Part I
1
John H. Arnold
Christian thought in the Middle Ages always struggled with the question of the senses as the source of knowledge, pleasure, and desire. Heir to the Aristotelian principle that all knowledge begins in the senses as well as the Neoplatonic distrust of the body and its carnal modes of knowing, and itself committed to the principle that preternatural and supernatural sources of knowledge were available and meaningful, it was difficult for Christian thinkers to reconcile this classical legacy with its own physics and metaphysics.1
Gabrielle Spiegel presents the senses as a problem for medieval thinkers. In this essay, I want to suggest that they continue to present a problem, both methodological and interpretive, for modern medievalists. They are problematic, first, because the current history of the senses, particularly when applied to the study of religion, has lost track of some of its intellectual inheritance, leading to an unintended bias in focus; and, second, because how we think we can access the senses is often overly dependent on proscriptive sources, leading to a lack of full contextualisation. However, as I argue below, there are productive paths forward and these can be approached in part by recognising that the senses were a fundamental problem, particularly with regard to the faith of the ordinary laity in the later Middle Ages.
The historiographical problems
The current interest in sensory history and the history of the senses sits at a point where several different historiographical vectors intersect, and a focus on religion adds yet further lines to complicate the picture. However, these historiographies have different purposes, and current work is hampered by a failure to recognise that the underlying projects diverge. The most obvious inheritance comes from the work of the Annales School in the decades following 1980, where the project is to historicise both natural and cultural phenomena in order better to situate the changing nature of the human subject.2 At their best, such histories reflect upon the history of affect, of what made people feel and do things at different times in the past, and are necessarily framed by an analysis of the wider political context. Thus, Alain Corbin’s account of church bells across the period of the French Revolution tells us not only about how they sounded and what they meant, nor simply evokes their experience in that time and place, but also situates them within struggles for control. Corbin argues for both a changing sonic habitus (of what becomes aurally ‘natural’) and a more self-conscious political struggle over the soundscape of modern France. It should be noted, however, that not all works aim so high, some preferring simply to evoke or ‘reconstruct’ sensory experience in a particular period, often focusing on a particular sense. This ‘evocative’ project could be linked to a different, and much longer standing, inheritance, namely the study of ‘lived religion’ (la religion vécue). Much work on lived religion has been pleased similarly to reconstruct and make tangible the experience of faith in a particular moment in time, as a kind of exercise in rescuing that which is ‘hidden from history’; though the best examples have again tried to move beyond evocation to something more analytical.3
The other main line of influence comes from the history of science and medicine, and its reconstruction of past understandings of the human body. Here the interest has been in how the senses and bodily sensory experience were explicitly understood and discussed in premodern times, a mode of analysis that is much closer to that of the history of ideas. Foundational medievalist work of this sort analyses the reception of Aristotelian theories of sight in the thirteenth century, attempting thus to understand the development of medieval thought, and, on occasion, to demonstrate its influence beyond the universities – for example, by arguing (as Michael Camille did most brilliantly) that it informed fundamental changes in gothic architecture.4 One should note also that there is a particular subset to this more ideas-led approach, namely long-standing work in the field of theology which has studied the medieval notion of the ‘spiritual senses’, asking primarily whether or not they formed a ‘coherent’ system of productive thought.5
It is worth unpacking these inheritances because part of the problem with the ‘sensory turn’ – as manifest in the history of medieval religion in particular – is a tendency to take at least one interpretive step backwards in the midst of its other innovations. The different strands described in the preceding paragraphs, whilst not innately opposed, are not very closely attuned in their purposes or analytical frameworks: understanding how and why people were affected sensorily in a particular historical moment may be aided by reference to how the senses (or, as often, one particular sense) were understood to function, but it is not a clear or robust approach. It tends also to focus attention on specific discussions or evocations of the senses – moments at which sight or hearing or taste are explicitly evoked – but at the cost of thinking about moments at which the senses are implicitly addressed.
It is surely right to be wary of assuming that ‘their’ senses corresponded straightforwardly to ‘ours’, as Mark M. Smith has warned, and theories of sensory perception from a period can help us to avoid such essentialism.6 But whilst contemporary ideas may allow us to understand some aspects of sensory production – the use of light in Gothic cathedrals, as analysed by Camille for example, or theories regarding the process by which the sound of preaching was imprinted on the ‘inner’ sense of hearing – it is problematical to assume that sensory consumption would be similarly informed and structured for all.7 At the very least, it is clearly the case that theories based upon Aristotelian texts and Arabic learning largely developed in the University of Paris in the mid-thirteenth century were not immediately accessible to everyone in medieval Europe. Moreover, the theories had much more to say about the so-called ‘higher’ senses of sight and hearing than other forms of experience. For historians wishing to avoid the sin of projecting modern categories back into the medieval past, the existence of explicit discussion of, for example, extromission/intromission theories of sight can be a welcome aid to avoiding anachronism; but that is not a tremendously secure methodology if one’s project is to understand, for example, the experience of an ordinary member of the laity viewing the Eucharist at weekly mass, who may not have heard much about post-Aristotelian optical theory.
The latter project is much closer to the aims of the ‘lived religion’ inheritance, but the default tendency in recent medievalist work is to abandon the popular for the elite, perhaps unintentionally, and often without reflection. The desire to establish links between scientific theory and cultural practice tends to result in a focus on ‘high’ culture, with a tendency to assume that past experience can be reconstructed from elite didactic texts, which set out idealised religious sensations.8 It is not wrong to focus on elite culture, and I am not arguing that elite cultures are hermetically separate from popular cultures – rather, that the former does not simply adumbrate or encompass the latter. But it is curious, in an area much indebted to the work of the Annales School and the legacy of la religion vécue, to find the issue of more general religious experience so quickly abandoned or problematically subsumed. In the desire to evoke fully and sympathetically the sensual experience of religion, guided by medieval texts and images steeped in theological and scientific tradition, there is a danger of mistaking ideology and pedagogy for the revelation of past reality. Thus, discussion of the senses, and the spiritual senses, is situated in time – by reference to theological discourse – but is not fully situated historically, as issues of social, cultural and political context fall out of the analysis.9
The issue is particularly acute with regard to medieval theological discussion of the ‘inner’ or ‘spiritual’ senses because of the importance of hierarchies within medieval discourses. The senses are themselves arranged in a hierarchy – often, though not always, with sight at the top – and they are understood to relate to a progression of modes of spiritual perception, where some direct (albeit ‘inner’) sensory experience of God is the eventual goal, whether in this life or the next. As Boyd Coolman explains, with regard to the theology of William of Auxerre in particular, but in a progression shared with various other thinkers, ‘knowledge of God proceeds from an affirmation of creedal doctrines, through a deeper understanding of their meaning and coherence, to a direct and experiential perception of divine realities’.10 This immediately links the senses to spiritual ability and discernment, where the ordinary lay person is rarely imagined to be particularly capable.11 Lay people are required to affirm the creed, but are less often encouraged to delve into its mysteries. This is part of the problem for medieval theologians: not only were there different intellectual traditions regarding the physics and metaphysics of the senses, as outlined by Gabrielle Spiegel in the quotation at the head of this essay, but the implications of these traditions played out across a varied and spiritually unequal Christian people, ranging from those who were training themselves to ever greater spiritual acuity, to those who were thought to be spiritually dull – but all of whom nonetheless possessed physical senses.
The ordinary laity, then, presented a challenge for medieval Christian writers thinking about the senses; and in a different fashion continue to present a challenge to medievalists of sensory history, who need to think carefully about the purpose and scope of their analyses. If we wish to use sensory history to help us understand medieval religion, we must try to encompass not just ‘religion’ at its spiritual pinnacle, but the everyday religion of the laity. And we may find it useful, in regard to this project, to think about how ‘the senses’ were seen as a problem within the period, particularly with regard to the many.
The sensory problems of the laity
For all Christians, the senses were both an opportunity and a problem. They offered an opportunity, in that one could hope to interpret or commune with God’s presence in the world through bodily experience, and perhaps hope also to connect with the divine through the ‘inner’ or ‘spiritual’ senses (understandings of the nature of these, and their relationship to the outer senses, wavered between metaphor, analogy, and some more innate and progressive connection, the outer leading to the inner). On the other hand, they were also a problem: it was through the senses that the body was bound to the sinful world and could be penetrated by temptation. The bodily senses might, moreover, mislead or misconstrue the spiritual benefit and truth of certain phenomena (most obviously, the Eucharist). For the ordinary lay person, these problems were seen as more severe, as they were not generally held to possess as securely the necessary skills of discernment and discipline that would protect them from exterior temptation, or, more importantly, allow them to read beyond the outer appearance of things. Theological discussion of the spiritual senses did not explicitly exclude any Christian. But such texts (from Augustine onwards) always framed sensory knowledge within a developmental hierarchy, presenting an ascent from a more basic to a more profound spiritual communion. In so doing, they implicitly constructed a spiritual elite, associated most clearly with those steeped in the necessary textual tradition and regulated way of life. Some (indeed, for some commentators, perhaps many) of the clergy would find themselves outside that elite; and, conversely, on rare occasion, a lay person might – most often with guidance from a supporting confessor – ascend to the more rarefied level.12 Others might well ascend some way up the ladder of perception, even if not to the highest steps. Nonetheless, the overwhelming and default understanding was of lay people who were less sensorily gifted in regard to spirituality: more prone to being distracted by the sensory input of worldly things, and less able to develop their ‘inner’ senses to commune with God at a deeper level.
If we look then to where the senses appear explicitly with regard to the ordinary lay person in religious discourse, the most immediate area is as one of the frames by which the dangers of sin are communicated.13 Handbooks advising confessors typically list sins of the ‘five senses’ alongside other schema such as the seven deadly sins, or sins against the ten commandments, and these tend to describe sensory experience as both acting upon and being acted upon by the physical world. Thus blasphemy (a sin of the tongue) is likened to wounding Christ; gazing lasciviously at people of the opposite sex acts physically on one’s inner self; greed for food and drink (a sin of touch and smell) ‘heats up’ the sinner, potentially leading them to other temptations. The senses are here overwhelmingly presented as sites of danger, portals into the body that can ultimately harm the soul.
An element in the theological discourse on the spiritual senses lurks implicitly here – namely, the injunction to guard the outer senses so that the inner ones may prosper – but in pastoral instruction for the ordinary laity it is rarely made explicit until the late Middle Ages. The sermons of Federico Visconti, archbishop of Pisa (1254–77) are interesting in this regard, as at several points they gesture toward the importance of sensing ‘properly’ without quite addressing directly, for their lay audience, the notion of sensing ‘spiritually’. Thus, for example, in a sermon given originally in the vernacular on the feast of St Stephen, Visconti elaborated on Matthew 5:8, ‘Blessed are the clean of heart; they shall see God’, by turning to Augustine, who had written (Visconti said) that ‘In order to see God it is necessary to have eyes fit for contemplation, namely directed on high, and so that one can arrive at the state of contemplation’ [Oportet ut videns Deum habeat oculos sanos ut aspiciat, scilicet sursum, et ut aspectus perveniat]. In fact, the closest passage in Augustine (from his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, as the editors of Visconti’s sermons point out) goes a little further, talking of how the properly ‘cleansed’ eye will be able to ‘regard and contemplate its inner light: this indeed is the eye of the heart’ [mundatus oculus simplexque redditus aptus et idoneus erit ad intuendam et contemplandam interiorem lucem suam: iste enim oculus cordis est]. Elsewhere, discussing listening (following the text of Matthew 13:9, ‘He who has ears to hear, let him hear’), Visconti does mention the ears ‘of the head’ and the ears ‘of the mind’ [aures mentis], but the emphasis is again on being attentive to the sermon rather than developing a more elevated spiritual understanding.14
Sensory imagery is also frequently used in pastoral literature to convey examples and to explain theological points, as suitably direct and understandable metaphors for a wide audience. The thirteenth-century encyclopaedic text Placides et Timeo, for example, explains the co-creation of the body and the soul as being like the creation of a bell and the sound it contains. Similarly, the equal spiritual value of all souls, despite their social rank or bodily circumstances, is described as being like the light of a candle which burns equally brightly whether placed in an open or a closed lantern.15 Archbishop Visconti explains in one sermon how faith without works is nothing, ‘just as seeing in the dark is not seeing’.16 To touch upon an area to which I shall return again below, the nature of the Eucharist – and particularly the question of how it was possible that the consecration and consumption of the host could be repeated endlessly in time and place without any diminution of Christ’s body – was frequently explained through simple sensory metaphors, such as noting that many people can all hear the same voice, and can all see the light from the same candle.17
Sensory metaphor was also useful when warning of the dangers of sin and damnation, for it could make something beyond human lived experience both intellectually comprehensible and affectingly vivid. The Book of Vices and Virtues (c. 1375, but a close translation of a thirteenth-century French text) described what one would experience if, via inner mental reflection, one ‘visited’ Hell:
Þere þou schalt see al þat herte hateþ and fleeþ: defaute of al goodnesse, and gret plente of al wikkednesse, brennynge fier, stynkynge brymston, foule stormes & tempestes, routynge ydousedeueles, hunger, þryst þat may neuere be staunched, many manere of turmentrye, wepynges, sorwes more þan any herte may þenke or any tunge may deuyse, and euere-more wiþ-outen ende lastynge.18
The images aim particularly at what is repellent to touch (fire), smell (brimstone), hearing (storms), sight (hideous devils having sex) and, at a slight stretch, taste (unassuageable hunger and thirst). The late medieval English vernacular text Jacob’s Well similarly communicates the horrors of sin and damnation by expatiating on both the sensory elements of the body, and the reaction of those elements to negative sensory stimuli in order to evoke the never-ending labour of atonement for sin:
But þis pytt, þi body, hath V entrees, þat arn þi V bodyly wyttes: þi sy3t, þin heryng, þi smellyng, þi mowth, þi towchyng. Be þise V entrees þe stremys of watyr, þat is, þe artycles of þe gret curse, entryn ofte tymes in-to þi pytt…19
On occasion the more positive corollary of the delights of salvation are similarly explained. In The Book of Vices and Virtues, for example, the positive state of ‘soberness’ (meaning overall spiritual balance and well-being, not just abstinence from alcohol) is evoked via clear images of things that are sensorily pleasing, leading to the ‘grete swetnesse þat is in God’.20
As these examples begin to suggest, it is not always clear whether one is dealing in medieval religious texts with sensory metaphor – where sensory experience is presented as an immediately knowable phenomenon which can be used comparatively to communicate difficult theological arguments or concepts – or with more essential claims about sensory knowledge, where for example the real knowledge and experience of sin may literally enter through the senses. The issue is further complicated by the notion of the spiritual senses: although these are discussed explicitly in some theology, they may lurk – possibly not fully coherently – within some of the sensory images that appear purely metaphorical on first glance.21 Do we, for example, take ‘the grete sweteness þat is in God’ to be a metaphor for something actually unknowable or directly incommunicable (namely, God’s goodness and mercy), or to indicate an experience of the spiritual senses (that is, an inner, but actual, experience of sweetness)? Similar questions arise with regard to more clearly exterior sensory phenomena. Take, for example, church bells. The sound of bells was used metaphorically by various writers to describe preaching, and to indicate more broadly the reception of the word of God. But bells were also understood to tame the power of storms, and to frighten away the ‘demons of the air’ who were thought to promote social dissension.22 Here, a much more literal meaning seems to be implied, as it would appear to be the physical action of sound that is involved in these protective effects – though this physical sensory element is also working in a spiritually ‘real’ fashion. Jean-Marie Fritz remarks that ‘[s]ound, by its immateriality, is the ideal image of the spiritual’;23 but one may also note that sound’s curiously material efficacy is also part of its spiritual attraction – an invisible force, but a force nonetheless.
A rich example of some of the confusion of literal and spiritual meanings comes in a miracle story relating to St Privat, part of a set collated in the first half of the twelfth century by Aldebert III, bishop of Mende.24 The dissolute son of a rich lord lost the power of both speech and hearing (by implication, as punishment for his sin). He went to Rome and to other famous shrines, hoping for a cure, but without avail. His father then led him to St Privat’s shrine in the cathedral in Mende on the eve of the saint’s feast day. At the cathedral many lights were burning, and, all through the night and without cease, the man pleaded to the saint for clemency. As dawn approached, and no improvement was perceptible, the father cried out bitterly. There was however still hope for his son:
But behold now, as the day ascends, and the clergy sing the major mass … and then, with the clergy singing the angelic lauds [i.e. Gloria in excelsis], and the ill man’s hand raised to heaven and his heart – doing that which his mouth could not – pounding to the majesty of heavenly gifts, he quickly began to tremble greatly, and collapsed to the ground, and vomited three gouts of blood.25
He was then helped up and – miraculously – his ears open and his tongue unbound, he regained a strong, clear voice with which he praised God and the saint. There is a pleasing congruence of imagery here: the day breaking – the light of the rising sun implied – and the welling up of music, breaking through the bonds that had tied tongue and ears; sound (the lauds) penetrating flesh (the heart beating), moving him bodily (the blood), and the cure prompting more sound (his clear, loud voice). To ask bluntly if the senses and phenomena here are spiritual, metaphorical or literal would clearly diminish the beauty of the story. But the point can be reversed: it is perhaps only through the power of narrative – its ability to keep disparate elements in play and in motion – that some of the tensions between the material, spiritual, literal and metaphorical can remain productively unresolved.
One might argue that my presumption that there is a problem to be addressed here is anachronistic, that one should instead recognise that all creation, for medieval people, had real spiritual meaning written into it as part of God’s plan. Sensory experiences were thus simultaneously literal, metaphorical and spiritual; hence there is no need to arbitrate between them, and no difficulty to be solved. This is surely so; but my point is that it is successfully so only in certain modes of discourse, such as narrative – and where, as in the miracle story just noted, ‘the senses’ are not addressed explicitly, but are clearly fundamental to the effects of the story. Elsewhere, as in theological treatises specifically dedicated to such issues, medieval writers themselves attempted to delineate matters more clearly. With regard to the ordinary laity, my interest is not in the success or failure of the theological discourse, but the potential implications of the blurred boundaries between metaphor, the spiritual realm, and material reality. To communicate the spiritual via sensory imagery is a powerful strategy, but one which brings its own problems. Metaphor and allusion work, until and unless one’s audience wants instantiation and specificity; and then the very universality of the senses becomes a problem in itself. Are everybody’s senses capable of perceiving the spiritual element in the allusion (and if so, does that mean that they can gain direct apprehension of the divine, without clerical assistance)? If someone perceives the Eucharist as more than a piece of bread – for example, in a Eucharistic miracle where it appears as a small boy or starts to bleed – why doesn’t everyone? As Caroline Walker Bynum notes, high medieval theologians tended to explain the latter point by arguing that God has effected a miracle on the eyes of the perceiver, rather than on the Host itself: those ‘seeing’ the Host bleed are in fact doing so at two removes (the Host is really Christ embodied, which appears to be bread, which appears to those experiencing the miracle to be bleeding).26 This is theologically adept, but more than a little confusing within pastoral discourse, where the point of miracles was usually to persuade the less learned of the direct reality of spiritual things.
With the Eucharist in particular, the issue of the difference between perception and reality is acute – indeed, one might say that belief in Christ’s presence in the bread and wine is the act of faith that stands at the heart of later medieval Christianity. Various pastoral writers emphasised that one of the reasons that the Host appeared to the senses to be just like bread was precisely because faith demands belief without proofs. But miracles also seem to offer such proofs; and the metaphorical use of sensory metaphors carries with it the possibility at least of suggesting that the spiritually ineffable can be tugged into the corporeal realm of sensory knowledge. Pastoral discourse on the Eucharist emphasised that God could work all kinds of corporeal miracles (often by reference to various biblical stories, such as Christ changing water into wine) and hence that the real, material transformation of the Host should not be doubted. At the same time, adapting earlier theological discussion of why that transformation was not sensorily legible, priests emphasised that this was an act of accommodation on God’s part, to avoid horrifying the communicant. An extract from a poem written in the first half of the fourteenth century by William of Shoreham, vicar of Chart in Kent, is exemplary in this respect:
For that colour, ne that savour / Ne beth nauƷt ther-inne Cryste / ThaƷ he ther-inne schewe hym / By hys myƷtefolle lyste [cleverness] / So couthe; / Ne myƷte elles bet be seƷe, / Ne beter yuƷred [chewed] inne mouth.
For Ʒet he schewed hym in flesche, / Other ine blody thynge, / Hydous hyƷt were to the syƷte, / And to the cast wlatynge [revolting to sight], / And pyne [painful]; / Thanne hys hyt betere in fourme of brede, / And eke in forme of wyne.27
It is notable that, as in many other similar discussions of the Eucharist for the laity, William does not attempt to turn to the philosophical (and Aristotelian) distinction between the ‘accidents’ and the ‘species’ of the Host. Philosophical reflection or argument by the laity was not encouraged in this area: as Richard of Wetheringsett put it succinctly in his treatise for priests: ‘this food is God and whoever denies this is a heretic … We are enjoined to believe. We are forbidden to discuss’.28
Affecting and policing the senses
I suggested earlier that one of the ways that the problems of the senses could be managed and contained – and perhaps particularly within pastoral discourse addressed to the laity – was via narrative, in its ability to distribute potentially conflicting elements across diegetic time and space. But probably the most important mode in which the relationship of the sensory and the spiritual was managed was via liturgy.29 Eric Palazzo has provided very considerable insight into how the five senses were ‘activated’ by liturgy, and how the liturgical work of the mass in particular produced a ‘synaesthetic’ experience, in which the supernatural elements were evoked and then embodied via a fusion of sight, sound, and smells.30 Palazzo’s work, however, raises questions about how effectively all the elements of liturgy ‘worked’ for lay, rather than clerical, participants.
Not all parish churches would be able to produce such a successful, or sensorily rich, liturgical experience as, say, the cathedral church at the Easter mass. Take, for example, reports from Henri de Vezelay’s visitations as archdeacon of thirty-one churches in Bayeux in 1267, at which various faults or lacks are noted regarding liturgical texts and objects. Vaucelles lacked a missal, whilst that at Varaville was ‘old and difficult to read’, a similar fault noted for the breviary at Banneville; Bretteville, Soliers, Tilly, Robehomme, and Emieville needed a psalter, and Colombelles ‘lacked books’. A couple of places needed a chalice, though whether this was a total lack or to replace something considered worn out is unclear. At Cormelles-le-Royal the church was ‘completely ruined’, and similarly Petiville was noted for having a ruined chancel which was ‘quite dangerous’. Croissonville had all necessary ornaments, but ‘the church is old and quite dark’.31 The visitation records of ninety churches in the archdeaconry of Totnes in 1342 give slightly greater detail regarding some faults: at North Bovey the chalice and missal had been stolen, the gradual was rotten and badly bound, the parish psalter was ‘insufficient’, and the images of the saints in the church were ‘shameful and badly painted’ (or possibly ‘badly decorated’) [inhonestus et male depictus], the cross also being male depictus.32 At Widdecombe the books were falling apart, the nave roof leaked, the images were again male depictus, and the chancel was dark and badly roofed. At Lustleigh the chancel was also dark, plus a glass window was broken. At Hennock the chancel was extremely dark, a window was cracked, and when it rained the altar got wet.33 In these visitations, the churches with problems were a small minority (perhaps between 5 and 10 percent of those in the diocese). But the problems were sometimes clearly serious, as at Tavistock where not only were the liturgical books deficient, but mass could not be celebrated when it was raining because of the disrepair to the chancel; and similarly, at Peaworthy where both the chalice and the pyx had been stolen – which presumably made it impossible to celebrate mass – and the nave roof was totally ruined.
My point here is not to suggest that the liturgy was not successfully celebrated in parishes; it clearly was. But ‘successfully celebrated’ indicates a range of potential outcomes, only some of which might achieve the kind of sensorily rapturous experience imagined in modern analysis. What could be achieved in some locales was much more limited via the available materials, setting, and audience (remembering that not all lay people attended mass regularly). Above all, as I have argued elsewhere, the sensorily rich and spiritually charged encounters aimed at – and sometimes achieved by – liturgical rituals need to be set in comparative context with other more quotidian lay experiences, such as frequently seeing simple wayside crosses or reciting the Ave Maria for various purposes.34
It is undoubtedly the case that liturgy aimed to bring together the sensory and the spiritual for all Christians, temporarily collapsing the more difficult issues which troubled theologians over the inner and outer senses, and working to produce spiritual affect through an embodied rather than a purely mental form of cognition. The archaeologist and theorist Yannis Hamilakis, in his important book on the senses, stunningly evokes the lived experience of liturgy. His focus in this passage is on medieval Byzantine Christianity, but many of his points can be related to western Christianity as well, particularly if one considers processional events as well as Sunday mass:
Imagine being part of such context. How can you experientially isolate the visual from the tactile, the olfactory, the auditory? As you were moving through the church, the objects around you would be also changing. Your body and the icons would engage in a process of inter-animation: the space, the icons, the liturgical chants, the incense would elicit specific reactions from you; they would invite you to perform certain postures and gestures from crossing to kissing. As you moved closer to icons, your breathing and the breathing of your co-participants would make the flames from the kindles flicker. The changing lighting would thus activate the reflections from the glass, gold, or silver and make the figures on the icons move. At the same time, the whole space would resonate with chants, whereas extracts from liturgical hymns could even be found on the icons themselves, fusing yet again the visual and the aural. Humans, things, light, sound, smell, incense, smoke, all become elements of the ‘flesh’, as Merleau-Ponty would put it. This corporeal experience would reach its climax in another act of in-corporation – in the Eucharist.35
Where Palazzo emphasises synaesthesia, Hamilakis suggests something even more radical: that the usual understanding of ‘the five senses’ is only one way of thinking about the sensory, and that it is in fact a particular inheritance of western modernity, divorced from the sensory experiences in different cultures and periods (where, for example, speech or bodily posture may be understood as key senses).36 To pursue further the kind of analysis which Hamilakis suggests, one might also reflect on how often the sensory experience of liturgy is a collective and communal phenomenon, particularly for the laity. The sensory stimuli trigger responses in individual bodies, but the affect thus produced is importantly communal: the experience of being part of the congregation, of coming together in friendship and charity (caritas) to open up collectively to a joint spiritual experience of viewing the Eucharist, and exchanging the kiss of peace at the end of the mass.
This suggests ways in which the simultaneous activation of what we tend to think of as different senses may be particularly powerful, and particularly suited at producing spiritual affect. A preacher might refer to an image – such as the crucified Christ – and evoke movement and tactility, as for example in a thirteenth-century Parisian sermon where the audience was invited to imagine that Christ was reaching out to embrace and kiss them. Or similarly, as in another of Archbishop Visconti’s sermons, a preacher might ask the audience to think of themselves in Mary’s place watching the unfolding horrors: ‘And when the hour comes, you [Mary] will see the flesh, which was drawn from yourself, suspended on the cross, bruised, wounded and bleeding from five deep wounds, and hanged between thieves’.37 The sound of the sermon, the visual stimulus of the crucifix, the activated memories of the Passion tale, the empathetic evocation of a mother’s suffering, the sight of a broken and bleeding body, and an image of a very tactile encounter with all these – Visconti tells his audience that they should be ‘pierced as with a sword’ by the Passion – in a sermon delivered in the sensually rich environment of a wealthy church on a particular saint’s day: all this works to forge a very strong and affective performance, where, as Hamilakis suggests, distinguishing between the ‘different’ sensory elements may not be the most useful analytical approach.
That we do however thus distinguish – that there is a schema of five senses that we have inherited in western Europe – is in part because of the medieval Church’s attempt to grapple with the conflicted inheritance of Aristotelian and Platonic notions of worldly embodiment and spiritual transcendence. Hamilakis argues that the intellectual traditions that delimit and map the ‘five’ senses arose in large part in an attempt to control and assuage their otherwise unruly, unpredictable, and anarchic tendencies.38 I would suggest that it is largely the fact that the ordinary laity were sensorily equipped but assumed usually to be lacking in spiritual discernment that particularly prompted both the elaboration of sensory spiritual affect and the development of pastoral discourses aimed at policing sensory experience – these then forming a major cornerstone in the development of that Western tradition. On the former point one notes, from the late twelfth century onwards, the increasing presence and sophistication of wall-paintings and other visual schema, the great explosion in preaching ‘exempla’ didactically aimed at a lay audience, and the increasing size and resonance of church bells, all of which sought to prompt an emotional, affective response from a lay audience.39 None of this is solely lay rather than clerical; but the increasing scope and vitality of later medieval spiritual culture, as has long been recognised, rests upon the congruence of lay enthusiasm and material support, and the Church’s desire to more effectively encourage and channel the spiritual aspirations of the laity.
The Church did not, however, embrace unfettered enthusiasm: there was also a policing of the senses. As the history of heresy makes all too apparent, it was not permissible for just anyone to preach or provide spiritual interpretation of worldly things. I noted above the prevalence of discussion of sin via the schema of the five senses. This was not only didactic – a means of explaining sin – but also a form of discipline, arranged within a pedagogic hierarchy. As sin was wont to enter all human beings via their senses, those senses must be managed, and pastoral discourse provided the means and the mode of instruction to attempt to control the bodily senses and – in some of the vernacular instruction of the late Middle Ages at least – to foster the inner, spiritual senses. There is something of a monastic model here, of course – advocating control of diet, speech, appetite, visual stimuli, the aural regularity of liturgical prayer – and some historians have indeed argued that, from perhaps the late twelfth century on, we start to see a ‘monasticization’ of the laity.40 However, whilst the initial logic perhaps does come from the notion of the monastic rule, the pastoral texts – the theological summae, the sermon and exempla collections, confessors’ manuals, and books of spiritual instruction addressed to those with the care of souls and latterly to the laity themselves – further elaborate a wider regimen for the management of sin, and to some degree for the development of spiritual ability.
Despite the increased focus that they display with regard to lay piety, these pastoral discourses continued to be predicated on the notion of a gulf between the spiritually adept elite and the vast majority of people. They hold out the possibility – as Catholic theology requires – of salvation for all, but present a ‘never-ending work’ (as Jacob’s Well puts it) and a narrow path that only a few can fully achieve. All lay people have senses and thus can be addressed by these texts and practices; but developing sense experience into something spiritually meaningful requires further progress and a particular accomplishment, as individuals must work to make their senses discern things in a spiritually correct fashion. Within this circumscribed space there are many grades of ability, complications of experience, levels of discernment, and the like. In short, pastoral instruction is a discourse in a roughly Foucauldian sense, that draws upon the senses (among other things) in order to map, delimit, distribute, and give meaning to a range of positive and negative experience; and, with regard to the spiritual senses, to rarefy what we might call the spiritually sensing subject by emphasising the problems of false perception and the barriers to universal discernment.
As Brigitte Cazelles noted in her book on ‘soundscape’ in medieval France, a recurrent instruction for personal spiritual development was to remove oneself from the noise of the world in order to work on refining the inner senses. This sensory work depends upon a physical action (removing oneself from everyday concerns and needs), and maps out a kind of sensory hierarchy, placing vision over audition (in Cazelles’s analysis), which
thus corresponds to a social order that gives intellect priority over ignorance. The result is a distinction between, on the one hand, the mentally able members of society (a select community of thinkers each endowed with the power to read and reflect in silence) and, on the other hand, the unrefined masses.41
Here we can see that the understanding of the senses is similarly structured to the language of the emotions as deployed in pastoral discourse: as I have analysed elsewhere, a set of universal potentials (all Christian peoples being understood to have emotional responses in potentia) are deployed to produce moral affect, are coded as spiritually ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, are arrayed hierarchically in regard to spiritual discernment, and are a part of the manufacturing a particular kind of believing subject.42 Thomas Lentes has discussed the devotional use of images in the later Middle Ages, arguing that we should not interpret late medieval ‘private’ worship of images as isolated from wider devotional practice. He notes that late medieval prayer books do not only instruct the lay reader how to look devoutly at an image, but what to do whilst engaged in such devotion, namely to pray and enact other moments of liturgy.43 This element in pastoral discourse illustrates well the Foucauldian sense of ‘power’ I want to evoke here: one which instructs and shapes, rather than simply represses; but one which sits also in an uneven and unequal landscape of social, material, and cultural resources.
Conclusion
Here, in its entirety, is an exemplum – a little story for use by preachers – from a fourteenth-century southern French collection collated by an anonymous Sack Friar:
Exemplum against the ornamentation of women. I heard that a certain woman, against her husband’s will, put makeup on her face. And when on a certain feast day she made herself up in this way, such that she looked like quite another woman, her husband asked her where his wife was. To which Portia said, ‘Lord, sign yourself [with the cross] and commend yourself to God, for am I none other than Portia, your wife?’ ‘Truly you do not seem to be my wife, for my wife is usually brunette, and you are blond, she is usually pallid and you are ruddy-faced’. ‘For God’, said Portia, ‘I am your wife!’ Her husband said, ‘If you are my wife, I will see if I can shift those adornments that I see on your face’. And using his robe as a scourer, he took her by the hair and began to scrub strongly at her cheeks until the blood ran. She, in truth, cried out ‘Lord, I am your wife!’ And thus, her being well scrubbed, he said ‘Now I can see, because indeed you are Portia my wife!’ – and thus he held his wife in check.44
This seems to me to be a sensory tale, although none of the five senses is explicitly cited. It is, firstly, about seeing and not seeing: about how surfaces can conceal the true nature of things. It is also interestingly vague about seeing ‘through’ those surfaces: we cannot be clear whether or not the husband ‘sees through’ the make-up from the very beginning, or whether, initially at least, Portia is like various other characters in medieval literature who are able to conceal themselves from even close friends and relatives with quite simple disguises. How we who hear or read the tale ‘see’ Portia herself is part of how the tale works as narrative, that is, as a movement from one situation to another that catches the audience up in the action. It is also a story about touch. It invites an embodied response from its audience, its female audience in particular: the putting on of makeup and the feeling of being adorned and painted; and then the experience of a particular kind of bodily suffering, as one’s skin is scrubbed ‘until the blood ran’ – in the process of which, some further violence is done to one’s presentation of one’s self. Again, where the audience places itself – in whose skin – is dramatically complex; and, perhaps, depends upon each individual’s past experience of violence, as perpetrator or victim.
There are three things to emphasise from the story of the made-up wife, by way of framing my conclusion. One is quite simply that if we look only at material which explicitly names one of the senses, we will miss much of what would actually tell us about the sensory worlds of the past, and will miss in particular various things that were likely to have moved people, through their sensory experiences. Religious historians are well-attuned to this point within the realm of liturgy, but should consider it in other contexts as well, where the ritualised structures and encoded meanings are less formalised. We need to think also of how the senses are activated not only by images, sounds, smells, and so forth, but also by texts which evoke an embodied imaginative response.45 The second point is that when we look at how people are sensorily affected by cultural productions, we are likely to find a variety of responses, for although most human beings have much the same sensory makeup (barring accident and disability), their sensory experiences are not outside or beyond other ‘positioning’ factors such as gender, class, age, and so forth. This is again something that medieval sensory theory, such as Aristotelian optics, is unlikely to be able to supply us if we continue to use it as a preferred interpretive frame. And the third point is that within sensory encounters with the sacred we are likely to find fundamental issues of power and discipline: again, not only the explicit disciplining and training of the bodily and spiritual senses, but the use of sensory prompts and affective imagery to produce and shape moral subjects. I don’t mean to suggest that this is all-encompassing or effortless: some women listening to the exemplum about Portia could no doubt resist internalising its multiple messages of subjection. But one suspects that it would not be that easy to shake off the unpleasantly effective – and, I would argue, affective – image of the rouged cheeks and bleeding skin (a sensory moment both visual and embodied).
I began this essay with Gabrielle Spiegel’s astute summation of the tensions within the medieval understanding of the senses. But one could reframe the import of this: rather than saying that the bodily senses are a problem for medieval spirituality, one could argue that the inherent complexities and tensions within the senses (particularly as they ranged across a Christian community from the most learned and discerning, to the most ‘simple’ and worldly) formed a fertile problematic for the production of medieval ‘religion’ as a system of images, practices, and disciplines.46 Theological abstractions are one part of that productive problematic, as they provide the discursive frame for explicit discussion on the topic, corralling the understanding of embodied reaction into the ‘five senses’ paradigm whilst elaborating also the more slippery notion of the inner or spiritual senses. However, a fully ‘sensory history’ that includes analysis of how the senses ‘work’ in regard to spiritual experience cannot rely only on this explicit discourse, and must not assume that it provides a transparent guide to the sensory ‘consumption’ of the greater part of the people. I would like to suggest that we could productively broaden this somewhat, to think harder about the notion of ‘affect’, where the main point for us historically is to understand how and why people were ‘moved’ by certain phenomena: moved bodily and cognitively, and indeed spiritually. In this line, we are not well-served if we think about that only via the ‘five senses’ paradigm, as focussed on discrete and individual human subjects, but should rather recognise that sensory history is one part of a wider set of issues, where questions of social class and status, emotions and disciplinary programmes, and the reach and address of cultural productions matter very considerably to both individual and collective experience.
Sensory history is proving to be a useful ‘turn’ in historiography; but it is clear that a focus on the ‘senses’ only makes sense – as it were – if also conducted in concert with analysis of other intersecting areas. These include the history of the emotions, a fully historicised understanding of embodiment (where the notion of a universalised and transhistorical ‘human subject’ is held at a critical distance for further inquiry), and, most of all, the analysis of different modes of subjectivity, power, and resistance. In all these ways, I would suggest once again that what we really need is not so much ‘a history of the senses’ – where the tendency is always to be pulled toward the specific viewpoint and arrangement of the senses found in a period’s intellectual abstractions – but histories of affect.
Notes
1 Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘Paradoxes of the Senses’, in Rethinking the Medieval Senses: Heritage, Fascinations, Frames, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Andreas Kablitz, and Alison Calhoun (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 186.
2 Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odour and the French Social Imagination, trans. Miriam L. Kochan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); idem, Village Bells: The Culture of the Senses in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (London: Papermac, 1999). As Mark Smith (see below) has noted, argument about the relative importance of different senses is found in earlier Annales work, particularly Lucien Febvre’s suggestion in The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais (first published in French in 1942) that senses other than sight were more important in that era, and were then devalued in modernity; what is at stake in that analysis is therefore another element in the ‘transition to modernity’ debates. English translation by Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
3 A recent evocation: Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). A classic analysis: William A. Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).
4 Among many other publications, see Michael Camille, Gothic Art: Visions and Revelations of the Medieval World (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996).
5 See Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley, eds., The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); as the introduction to that collection sets out, there has been work on the spiritual senses since the 1930s.
6 Mark M. Smith, ‘Producing Sense, Consuming Sense, Making Sense: Perils and Prospects for Sensory History’, Journal of Social History 40 (2007): 841–58. For a nice attempt to nudge us away from assuming a transhistorical interpretation, in regard to medieval wall paintings, see Kate Giles, ‘Seeing and Believing: Visuality and Space in Premodern England’, World Archaeology 39 (2007): 105–21.
7 The useful distinction between production and consumption is made by Smith. See also his Sensory History (Oxford: Berg, 2007). For a very impressive attempt to combine both aspects, see Martin Roch, L’intelligence d’un sens: Odeurs miraculeuses et odorat dans l’Occident du haut Moyen Age (V-VIII siècles) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009); assisted however by a focus on a period where evidence of ‘reception’ is essentially non-existent.
8 For example, Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Jean-Marie Fritz, Paysages sonores du Moyen Age: Le versant épistémologique (Paris: H. Champion, 2000); the essays in Nichols, Kablitz, and Calhoun, eds. Rethinking the Medieval Senses.
9 Thus Matthew Milner’s important and thought-provoking The Senses and the English Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011) rather problematically takes the intellectual framework (presented as monovocally Aristotelian) and the idealisations of didactic works as too direct a guide to the lived experience of late medieval Christianity.
10 Boyd Taylor Coolman, Knowing God by Experience: The Spiritual Senses in the Theology of William of Auxerre (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 6. For an important discussion of how Aristotelian thought affected the understanding of the spiritual senses, see Boyd Taylor Coolman, ‘Alexander of Hales’, in The Spiritual Senses, ed. Gavriluyk and Coakley, 121–39.
11 On the intellectual disparagement of lay ability to ‘believe’ in any profound way, see Peter Biller, ‘Oxen and She-Asses: Intellectuals and the Masses’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity, ed. John H. Arnold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 323–39.
12 One thinks particularly of various female mystics, but notes also the degree to which their claims to spiritual sensory ascendance could provoke concern; see Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
13 Among various other writers, see further Milner, The Senses and the English Reformation, 53–62.
14 Nicole Bériou et al., eds., Les sermons et la visite pastorale de Federico Visconti, archevêque de Pise (1253–1277) (Rome: École française de Rome, 2001), 474, 530. In a further sermon on the same passage Visconti does mention the ‘ears of the inner heart’ (at 573) but the implication is again in regard to paying attention rather than developing a greater spiritual communion.
15 Claude A. Thomasset, ed., Placides et Timéo, ou Li secrés as philosophes (Paris: Librairie Droz, 1980), 119–22, 206–7; on the bell metaphor cf. Fritz, Paysages sonores, 49. This is an elite text, but written in the vernacular, framed as the instruction of young prince, and one can assume that the images and examples it provided were suitable for re-use in other pedagogic and pastoral contexts.
16 Bériou et al., eds., Les sermons … Visconti, 474.
17 Thus, for example, the early thirteenth-century pastoral work Qui bene presunt presbiteri by Richard of Wetheringsett (e.g. BL MS Eg. 655, f. 94r[a]), and the highly influential fourteenth-century pastoral work by William of Pagula, Oculus sacerdotis (e.g. BL MS Royal 6 E i, f. 31v). In the fifteenth-century Pupilla oculi (an adaptation of the Oculus sacerdotis), John de Burgo uses the slightly more complicated metaphor of a broken mirror producing multiple reflections (e.g. BL MS Royal 11 B X, f. 14v[b]).
18 The Book of Vices and Virtues: A Fourteenth Century English Translation of the ‘Somme le Roi’ of Lorens d’Orléans, ed. W. Nelson Francis, EETS o.s. 217 (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), 71.
19 Jacob’s Well: An Englisht Treatise on the Cleansing of Man’s Conscience, ed. Arthur Brandeis, EETS o.s. 115 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1900), 1.
20 The Book of Vices and Virtues, ed. Francis, 279.
21 It should also be noted that influential and authoritative sources for the notion of the inner or spiritual senses, such as Augustine’s writings (undoubtedly influential on the Middle English texts discussed here), were not themselves fully coherent or systematic. See Matthew R. Lootens, ‘Augustine’, in The Spiritual Senses, ed. Gavrilyuk and Coakley, 56–70.
22 John H. Arnold and Caroline Goodson, ‘Resounding Community: The History and Meaning of Medieval Church Bells’, Viator 43 (2012): 99–130.
23 Fritz, Paysages sonores, 49. Several historians remark on the medieval ‘belief’ that sound was a physical thing; as anyone who has been in the vicinity of a large bell being struck – or stood next to a large bass amp at a gig – can attest, medieval people were right.
24 Clovis Brunel, Les Miracles de Saint Privat; suivi des opusculs d’Aldebert III, eveque de Mende (Paris, 1912), i-xix.
25 Brunel, Miracles, 13.
26 Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Seeing and Seeing Beyond: The Mass of St Gregory in the Fifteenth Century’, in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey F Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 208–40 (at 213).
27 Thomas Wright, ed., The Religious Poems of William de Shoreham, Vicar of Chart-Sutton, in Kent, in the Reign of Edward II (London, 1849), 26. See further John H. Arnold, ‘The Materiality of Unbelief in Late Medieval England’, in Sophie Page, ed. The Unorthodox Imagination in Late Medieval Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 65–95; Jennifer Garrison, ‘Mediated Piety: Eucharistic Theology and Lay Devotion in Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne’, Speculum 85 (2010): 894–922.
28 BL MS Eg. 655, ff. 93v-94r: … iste cib[um] d[eu]s et qui negat hereticus est… . Credere iube[a]m[us]. Di[s]cut[er]e p[ro]hibe[a]m[us].
29 For a dazzling analysis of this for a very early period, see Georgia Frank, ‘“Taste and See”: The Eucharist and the Eyes of Faith in the Fourth Century’, Church History 70 (2001): 619–43.
30 See particularly Eric Palazzo, ‘Art, Liturgy and the Five Senses in the Early Middle Ages’, Viator 41 (2010): 25–56; idem, ‘Missarum solemnia: Eucharistic Rituals in the Middle Ages’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity, ed. Arnold, 238–53; idem, L’invention chrétienne des 5 sens dans la liturgie et l’art au Moyen Age (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2014).
31 Leopold Delisle, ed., ‘Visites pastorales de Maitre Henri de Vezelai, archdiacre de Hiémois et 1267 et 1268’, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes 54 (1893): 457–67.
32 George G. Coulton, ed., ‘A Visitation of the Archdeaconry of Totnes in 1342’, English Historical Review 26 (1911): 108–24. The complaint about images is repeated for Widdecombe, Bovey Tracey, Ipplepenne, Diptford, Dean Prior (where it is noted that the image of the Virgin lacked one hand), Cornworthy, Ashwater, and Peaworthy.
33 Ibid. Issues with roofs and windows are reported elsewhere: in five places the roof of the nave leaked, and the windows of three naves were broken or lacked all glass; in six places the chancel roof was a problem, and chancel windows similarly in nine churches.
34 See further Arnold, ‘Belief and the Senses for the Medieval Laity’, in Les cinq sens au Moyen Age, ed. Eric Palazzo (Paris: Cerf, 2016); Arnold, ‘Materiality of Unbelief’.
35 Yannis Hamilakis, Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 78.
36 On ‘speech’ as part of the medieval senses, see C. M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 84–116.
37 Sara Lipton, ‘“The Sweet Lean of His Head”: Writing about Looking at the Crucifix in the High Middle Ages’, Speculum 80 (2005): 1172–1208; Beriou, ed., Les sermons … Visconti, 535 (sermon at church of St Peter-in-Chains, given originally in vernacular).
38 See particularly Hamilakis, Archaeology and the Senses, 55.
39 Note the increased use of bells to ‘rouse’ or ‘kindle’ piety in those absent from church when signalling the elevation of the Host, for example; Arnold and Goodson, ‘Resounding community’, 121–22.
40 André Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages, trans. M. J. Schneider (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 72.
41 Brigitte Cazelles, Soundscape in Early French Literature (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 5–6.
42 John H. Arnold, ‘Inside and Outside the Medieval Laity: Reflections on the History of the Emotions’, in European Religious Cultures, ed. Miri E. Rubin (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2010), 107–30.
43 Thomas Lentes, ‘“As far as the eye can see …”: Rituals of Gazing in the Late Middle Ages’, in The Mind’s Eye, ed. Hamburger and Bouché, 360–73.
44 Jean-Thiébaut Welter, ‘Un recueil d’exempla du XIIIe siècle’, Etudes franciscaines 30 (1913): 646–65; 31 (1914): 194–213, 312–20; story no. 219. See also no. 15, where the Virgin Mary tells a woman wearing make-up that she cannot see her face when it is thus adorned.
45 See similarly Patricia Cox Miller, ‘Visceral Seeing: The Holy Body in Late Ancient Christianity’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 12 (2004): 391–411.
46 Note the analysis of ‘paradox’ in fifteenth-century religious ideas about matter in Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality, although she is curiously uninterested in liturgical ritual or questions of cultural power and authority. For another, more specific but also highly subtle, analysis for a later period, see Nicky Hallett, The Senses in Religious Communities 1600–1800: Early Modern ‘Convents of Pleasure’ (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).