The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England

Erscheinungsjahr 2016
ISBN: 978-90-04-31548-8
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 44, 298 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 241 mm, Gewicht: 558 g

Reihe: Intersections

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

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kern-Stähler, Annette

Busse, Beatrix

Boer, Wietse de

de Boer, Wietse

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Religionsgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements
Notes on the Editors
Notes on the Contributors
List of Illustrations

Introduction: The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures
Annette Kern-Stähler and Kathrin Scheuchzer

PART ONE: SENSING AND UNDERSTANDING

Sight and Understanding. Visual Imagery as Metaphor in the Old English Boethius and Soliloquies
Katherine Hindley

Coming to Past Senses. Vision, Touch and Their Metaphors in Anglo-Saxon Language and Culture
Javier Enrique Díaz-Vera

PART TWO: VISION AND ITS DISTORTION

Bleary Eyes. Middle English Constructions of Visual Disabilities
Beatrix Busse and Annette Kern-Stähler

Exterior Inspection and Regular Reason. Robert Hooke’s and Margaret Cavendish’s Epistemologies of the Senses
Virginia Richter

Hierachies of Vision in John Milton’s Paradise Lost
Tobias Gabel

PART THREE: THE PERILOUS SENSES

Strange Perceptions. Sensory Experience in the Old English “Marvels of the East”
Dieter Bitterli

The Perils of the Flesh. John Wyclif’s Preaching on the Five Bodily Senses
Sean A. Otto

The Senses and Human Nature in a Political Reading of Paradise Lost
Jens Martin Gurr

PART FOUR: THE MULTISENSUAL

Multisensoriality and the Chaucerian Multisensual
Richard G. Newhauser

‘Eate not, taste not, touch not’. The Five Senses in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments
Kathrin Scheuchzer

PART FIVE: THE THEATRE AS SENSORY EXPERIENCE

Smell in the York Corpus Christi Plays
Rory G. Critten and Annette Kern-Stähler

The Sensory Body in Shakespeare’s Theatres
Farah Karim-Cooper

Afterword: From Gateways to Channels. Reaching towards an Understanding of the Transformative Plasticity of the Senses in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods
Elizabeth Robertson

Index Nominum

Über Autor(innen)

Annette Kern-Stähler is Full Professor and Chair of Medieval English Studies at the University of Bern. She is particularly interested in the interrelations between material culture, sense perception and affect and in the uses and transformations of space in late medieval England.

Beatrix Busse, Ph.D. (2004), University of Heidelberg, is Full Professor and Chair of English Linguistics at that university. Her research interests include the history of English and historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, stylistics and language in urban spaces.

Wietse de Boer, Ph.D. (1995), is Professor of History at Miami University (Ohio). His publications are focused on the Italian Counter-Reformation, most recently Space and Conversion in Global Perspective, co-edited with Giuseppe Marcocci, Aliocha Maldavsky and Ilaria Pavan.