this historically particular
’ opinion and perhaps prioritise the issues as stake. Moreover, the relationship between seeing and knowing goes deeper into our verbal language. The word idea comes from the Greek ‘idea’ which in turn is derived from the verb idein – to see; imagination where we see with the mind’s eye stems from the Latin verb imaginare – to picture oneself. My purpose in reiterating these metaphors and in exploring their etymology is to help to explain why sight has been characterised so often as the least bodily of the senses. This Aristotelian notion of a sensory hierarchy