Sensory Reflections
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
"Griffiths and Starkey's collection explores the ways in which nine different sorts of objects were--or, at least, might have been--experienced in the Middle Ages. [.] All [chapters] offer new ways to think about material things. [.T]his is a book worth savoring in all one's senses."
Barbara Rosenwein, The Medieval Review
More details
Other editions
Additional editions
Persons
Content
- Intro
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Contributor Biographies
- Sensing Through Objects
- 1. The Songbook as Sensory Artifact
- 2. Sensory Experiences of Low-Status Female Textile Workers in the Carolingian World
- 3. Appealing to the Senses: Experiencing Adornment in the Early Medieval Eastern Mediterranean
- 4. Sensing Iconography: Ornamentation, Material, and Sensuousness in Early Anglo-Saxon Metalwork
- 5. The Vessel as Garden: The "Alhambra Vases" and Sensory Perception in Nasrid Architecture
- 6. Theatricality, Materiality, Relics: Reliquary Forms and the Sensational in Mosan Art
- 7. The Wound's Presence and Bodily Absence: Activating the Spiritual Senses in a Fourteenth-Century Manuscript
- 8. Birds in Hand: Micro-books and the Devotional Experience
- 9. Moved by Medicine: The Multisensory Experience of Handling Folding Almanacs
- 10. "putten to ploughe": Touching the Peasant Sensory Community
- Reflections on Sensory Reflections: An Afterword
- Index
- Plates
