The Senses in Medieval Europe, C. 1100-1500

MA Option

The Senses in Medieval Europe, c. 1100-1500.

Dr Matthew Champion

Our senses are crucial to how we encounter the world – but were the senses of medieval Europeans the same as ours? Do the senses have a history? This module brings to life the distinctive, complex and vibrant sensory worlds of medieval Europe and engages with exciting recent developments in the transdisciplinary history of the senses. Starting with a survey of how the five senses were believed to work in medieval Europe, we will then move to examine in more detail medieval experiences and theories of sight, sound, touch, taste, smell and the spiritual senses. Through case studies of a series of medieval objects, texts, images, sounds, and rituals, we will examine the ambivalent attitudes to the sensory world in medieval religious cultures, the politics of sensory experience in the medieval city, gendered experiences of the senses, and the relationships between the senses and histories of emotions and knowledge. Finally, in dialogue with recent anthropological and archaeological theory, the course will reflect on how medieval theories of the five senses might make us deaf to other ways of understanding the medieval senses, and will ask what we might learn about the senses from the complexities of medieval aesthetics and ritual.

Indicative Reading

Classen, Constance. Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Culture (1993).

Gavrilyuk, Paul L. and Sarah Coakley (eds). The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity (2012).

Hamilakis, Y. Archaeology and the Senses (2013).

Howes, David (ed.). Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (2005).

Newhauser, R. (ed.). A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages (2014).

Nichols, Stephen G., Andreas Kablitz and Alison Calhoun (eds). Rethinking the Medieval Senses: Heritage, Fascinations, Frames (2008).

Palazzo, Eric (ed.). Les cinq sens au Moyen Âge (some articles in English) (2016).

Schleif, C. and Richard Newhauser (eds). Pleasure and Danger in Perception: The Five Senses in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Senses and Society, 5.1, 2010).

Vannini, Phillip, Dennis Waskul and Simon Gottschalk, The Senses in Self, Society and Culture: A Sociology of the Senses (2012).

Woolgar, C.M. The Senses in Late Medieval England (2006).