xiii, 286 pages : illustrations (some color), facsimiles, music ; 25 cm
Bibliographic Note:
Includes bibliographical references and index
Contents:
The songbook as sensory artifact / Jesse Rodin -- Sensory experiences of low-status female textile workers in the Carolingian World / Valerie L. Garver -- Appealing to the senses: experiencing adornment in the early medieval Eastern Mediterranean / Elizabeth Dospel Williams -- Sensing iconography: ornamentation, material, and sensuousness in early Anglo-Saxon metalwork / Melissa Herman -- The vessel as garden: the "Alhambra vases" and sensory perception in Nasrid architecture / Patricia Blessing -- Theatricality, materiality, relics: reliquary forms and the sensational in Mosan art / Cynthia Hahn -- The wound's presence and bodily absence: activating the spiritual senses in a fourteenth-century manuscript / Sara Ritchey -- Birds in hand: micro-books and the devotional experience / Alexa Sand -- Moved by medicine: the multisensory experience of handling folding almanacs / Jennifer Borland -- "putten to ploughe": touching the peasant sensory community / Richard Newhauser -- Reflections on sensory reflections: an afterword / Beth Williamson
Summary:
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