This volume traces transformations in attitudes toward, ideas about, and experiences of religion and the senses in the medieval and early modern period. Broad in temporal and geographical scope, it challenges traditional notions of periodisation, highlighting continuities as well as change. Rather than focusing on individual senses, the volume’s organisation emphasises the multisensoriality and embodied nature of religious practices and experiences, refusing easy distinctions between asceticism and excess. The senses were not passive, but rather active and reactive, res-ponding to and initiating change. As the contributions in this collection demonstrate, in the pre-modern era, sensing the sacred was a complex, vexed, and constantly evolving process, shaped by individuals, environment, and religious change. The volume will be essential reading not only for scholars of religion and the senses, but for anyone interested in histories of medieval and early modern bodies, material culture, affects, and affect theory.
Chapter 1. Problems of sensory history and the medieval laity
Chapter 2. Virtus regens animam: William Peraldus on guiding the pleasures of the senses
Chapter 3. What makes things holy? The senses and material culture in the later Middle Ages
Chapter 4. Double conversion: the sensory autobiography of Sir Kenelm Digby
Chapter 5. The senses and the seventeenth-century English conversion narrative
Chapter 6. Hearing exile and homecoming in the Dutch Stranger church
Chapter 9. “O, she’s warm”: evidence, assent, and the sensory numinous in Shakespeare and his world
Chapter 10. Robert Southwell’s intimate exegesis
Chapter 11. God’s nostrils: the divine senses in early modern England
Afterword: making sense of religion