2
Richard Newhauser
Treatments of the virtue of temperance are not the setting in which some would expect to find ethical analyses of the five external senses in the Middle Ages. Considered from the perspective of a common, culturally regressive view of all things medieval, it might seem that treatises on ascesis, or particularly severe sermons, would be the more likely place for a focus on the ethics of the senses, types of literature, that is to say, in which one could anticipate that denunciations of sensory perception would flourish amid warnings about the dangers of not carefully guarding the senses. And in fact, ascetic considerations and homiletic reprimands do deliver on such expectations – but that is true whether these admonitions were composed in the European Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance, or anywhere on the globe in the twenty-first century.1 Nevertheless, in the contemporary popular imagination, an austere repression of sensory pleasure has been taken to accurately represent the position of sanctioned ideology in the Middle Ages in Europe, a controlling dogma that was only upended with the turn to the Italian Renaissance. The most recent and celebrated expression of this view is Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, where the resurgence of Burckhardtian historiography guides the depiction of the place of the sensory world in the millennium preceding the Italian quattrocento: ‘something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body’.2 What one finds in Greenblatt’s work, then, is a Middle Ages in which the senses served only to tempt humanity to the enjoyment of the beckoning material world, an allurement which was successfully quashed before that ‘something’ occurred. This claim is hardly new, though earlier and more scholarly statements of it were not as categorical in making the Italian Renaissance the decisive pivot to modernity. In his influential and controversial study of the late Middle Ages, Johan Huizinga, for example, also asserted that sensory enjoyment was considered sinful per se in the Middle Ages, but he then went on to stress that renaissance culture had not found a way of distinguishing between levels of acceptable or unacceptable pleasures. That separation, he felt, occurred only in the modern period, which he located in the eighteenth century, when Puritanism lost its intensity and anyone ‘attempting to draw the dividing line between the higher and lower enjoyment of life according to the dictates of ethical consciousness would no longer separate art from sensuous enjoyment…’.3 As John Parker and others have noted, Greenblatt’s (and in some senses, even Huizinga’s) narrow materialistic historiography flattens out the place of sensory pleasure to mean essentially a physical immoderation that was rejected wholesale by medieval Christianity in anxious warnings about the need to guard the senses, and then overcome in the Italian Renaissance to directly yield modernity.4 It is a common view of the Middle Ages, one completed in the popular imagination by the view of a medieval ‘counterculture’ awash in sensuality, a bawdy age that lived out a permanent carnival of the senses as transgression against sanctioned authorities.
Medieval texts of moral theology dealing with moderation in its many varieties sound a much different note than one would expect from either of these stereotypes. Nowhere is there a better example of this more refined treatment of temperantia in the practical pastoral theology of the Late Middle Ages than in the influential, but still too often unexplored, works of William Peraldus (d. c. 1271).5 The examination of Peraldus’s Compendium on the Vices, and in particular the ‘Tractatus de temperantia’ in his Compendium on the Virtues, will demonstrate the importance to moral theologians of the moderation of sensory experience, not its ascetic denial. This emphasis on sensory restraint in understanding temperance is part of the inheritance and adaptation of Aristotelian thought by scholastic authors. Peraldus contributed to the ongoing process of adapting the Aristotelian tradition for late medieval Christian society by putting an Aristotelian-inflected notion of temperance and its sensory understanding at the disposal of generations of pastoral theologians and their congregations.
Peraldus may serve not only as a guide to the connection of temperance and the senses, especially in the pastoral literature of the late Middle Ages, but also as an author whose influential works demonstrate the wide variety of medieval conceptions of the senses and the way this diversity challenges presuppositions about the place of the senses in the Middle Ages. Born in Peyraud, France, William Peraldus (Guillaume Peyraut, Guilielmus Peraldus) probably studied at the university in Paris before entering the Dominican Order there and eventually becoming the prior of the Dominicans in Lyon. He wrote with such authority, and was accepted as such in his own time, that he is often referred to in contemporary manuscripts as the Archbishop (or suffragan) of that city, though he never held this office. As an active member of an order dedicated to preaching, he authored many sermons, and a large number of them have survived.6 He also composed two important pedagogical texts that demonstrate his keen interest in the program of pastoral reform of the thirteenth century: On Monastic Instruction [De eruditione religiosorum] (c. 1260–1265), and On the Education of Princes [De eruditione principum] (c. 1265).7 But he was more widely known in the Middle Ages for his Compendium on the Vices [Summa de vitiis], which was completed about 1236 and sometimes circulated together with its companion volume, the Compendium on the Virtues [Summa de virtutibus] sometime after the latter work’s completion before 1249.8
The compendia illustrate the importance of the literature of morality in Dominican instruction and the preparation of sermons, material which was meant to benefit above all the brothers who were carrying out the Order’s specific tasks of hearing confession and, especially, preaching to the masses. Reform measures had been initiated at the Third Lateran Council (1178), but the specific tasks of preaching and hearing confession were set as the official duties of the clergy at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215–1216). These reform initiatives occurred in the period that saw the founding of the Dominican Order, as the Church leadership attempted to counteract the effects of a perceived indolence on the part of the secular clergy and monastic orders in educating the community of Christians, and of such heresies as that of the Albigensians in southern France, by making room for apostolic movements within legitimate Church authority that would reaffirm its power once more among the broad masses. But Peraldus’s work on the vices became popular far beyond the Dominican Order because it served as a guide for all forms of instruction (in preaching, confession, and penance) at a time when pastoral work was emphasised by the Church as a way of promoting ecclesiastical self-reform and the simultaneous reform of society at all levels. The Summa de vitiis and the Summa de virtutibus, whether transmitted separately or together, grew to be some of the most successful tools for meeting the needs of the common members of the community in matters of moral education. Their popularity testifies to the importance of ethics as one of the most productive categories of conceptualisation in the later Middle Ages. The analysis of the vices and virtues that is so prevalent at the end of the medieval period is also a way of equating the individual with his or her moral identity. In their wider context, thus, in the way they encouraged and furthered the call to introspective examination of the conscience that forms the core of many sermons and self-examination in preparation for confession, Peraldus’s compendia also had an important place in the development of ideas of the self in Western culture, a self conceived of as both a social and an ethical phenomenon.
From the time of its earliest dissemination, the Compendium on the Vices and its vision of individual and communal order in the task of overcoming the vices had a major impact on the moral tradition. It achieved a degree of popularity unmatched by any of its peers, such as the Summa de bono by Philip, chancellor of the Cathedral of Notre Dame (d. 1236); the Summa de vitiis by the Franciscan Johannes de Rupella (c. 1236); the Summa de vitiis et virtutibus by William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris (1228–1249); the Franciscan Servasanto da Faenza’s Liber de virtutibus et vitiis (c. 1260); or the Breviloquium de virtutibus antiquorum principum et philosophorum by the Franciscan John of Wales (d. c. 1285).9 A relatively limited number of copies of these works is still preserved – as the most popular of the group, John of Wales’s text is extant in 153 copies – but Peraldus’s Compendium on the Vices exists today in an extremely large number of manuscript copies – over 620 – either transmitted by itself or together with the author’s treatment of the virtues, which is extant in about half as many copies as the Compendium on the Vices. These texts were also printed over twenty times before the late seventeenth century.10 They served as the major inspiration for a very large number of Latin and vernacular compendia of ethics that extended far beyond the boundaries of the Order of Preachers, determining the form and content not only of many Latin treatises on the seven deadly sins and contrary virtues11 for confessors and preachers, but also of just as many vernacular texts on the vices and virtues, including the Fiore di virtù,12 the Somme le roi,13 the Spiegel der Sonden,14 Michel Beheim’s Büchlein von den sieben Todsünden,15 The Book of Vices and Virtues,16 and many others. Their influence extended to a number of other genres, as well: encyclopaedias (such as Brunetto Latini’s Li livres dou tresor),17 or penitential manuals such as Heinrich von Langenstein’s Erchantnuzz der sund,18 or the work of poets like Dante Alighieri19 and Geoffrey Chaucer.20 The compendia were, in fact, so essential that by the fifteenth century, when Jean Gerson was chancellor of the University of Paris, he observed that the loss of all the books in the world could be tolerated if only Peraldus’s Summa de vitiis and Summa de virtutibus would survive.21
Using the model of Aristotelian ethics, Peraldus posits an ideal amount of ardour as the virtuous mean between its sinful deficiency, the deadly vice of sloth, and its equally sinful excess, that he terms ‘indiscreet fervour’ (indiscretus fervor). In this critique of an excess of zeal in the asceticism and corporeal suffering that had been characteristic of the early saints, Peraldus also demonstrates his inheritance of what was expressed by twelfth-century authors as a ‘new ideal of temperance and unostentation’ in the monastery and, more generally, in twelfth-century spirituality and humanism.22 When treating the sense of taste and the pleasures of food in his warnings against the extravagances of indiscreet fervour, Peraldus observes the following:
We should know that we must very much fear taking excessive pleasure in the food we consume, for often one consumes too much delectable food and with too much zeal. Moreover, the consolation from delectable food sometimes prevents a person from receiving divine consolation. According to Bernard, divine consolation is extremely delicate, and it is not given to people who accept another [form of consolation]. But if someone is careful about how much and how eagerly he eats food, and gives thanks to the Creator for the created things he eats, he can consume as much food as is necessary to sustain his body not only without sin but even with merit. For God has created food to be received with thanksgiving by the faithful, 1 Timothy 4[:3]. And to put it briefly, we should think of our body as a sick man who is eating; if he wants much that is not useful, it should be denied to him, but if he does not want what is useful, it should be forced on him.23
In this example, it is excess in the eagerness with which the appetite is quenched and a superfluity in the amount consumed to satisfy hunger that must be shunned, not delectable food per se, or even, in itself, the pleasure that accompanies eating. Overindulgence is to be avoided, as is its contrary, namely all slothful inactivity, but tasting with temperance not only sidesteps the commission of sin; it is, in fact, understood by Peraldus as a virtuous activity. The view of the external senses on display here is very different from one that sees them as invariably the five windows, portals, or water sluices that allow sin to flow into the corruptible body and contaminate the human soul.24 The emphasis in Peraldus’s examination lies not on padlocking the gateways to sensation, but on guiding the senses to reach a harmonious midpoint between excess and a harmful avoidance of sensory pleasure. As he further explains by appealing to auditory perception, disproportionate and unrelieved rigour in matters of the senses must be avoided if the pleasantness of virtue is to be achieved: ‘It is the same with the strings of a harp: if they are tightened too little, they make a grating noise; if too much, they break; but if [done] moderately, they give a sweet sound’.25
Temperance, as it turns out, is so deeply involved in the actions of the senses that Peraldus partially defines the virtue in the context of sensory perception. The word ‘temperance’, he observes, is used in three ways: first, it designates a general sense of moderation regulating the action of all virtues and ensuring that they are not excessive or deficient but achieve the ‘golden mean’ of Aristotelian ethics; second, the term designates a virtue that restrains improper impulses of the mind. The third usage brings temperance into direct connection with the sensorium, for here:
[T]emperance is spoken of as the virtue governing the soul (virtus regens animam) with respect to bodily pleasures or with respect to the pleasures of the five senses. The Gloss on Matthew 15: ‘Temperance is the bridling of desire from those things that give temporary pleasure’. And Augustine says that temperance consists ‘in restraining improper pleasures’.26
Temperance, thus, does not suppress sensory activity, but governs it by a process of edification expressed through the Gloss’s metaphoric language as bridling (refrenatio). Pastoral literature made frequent use of the metaphor: as a horse is controlled by a bridle, temperance guides the soul in matters of sensory perception. The goal for those engaged in the care of souls was to educate the Christian in applying the correct pressure of this bridle to guide the senses along a path of virtue.
Structurally, as well, the senses play a pivotal role in Peraldus’s treatment of temperance. The treatise begins with introductory matters (chapters 1–4: the rationale for treating temperance after prudence in the examination of the cardinal virtues; the three ways in which the word ‘temperance’ is used; definitions of temperance according to Cicero, Macrobius, and Augustine; and a survey of biblical, classical, and medieval texts praising temperance). Next comes an examination of the parts of temperance according to Cicero (chapters 5–7: continentia, clementia, and modestia), and the rest of the treatise is taken up with an examination of the species of temperance distinguished by the external sense each species regulates (a principle announced in chapter 8):
It should be noted that those parts of temperance which govern the mind in reference to the pleasures that exist according to taste and touch have been sufficiently noted and named: they are sobriety and restraint (continentia). Those parts which pertain to the pleasures that accord with sight and hearing and smell are not noted in this way, nor do they have special names.27
Taste is to be guided by sobriety (chapter 9), the analysis of which is divided into the variety of meanings of sobrietas; the commendation of sobriety adduced from nature, Scripture, and all of creation; and the number and kinds of effects of sobriety and the danger to human beings when it is missing. In the third category, Peraldus notes that sobriety is effective for health, long life, and bodily and spiritual enjoyment, and that moderation is to be practiced not just in the quantity of food and drink one indulges in, but in all circumstances. He develops five functions of sobriety, derived as virtuous opposites of Gregory the Great’s five types of gluttony, namely, to avoid anticipating the time established for a meal, to avoid looking for luxurious foods, to avoid painstaking care in preparing foods, to bridle an excessive appetite for food and drink, and not to exceed the right portions at a meal.28 Touch is to be guided by restraint (continentia; chapter 10). Its varieties include restraint in the soft touch of clothing, beds, oils, ointments, or bodily touching, of which there are two kinds: touching bodily members meant for reproduction, or touching the other bodily members. Temperance of all the aforementioned kinds is called continentia, but in sermons the term is used especially for the illicit pleasures of touch with respect to the bodily members used for reproduction, in which sense continentia is understood as abstinence from illicit sexual intercourse. The rest of this section of the treatise is devoted to the careful examination of sexual continentia. Continence is divided here into abstinence from illicit and licit sex, which has two varieties: continentia virginalis, for those who never had sex (chapter 11), and continentia vidualis, for those who had been married (chapter 12); clerical chastity (chapter 13); and married restraint, which is abstinence from illicit sex while practicing licit sex (continentia coniugalis; chapter 14).29 Next follows a section in praise of marriage (chapter 15) that includes guidelines to contract marriage (chapter 16) and the practice of marital sex (chapter 17). Finally, in the last chapter temperance in sight, hearing, and smell is distinguished by the objects of these senses that should be perceived with self-discipline.
Peraldus’s appeals to moderation in the activity of the senses vitiate notions commonly held today of medieval moral theologians’ unrelieved campaign to curtail sensory pleasure. Challenges to such presuppositions can be found in Peraldus’s discussion of the need for moderation included in a number of treatises on sins in the Summa de vitiis, but they take on sharper focus in the ‘Treatise on Temperance’ in his later Compendium on the Virtues. Here, too, Peraldus’s analysis contests some common views on such basic aspects of the medieval sensorium as the hierarchy of the senses. The conception that humans have only five senses is purely arbitrary, but traditional in the West.30 The paradigm of five external senses was inherited from antiquity, specifically from the classification of the senses by Aristotle (384–322 BCE) or Democritus (c. 460-c. 370 BCE),31 with Cicero (106–43 BCE) as an important intermediary,32 but this list was hardly as rigid as it is sometimes made out to be, and in all events it allowed for more multisensoriality than a static hierarchy might be taken to permit.33 The influential monastic writer and papal advisor, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), gives a clear and schematic view of the five external senses, and one of their most frequently delineated hierarchies. In his Sententiae, a collection of Bernard’s thoughts that may represent notes for later sermons, he states:
There are five senses of the flesh, or the corporeal senses, by which the soul endows its body with sensation, namely, beginning from the inferior ones: touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight.34
This hierarchy, in which sight and hearing are considered ‘superior’ senses and taste and touch ‘inferior’, was repeated widely in the Middle Ages.35 Yet, as a learned inheritance of antiquity, the five-sense taxonomy took some time to spread through medieval Europe,36 and even when it was well established it could be supplemented and varied. Moreover, the list of the external or physical senses also coexisted with taxonomies of the spiritual senses37 and classifications of the inner senses.38
More specifically, the hierarchical ordering explained by Bernard of Clairvaux is an inheritance of classical philosophy’s notion that the value of sight and hearing derives from the fact that these senses occur at a distance from the object of perception. As Carolyn Korsmeyer has observed, ‘in virtually all analyses of the senses in Western philosophy the distance between object and perceiver has been seen as a cognitive, moral, and aesthetic advantage’.39 But with a changed context, the ‘proximity’ senses of touch and taste could be valued more than the ‘distal’ senses. Among the spiritual senses, the sense of taste could be more highly valued than sight or hearing – especially when it came to the taste of the Lord’s sweetness (see Psalm 33:9).40 In the medical field, taste was appreciated for its pedagogical value as the single sense that can teach each person perfectly about the various natures of things because we take a substance completely into ourselves when we taste it with the tongue.41 As a diagnostic tool, tasting the bodily fluids of their patients served physicians as a more reliable guide to health than using most of their other senses; in a related fashion, a patient’s experience of the feeling of pain was also considered especially useful in diagnosing illnesses.42 Even on ethical grounds, the proximity senses could be appreciated more highly than sight or hearing. In Peraldus’s ‘Treatise on Temperance’, proximity senses are valued because they do necessary service in preserving life: taste is a required element in eating, touch an essential part of reproduction. The other senses add to the quality of life, but are of less importance in its rudimentary maintenance. Basing his work on Aristotle’s ethics and libri naturales, Peraldus observes that sight, hearing, and smell are activated at a distance from the object of perception, but taste and touch require proximity to that object:
Whence the pleasures that occur through taste and touch are greater than those that occur through the other three senses. And the inclination to the actions and pleasures stimulated through these two senses is greater than that stimulated through the other three. And the vices that occur through the actions and pleasures of those two senses are more dangerous. Hence, the virtues that are contrary to these vices are more necessary and more noteworthy.43
This variation in what Bernard had presented as the hierarchy of the senses is a function of the context in which the senses are discussed. For pastoral theology, the immediacy of sensation and its possible allure had far more potential for the process of edifying the senses than a statement on vision as the superior sense. The possibility of sensory perception – especially the intensity of touch or taste – leading to sin provided the kind of pedagogical moment that invited pastoral authors to foreground the proximity senses when teaching how to cure the vices. For example, while Peraldus includes both sight (seeing women) and hearing (listening to lascivious songs) among the occasions that can lead to lust, as well as the sense of touch, he emphasises mainly the latter among the initial group of lust’s remedies. If someone finds himself tempted by luxuria, in other words, he should put out this fire by dousing himself with cold water (either literally, or with the water of tears or the ‘water’ of corporeal discipline).44 There is more complexity and variation in the choices of assigning positions in the medieval hierarchy of the senses than has at times been acknowledged.
Peraldus’s view of temperance as a virtue with a special regard to regulating sensory experience demonstrates his inheritance of Aristotelian ethical thought. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s treatment of temperance (sophrosyne) first excludes from consideration the pleasures of the intellect (or soul), such as ambition when it is gratified or the love of learning, and focuses on the pleasures of the body as the scope of this moral virtue.45 More closely defined, the sphere of temperance is further distinguished by the sensory modalities it engages. Here, sight, hearing, and smell are excluded: Aristotle observes that those who are delighted by the pleasures of colours, or the sounds of music, or the odour of roses are not referred to as either temperate or profligate (the fault of excess related to temperance) through the use of these distal senses in themselves. What is left in the scope of sensory modalities proper to temperance are the proximity senses that human beings share with animals: those which are involved in the appetitive pleasures associated with eating and sex, namely taste and touch. And even more, touch plays the functionally decisive role in this distinction since, for Aristotle, the pleasure of eating is also essentially haptic. This is the background for his observation that a certain gourmet (opsophagos) wanted a neck that was longer than a crane’s, showing that his pleasure came in the sensation of touch when he swallowed.46 As John Sisko has noted, for Aristotle ‘it is touch (in the gullet and the oesophagus) that plays the fundamental perceptual role in the bestial activity of feeding’.47 Insofar as touch (and through it, taste) are senses that human beings have in common with animals, they are also senses of a lower order that potentially produce slavish behaviour. A profligate revelling in these senses is not characteristic of human beings, but of animals.48 What makes temperance a moral virtue, then, is that by exercising it a human being demonstrates a conception of the self and the life worth leading that rises above that of animals. The action of temperance as a virtue is not the total rejection of the physical pleasures connected with nutrition and generation that humans have in common with animals, but it works to ensure that these pleasures are felt in the right way and to the right degree by human beings.49
The function of temperance in moderating touch remained a familiar element in the scholastic reception of Aristotelian thought on the cardinal virtue, though academic authors do not limit temperance to touch as, in essence, Aristotle had done. Albert the Great emphasises the haptic sense in defining temperance, which – along with prudence, fortitude, and justice – he defines as a civic virtue. He proposes what he terms a substantial reason to justify the number of four cardinal virtues, namely that the four of them together amount to what is required of good citizens.50 These four necessary virtues include the habit in determining what is right about one’s actions (prudence) and three varieties of carrying out the right actions in difficult and important matters, either in relation to others according to what is owed them by obligation (justice), or in relation to one’s self. Of the latter, there are two types: one is when difficult matters, like war, are inflicted on us from external sources and we behave correctly (fortitude). The other concerns ‘what is inherently pleasurable within our present life according to touch, as in taste, which is a kind of touch, and sexual desire. And the habit governing these matters is temperance’.51 Thomas Aquinas also emphasised the sense of touch in understanding temperance when he justified the designation of the ‘cardinal’ virtues, not because they are general categories of virtue, but because of the particular scope Aristotle had given to each:
And thus Aristotle more appropriately distinguished the virtues according to their objects or according to their subject matter. And according to this, the previously mentioned four virtues are not called ‘principle’ because they are general virtues but because their species are explained according to certain principles: …temperance is not concerned with just any kind of bridling, but only with desires for the pleasures of touch.52
The analysis of temperance in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae also depends closely on Aristotle’s distinction of the scope of this virtue, arguing that temperance concerns desires for the greatest pleasures. Since pleasure results from a natural operation, the more natural the operation is, the greater the pleasure will be. For animals, the most natural operations are those that preserve the nature of the individual through food and drink and the nature of the species through the union of a male and a female. Thus, temperance is properly concerned with pleasures associated with food and drink and sexual pleasures, and these kinds of pleasures result from the sense of touch.53
While the Aristotelian tradition asserts that the proper scope of temperance is the sense of touch, Peraldus included both taste and touch as the focal points of temperance in his treatise on the virtue. Although he also observes that delectable food gives a brief pleasure as it passes through the throat,54 he did not claim that the pleasure of taste is essentially haptic. He found a precedent for this in the same scholastic authors (and Dominicans) with whom he shared the study of Aristotle’s writings. Moral theologians, such as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, extended the scope of temperance to include the moderation of all the senses, even while they claimed to be following Aristotle in maintaining that the central sense modality implicated in temperance is touch. Albert notes that virtue can be exercised in other than the most extreme circumstances. Fortitude, for example, can be shown in situations less menacing than imminent mortal danger.
And we can say in accordance with Aristotle that temperance exists in the highest degree and according to its greatest power in the pleasure of touch concerning nourishment and sexual desire, but nevertheless it is also correctly exercised in other innate pleasures in accordance with the same habit. And this is in agreement with the words of Aristotle in many passages of the Ethics, as is evident to those who diligently examine that book.55
Similarly, in the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas includes under the aegis of temperance a number of virtues, or virtues understood in a broad sense, in which the sense of touch plays little or no role at all: for example, shamefastness (verecundia; question 144), honesty (honestas; question 145), clemency (clementia), and meekness (mansuetudo) (both addressed in question 157). Together, these parts of temperance demonstrate Aquinas’s interest in extending the scope of virtuous moderation to matters beyond the sense modality that Aristotle had seen at the centre of temperance.56
Peraldus goes further in this direction, asserting the inclusion of the distal senses in the scope of temperance not just as a matter of theory, but by examining features of moderation in the activity of each of them. There is an order involved here which depends on the conventional hierarchy of the senses, in which the sense of sight has a higher position than hearing, and hearing a higher position than the sense of smell, and therefore ‘it appears that sight is more dangerous than hearing unless it is restrained, and hearing more dangerous than smell’.57 The control of sight involves restraint in merely glancing around idly, but also preventing oneself from looking at women, uncontrolled uses of vision that a number of passages in Ecclesiasticus warn about which are recommended for use by the preacher (unrestrained looking in general: Sirach 9:7, 9:8; looking at women: Sirach 9:3, 9:5, 25:28, 41:27). The combination of sight and hearing presents the danger of vitium curiositatis, which in no way implicates any and all intellectual inquiry – if nothing else, Peraldus’s reading of the Aristotelian corpus demonstrates his own lively curiosity about any number of topics – but rather an inquisitiveness which expends itself in the useless knowledge of rumours about other people, on which Peraldus quotes Gregory the Great:
‘Curiosity is a serious sin which, while it leads someone’s mind to poke into his fellow human being’s life, hides his own most inward qualities from him so that while he knows about others’ affairs he does not know himself’. The same author: ‘The more experienced the mind of the curious person is in someone else’s merit, the more ignorant it is of itself’.58
The restraint of hearing is recommended in a number of areas, each supported by biblical passages or citations from authorities. These areas include the tempting sounds of musical instruments (Job 21:12–13, Isaiah 5:12; further supported by a brief exemplum: ‘Antigonus, Alexander’s teacher, broke his cithara and on top of that said: ‘It is fitting that you rule already at your age, and it should be shameful that the pleasure of lust is dominant in the body of the royal authority’’).59 Lascivious singing and casual conversations with women are also to be avoided (Sirach 9:4, 9:11), as is the sound of one’s own singing voice (supported by a quotation attributed to Gregory: ‘While one warbles with a fawning voice, the temperate life is abandoned’).60 But other forms of intemperate listening are also found to be in need of restraint: hearing about others’ misfortunes (Sirach 28:28), and the recitation of one’s own good qualities that flatterers customarily bring up. The avoidance of flatterers is supported by citations attributed to Seneca: ‘If you have self-restraint, avoid flattery, and let being praised by sinners be just as disagreeable to you as being praised on account of sins’. And from the same source: ‘The most difficult act of restraint is to reject the adulation of flatterers whose words enervate the mind with a certain pleasure’.61 Finally, the sense of smell is to be tempered from sweet fragrances, while sinners should be reminded that one of the punishments in hell will be the smell of sulphur (Isaiah 3:24, 30:33; Psalm 10:7).
With all the care Peraldus takes in delineating restraint in activities of both the distal and the proximity senses, his goal in the ‘Treatise on Temperance’ is not to encourage an anxious guarding of the senses,62 which is a static phenomenon, but rather an informed guidance of the senses, a progressive process of education that emphasises the value of moderation in sensory pleasures. Indeed, part of the conscious work of pastoral theologians following Peraldus – especially the generations of Dominicans who were trained by the study of his compendia on the vices and virtues – was to emphasise in their preaching the importance of edifying the senses.63 Learning how to perceive as an aspect of the virtuous life was as significant for Peraldus as it had been for Aristotle, and this prominence can be seen not only in Peraldus’s treatment of sight, hearing, and smell, but also in his analysis of the senses which afforded the greatest pleasures, taste and touch. In this way, he spends nearly as much time praising all aspects of marriage, including conjugal sexual relations, as he does lauding virginity.64 This praise of the ‘correct’ use of the senses as virtuous actions had the effect of creating a sacral context for sensory perception, of imbuing the senses in a number of seemingly everyday situations – eating, drinking, sexual relations – with sacred meaning. The pastoral encouragement for every sensory act to participate in the divine as a part of the moral life was one more step in the process of edifying the senses. Peraldus, thus, also commends sobriety for its positive effects on health, resulting in long life, but also for the enjoyment of life:
Chrysostom on the Epistle to the Hebrews: ‘Nothing is so effective for health, nothing so effective for sharpening the senses, nothing chases away illness so much as moderation in a meal’. Likewise, sobriety is efficacious for a long life; Sirach 37[:34]: He who is temperate will prolong his life. Likewise, sobriety is efficacious for enjoyment, both corporeal and spiritual; Sirach 31[:36]: Wine drunken with moderation is the joy of the soul and the heart.65
This is hardly a call for ascetic self-denial in the face of sensory pleasures that the Burckhardtian (or Greenblatt’s neo-Burckhardtian) view of the Middle Ages would have us expect, but of course it corresponds perfectly with the task of preaching to the laity, especially in urban centres with their more cosmopolitan congregations, which was specific to the Dominican Order and necessitated its attention to all forms of cultural entertainment.66 The Order of Preachers was ministering here to congregations for whom demands for ascesis would hardly have accorded with a life shaped by commerce and civic obligations. This process of reforming the interpretation of sensory data, of educating the senses in the ethics of moderation, was the great task Peraldus set for himself in his analysis of temperance. His success in these efforts makes it clear why, against common contemporary preconceptions, the treatment of temperance remained the most important context in which the ethics of the senses – always at the centre of the sensorium in the Middle Ages – is to be found in the medieval moral tradition.67
Notes
1 See the discussion of the call to guard the senses by the medieval preacher Geiler von Kaysersberg in Robert Jütte, A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace, trans. James Lynn (Malden, MA: Polity, 2005), 105. For an early Italian renaissance work that includes admonitions to control the senses, see Antonino Pierozzi, Opera a ben vivere, discussed in Theresa Flanigan, ‘Disciplining the Tongue: Archbishop Antoninus, the Opera a ben vivere, and the Regulation of Women’s Speech in Renaissance Florence’, Open Arts Journal 4 (2014–2015): 41–60, available at: http://openartsjournal.org/issue-4/article-3/, accessed 15 July 2015; see also eadem, ‘Art, Memory, and the Cultivation of Virtue: The Ethical Function of Images in Antoninus’s Opera a ben vivere’, Gesta 53 (2014): 175–95. The continuity of advice to guard the senses can be witnessed in contemporary, homiletically oriented presentations of what Buddha is said to have taught on sensory control: see, for example, ‘Six Sense Organs’, Chinese Buddhist Encyclopedia, available at: http://www.chinabuddhismencyclopedia.com/en/index.php/Six_sense_organs, accessed 15 July 2015: ‘When seeing a form, hearing a sound, smelling a smell, tasting a taste, touching a thing, or thinking a thought, one does neither get caught up by any of the general features, nor does one become as if gripped, immersed, fixated, or captivated by any particular detail of this form, sound, smell, taste, touch, or mental state… . Since, if one leaves the senses of the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind uncontrolled, then evil detrimental states such as greed, lust, and discontent invade and dominate the mind!’
2 Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: Norton, 2011), 9–10.
3 Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 41. On the importance of Huizinga for the history of emotions in the Middle Ages, see Andrew Galloway, ‘Petrarch’s Pleasures, Chaucer’s Revulsions, and the Aesthetics of Renunciation in Late-Medieval Culture’, in Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England, ed. Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 140–66, esp. 140–42.
4 John Parker, ‘The Epicurean Middle Ages’, Exemplaria 25 (2013): 324–29, here 326. See also Richard Newhauser, ‘Sin, the Business of Pleasure, and the Pleasure of Reading: Exemplary Narratives and Other Forms of Sinful Pleasure in William Peraldus’s Summa de vitiis’, in Pleasure in the Middle Ages, ed. Naama Cohen-Hanegbi and Piroska Nagy, International Medieval Research, 24 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 149–64.
5 Since the mid-1990s an increasing number of studies have been devoted to the study of Peraldus’s works. For some examples, see the following: Richard Newhauser, ‘Unerring Faith in the Pulpit: William Peraldus’ Tractatus de fide in the Summa de uirtutibus’, in Fides Virtus: The Virtue of Faith from the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century, ed. Marco Forlivesi, Riccardo Quinto, and Silvana Vecchio, Archa Verbi. Yearbook for the Study of Medieval Theology. Subsidia, 12 (Münster: Aschendorff, 2014), 389–410; Richard Newhauser, ‘The Capital Vices as Medieval Anthropology’, in Laster im Mittelalter / Vices in the Middle Ages, ed. Ch. Flüeler and M. Rohde, Scrinium Friburgense / Veröffentlichungen des Mediävistischen Instituts der Universität Freiburg, 23 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 105–23; Petra Schulte, ‘Einleitung’, in Strategies of Writing: Studies on Text and Trust in the Middle Ages, ed. Petra Schulte, Marco Mostert, and Irene van Renswoude (Brepols: Turnhout, 2008), 1–12; Michiel Verweij, ‘Princely Virtues or Virtues for Princes? William Peraldus and his De eruditione principum’, in Princely Virtues in the Middle Ages 1200–1500, ed. István P. Bejczy and Cary J. Nederman, Disputatio, 9 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 51–71; Michael Menzel, ‘“Historiarum armarium”: Geschichtsexempla in Predigerhand’, Historisches Jahrbuch 126 (2006): 1–23; Edwin D. Craun, ‘“It is a freletee of flessh”: Excuses for Sin, Pastoral Rhetoric, and Moral Agency’, in In the Garden of Evil: The Vices and Culture in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard Newhauser, Papers in Mediaeval Studies, 18 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies Press, 2005), 170–92; F. N. M. Diekstra, ‘The Art of Denunciation: Medieval Moralists on Envy and Detraction’, in ibid., 431–54; Louis-Jacques Bataillon, ‘L’influence de Hugues de Saint-Cher’, in Hugues de Saint-Cher (†1263). Bibliste et théologien, ed. Louis-Jacques Bataillon, Gilbert Dahan and Pierre-Marie Gy, Bibliothèque d’histoire culturelle du Moyen Age, 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 497–502; István P. Bejczy, ‘John of La Rochelle and William Peraldus on the Virtues and Vices’, Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 97 (2004): 99–110; Peggy A. Knapp, ‘The Words of the Parson’s “vertuous sentence,”’ in Closure in the Canterbury Tales: The Role of the Parson’s Tale, ed. David Raybin and Linda Tarte Holley, Studies in Medieval Culture, 41 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 95–113; John Inglis, ‘Aquinas’s Replication of the Acquired Moral Virtues: Rethinking the Standard Philosophical Interpretation of Moral Virtue in Aquinas’, The Journal of Religious Ethics 27 (1999): 3–27; Richard Newhauser, ‘Jesus as the First Dominican? Reflections on a Sub-theme in the Exemplary Literature of Some Thirteenth-Century Preachers’, in Christ Among the Medieval Dominicans: Representations of Christ in the Texts and Images of the Order of Preachers, ed. Kent Emery, Jr. and Joseph Wawrykow, Notre Dame Conferences in Medieval Studies, 7 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 238–55; David L. d’Avray, ‘Christ in Dominican Marriage Preaching’, in ibid., 271–82; Robert J. Schneider, ‘Vincent of Beauvais, Dominican Author: From compilatio to tractatus’, in Lector et compilator: Vincent de Beauvais, frère prêcheur, un intellectuel et son milieu au XIIIe siècle, ed. Serge Lusignan and Monique Paulmier-Foucart, Rencontres à Royaumont, 9 (Gâne: Editions Créaphis, 1997), 97–111; Edwin D. Craun, Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature: Pastoral Rhetoric and the Deviant Speaker, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 31 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), passim; Joan Heiges Blythe, ‘Sins of the Tongue and Rhetorical Prudence in Piers Plowman’, in Literature and Religion in the Later Middle Ages: Philological Studies in Honor of Siegfried Wenzel, ed. Richard G. Newhauser and John A. Alford, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 118 (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1995), 119–42.
6 William Peraldus, Sermones, in Guilelmi Alverni Episcopi Parisiensis … opera omnia, 2 vols. (Paris, 1674), 2: 1–476.
7 De eruditione principum is available in digital format in the edition printed among the works of Thomas Aquinas at http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/xre0.html, accessed 21 January 2015.
8 For Peraldus’s life and works, still essential is Antoine Dondaine, ‘Guillaume Peyraut, vie et œuvres’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 18 (1948): 162–236.
9 On these texts, see Richard Newhauser, The Treatise on Vices and Virtues in Latin and the Vernacular, Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental, 68 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993), 124–32.
10 On the transmission and printed editions, see Thomas Kaeppeli, Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum Medii Aevi, 4 vols. (Roma: Ad S. Sabinam; Istituto storico Domenicano, 1970–1993), no. 1622; Morton W. Bloomfield, Bertrand-Georges Guyot, Donald R. Howard, and Thyra B. Kabealo, Incipits of Latin Works on the Virtues and Vices, 1100–1500 A.D., The Mediaeval Academy of America, Publication 88 (Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1979), 1628, 5601, etc. The latter text is emended in Richard Newhauser and István Bejczy, A Supplement to Morton W. Bloomfield et al., ‘Incipits of Latin Works on the Virtues and Vices, 1100–1500 A.D.’, Instrumenta Patristica et Mediaevalia, Research on the Inheritance of Early and Medieval Christianity, 50 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008).
11 For the concept of the contrary virtues, formerly known as ‘remedial virtues’, see Richard Newhauser, ‘Preaching the “Contrary Virtues,”’ Mediaeval Studies 70 (2008): 135–62; reprint in Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism, 159, ed. L. J. Trudeau (Detroit: Gale, 2014), 266–81.
12 For editions of the Fiore di virtù see Newhauser, The Treatise on Vices and Virtues in Latin and the Vernacular, 38.
13 Frère Laurent, La Somme le roi, ed. Édith Brayer and Anne-Françoise Leurquin-Labie (Paris: Société des Anciens Textes Français, 2008).
14 Die Spiegel der Sonden, ed. Jacob Verdam, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1900– 1901).
15 See William C. McDonald, ‘Singing Sin: Michel Beheim’s “Little Book of the Seven Deadly Sins,” a German Pre-Reformation Religious Text for the Laity’, in Sin in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, ed. Richard G. Newhauser and Susan J. Ridyard (York: York Medieval Press, in connection with Boydell & Brewer, 2012), 282–303. German adaptations of Peraldus began very early; for a fragment of a translation preserved in a manuscript of the third quarter of the thirteenth-century, see Karin Schneider, ‘Guilelmus Peraldus in früher deutscher Übersetzung’, in Fata Libellorum: Festschrift für Franzjosef Pensel zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Rudolf Bentzinger and Ulrich-Dieter Oppitz, Göppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik, 648 (Göppingen: Kümmerle Verlag, 1999), 279–91. See also Gunhild Roth, ‘Wilhelm Peraldus’, Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, 2nd ed. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999), 10:1116–29.
16 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).
17 Brunetto Latini, Li livres dou tresor, ed. Francis J. Carmody (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948).
18 Klaus Wolf, ‘Propter utilitatem populi: Durch nucz willen seines volkes. Die ‘staatstragende’ Rezeption der ‘Summa de vitiis’ des Guilelmus Peraldus in der spätmittelalterlichen Wiener Schule’, in Laster im Mittelalter / Vices in the Middle Ages, ed. Flüeler and Rohde, 187–99; Richard Newhauser, ‘The Parson’s Tale and Its Generic Affiliations’, in Closure in ‘The Canterbury Tales’, ed. Raybin and Holley, 45–76; reprint in Richard Newhauser, Sin: Essays on the Moral Tradition in the Western Middle Ages, Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS869 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), essay IV.
19 Siegfried Wenzel, ‘Dante’s Rationale for the Seven Deadly Sins (Purgatorio XVII)’, Modern Language Review 60 (1965): 529–33; reprint in Siegfried Wenzel, Elucidations, Synthema, 6 (Louvain: Peeters, 2010), 113–19.
20 Richard Newhauser, ‘The Parson’s Tale’, in Sources and Analogues of ‘The Canterbury Tales’, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, 2 vols., Chaucer Studies, 28 and 35 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002–2005), 1: 529–613; Siegfried Wenzel, ‘The Source of Chaucer’s Seven Deadly Sins’, Traditio 30 (1974): 351–78; Siegfried Wenzel, ‘The Source for the Remedia of the Parson’s Tale’, Traditio 27 (1971): 433–53. On the reception of Peraldus’s summae, see Newhauser, The Treatise on Vices and Virtues in Latin and the Vernacular, 127–30; Siegfried Wenzel, ‘The Continuing Life of William Peraldus’s Summa vitiorum’, in Ad litteram: Authoritative Texts and Their Medieval Readers, ed. Mark. D. Jordan and Kent Emery, Jr., Notre Dame Conferences in Medieval Studies, 3 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 135–63.
21 See Emile J. Arnould, Le ‘Manuel des Péchés’: Étude de littérature religieuse anglo-normande (Paris: Droz, 1940), 29n3.
22 Giles Constable, ‘Moderation and Restraint in Ascetic Practices in the Middle Ages’, in From Athens to Chartres. Neoplatonism and Medieval Thought: Studies in Honour of Edouard Jeauneau, ed. Haijo Jan Westra, Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, 35 (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 315–27, here 326.
23 William Peraldus, Summa de vitiis, Tractatus de accidia, in Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale MS 678, f. 84rb (Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine MS 794, f. 112ra-rb): ‘Sciendum quod in cibis qui sumuntur ualde timenda est delectabilitas, quia frequenter nimis sumitur de cibis delectabilibus et cum nimio ardore. Preterea consolatio in cibis delectabilibus quandoque prohibet hominem a diuina consolatione. Secundum Bernardum nimis delicata est diuina consolatio que non datur admittentibus alienam. Sed si quis in cibis quos sumit in quantitate et in ardore caueat et Creatori de creatura eius quam sumit gratias agat, non solum absque peccato sed etiam meritorie potest sumere de cibis illis quantum necesse est ad sustentationem corporis sui. Deus enim creauit cibos ad percipiendum cum gratiarum actione fidelibus, [om. MSS] ad Thimotheum iiii. Vt breuiter dicam, sic deberemus habere corpus sicut eger comedit, cui multum uolenti inutilia sunt neganda, utilia uero etiam nolenti ingerenda’. For the passage from Bernard, cited frequently by scholastic authors, see Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones in adventu Domini, 4.5, ed. Jean Leclercq and Henri M. Rochais, in Opera, 8 vols. (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–1977), 4: 185. On the importance of moderation in maintaining good health in the works of later British pastoral writers, see Edwin D. Craun, ‘Aristotle’s Biology and Pastoral Ethics: John of Wales’s De Lingua and British Pastoral Writing on the Tongue’, Traditio 67 (2012): 277–303, here 287–88. On the physiological interests of moral theologians in thinking about sin, see Heather Webb, ‘Cardiosensory Impulses in Late Medieval Spirituality’, in Rethinking the Medieval Senses. Heritage, Fascinations, Frames, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Andreas Kablitz, and Alison Calhoun (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 265–85, here 269, 273.
24 For an example of a text that adopts a metaphor begun in Late Antiquity in seeing the body as a city and the senses as gates or water sluices, see Sermon 34, titled De quinque sensibus corporis, in Jacob’s Well. An Englisht Treatise on the Cleansing of Man’s Conscience, ed. Arthur Brandeis, Part 1, EETS o.s. 115 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1900), 216–22, here 217: ‘þerfore, þe v watyr-gatys of 3oure pytt [i.e., the human body] arn 3oure v bodyly wyttes, as crisostom seyth, super Mat. in imperfecto, omilia xxxiiij’. The text was probably composed in the earlier fifteenth century in Suffolk. See Leo Carruthers, ‘Where Did Jacob’s Well Come From? The Provenance and Dialect of MS Salisbury Cathedral 103’, English Studies 4 (1990): 335–40. On the manuscript, see Veronica O’Mara and Suzanne Paul, A Repertorium of Middle English Prose Sermons, 4 vols., Sermo, 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 4: 2276–453.
25 William Peraldus, Summa de vitiis, Tractatus de accidia, in Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale MS 678, f. 84rb (Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine MS 794, f. 112rb): ‘Simile est de cordis cythare, que si parum tendantur, rauce sonant, si nimium, rumpuntur, si moderate, dulcem sonum reddunt’.
26 William Peraldus, Summa de virtutibus, 3.3.2, in Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale MS 678, f. 248va: ‘Tercio dicitur temperantia virtus animam regens circa delectationes corporales siue circa delectationes quinque sensuum. Glossa super Mathei xv: ‘Temperantia est refrenatio cupiditatis ab hiis que temporaliter delectant’. Et Augustinus dicit temperantiam esse ‘in cohercendis delectationibus prauis’’. For the citation from Matthew, see the gloss on Matthew 15:36 in Glossa ordinaria, in Biblia latina cum Glossa ordinaria (Strassburg: Adolph Rusch, for Anton Koberger at Nürnberg, 1480/81), vol. 4, 947v. For the quotation from Augustine, see De Trinitate, 14.9, ed. W. J. Mountain, 2 vols., CCSL 50–50A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1968), CCSL 50A, 439.
27 William Peraldus, Summa de virtutibus, 3.3.8, in Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale MS 678, f. 251va: ‘Notandum ergo quod ille partes temperantie que regunt animum circa delectationes que sunt secundum gustum et tactum, satis sunt note et nominate, que sunt sobrietas et continentia. Ille autem partes que pertinent ad delectationes que sunt secundum visum et auditum et olfactum, non sunt ita note nec habent specialia nomina’.
28 Cf. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, 30.18.60, ed. Marc Adriaen, 3 vols., CCSL 143, 143A, 143B (Turnhout: Brepols, 1979–1985), vol. 143B, 1531.
29 Peraldus frames his discussion in chapter 14 as a way of correcting the argument of those who condemn marriage, whom he explicitly names ‘Cathars’. See David L. d’Avray, ‘Some Franciscan Ideas About the Body’, Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 84 (1991): 343–63, here 351.
30 Phillip Vannini, Dennis Waskul, and Simon Gottschalk, The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture: A Sociology of the Senses (London: Routledge, 2012), 6; C. M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 5–28; Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures (New York: Routledge, 1993).
31 Jütte, A History of the Senses, 61–71.
32 Peter Dronke, ‘Les cinq sens chez Bernard Silvestre et Alain de Lille’, I cinque sensi / The Five Senses. Micrologus 10 (2002): 1–14.
33 Holly Dugan and Lara Farina, ‘Intimate Senses / Sensing Intimacy’, Postmedieval 3 (2012): 373–79.
34 Bernard of Clairvaux, Sententiae, 3.73, ed. Jean Leclercq and Henri M. Rochais, in Opera, vol. 6.2, 108: ‘Quinque enim sunt sensus animales vel corporales, quibus anima corpus suum sensificat, ut ab inferiori incipiam: tactus, gustus, odoratus, auditus, visus’.
35 Louise Vinge, The Five Senses. Studies in a Literary Tradition, Skrifter utgivna av Kungl. Humanistiska Vetenskapssamfundet i Lund, 72 (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1975).
36 David Howes and Constance Classen, Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society (London: Routledge, 2013), 67.
37 The spiritual senses were articulated at times as a system parallel to the external senses that was used to give expression to an encounter with the divine, as if they were the sense impressions of the ‘eyes of the heart’ or ‘the tongue of faith’, etc. See The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity, ed. Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Karl Rahner, ‘La doctrine des ‘sens spirituels’ au Moyen-Age, en particulier chez saint Bonaventura’, Revue d’Ascétique et de Mystique 14 (1933): 263–99, trans. David Morland as ‘The Doctrine of the ‘Spiritual Senses’ in the Middle Ages’, in Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1979), 16:104–34; Karl Rahner, ‘Le début d’une doctrine des cinq sens spirituels chez Origène’, Revue d’Ascétique et de Mystique 13 (1932): 113–45, trans. David Morland as ‘The ‘Spiritual Senses’ According to Origen’, in Rahner, Theological Investigations, 16: 81–103.
38 The ‘inner (or internal) senses’ could refer to the spiritual senses, as a way of contrasting them to the external or physical senses, but the phrase ‘inner senses’ was also used to designate the stages that were considered to be involved in the process leading from physical sensation by the external senses through perception to cognition. Here, too, these faculties of cognitive progression could be modeled on the five external senses, as Aristotle did. See Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Pavel Gregoric, Aristotle on the Common Sense (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007).
39 Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste: Food & Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 12.
40 Rachel Fulton, ‘‘Taste and See That the Lord is Sweet’ (Ps. 33:9): The Flavor of God in the Monastic West’, Journal of Religion 86 (2006): 169–204; Anne Astell, Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middles Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 3–4.
41 Faith Wallis, ‘Medicine and the Senses: Feeling the Pulse, Smelling the Plague, and Listening for the Cure’, in A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard G. Newhauser, A Cultural History of the Senses, 2 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 133–52, here 147–49; Charles Burnett, ‘Sapores Sunt Octo: The Medieval Latin Terminology For the Eight Flavors’, I cinque sensi / The Five Senses. Micrologus 10 (2002): 99–112; Charles Burnett, ‘The Superiority of Taste’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 54 (1991): 230–38.
42 Esther Cohen, The Modulated Scream: Pain in Late Medieval Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
43 William Peraldus, Summa de virtutibus, 3.3.8, in Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale MS 678, f. 251vb: ‘Vnde delectationes que sunt secundum gustum et tactum maiores sunt quam sunt secundum alios tres sensus. Et pronitas ad operationes et delectationes secundum illos duos sensus maior est quam secundum alios tres. Et uicia que sunt secundum operationes et delectationes illorum duorum sensuum magis sunt periculose. Ideo virtutes que sunt contra illa vicia magis sunt necessarie et magis note…’.
44 William Peraldus, Summa de vitiis, Tractatus de luxuria, in Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale MS 678, f. 25vb (Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine MS 794, f. 22ra).
45 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 3.10, trans. Harris Rackham, Loeb Classical Library 73, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), 172–75.
46 Aristotle, Nic Eth, 3.10, trans. Rackham, 176–77. A long neck was used to typify the glutton as late as Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1603); see Silvana Vecchio, ‘Gusto, piacere, peccato nella cultura medievale’, in L’infinita varietà del gusto: filosofia, arte e storia di un’idea dal Medioevo all’età moderna (Padova: Il poligrafo, 2010), 27–39, here 33. For depictions of moderation in Nicholas Oresme’s translation of the Nicomachean Ethics, see Claire R. Sherman, Imaging Aristotle: Verbal and Visual Representation in Fourteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 72–82.
47 John E. Sisko, ‘Taste, Touch, and Temperance in Nicomachean Ethics 3.10’, Classical Quarterly 53 (2003): 135–40, here 139. Cf. Charles M. Young, ‘Aristotle on Temperance’, The Philosophical Review 97 (1988): 521–42.
48 Aristotle, Nic Eth, 3.10, trans. Rackham, 178–79. For voluminous examples from antiquity of immoderate behavior in taste, depicted in the intemperate use of wine leading to drunkenness, see Hanneke Wilson, Wine and Words in Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages (London: Duckworth, 2003), 77–113.
49 Gabriel Richardson Lear, Happy Lives and the Highest Good. An Essay on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 165–66.
50 See István P. Bejczy, The Cardinal Virtues in the Middle Ages: A Study in Western Moral Thought from the Fourth to the Fourteenth Centuries, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 202 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 212–13.
51 Albert the Great, Commentarii in III Sententiarum, 33.1. resp., in Opera omnia, ed. Auguste Borgnet, 38 vols. (Paris: Vivès, 1890–1899), 28: 607: ‘… in delectabili innato contemporaneo vitae secundum tactum, ut gustu secundum quod est tactus, et venereis. Et sic habitus regens est temperantia’. See Rollen Edward Houser, The Cardinal Virtues: Aquinas, Albert, and Philip the Chancellor, Mediaeval Sources in Translation, 39; Sources in Medieval Moral Teaching, 4 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies Press, 2004), 130.
52 Thomas Aquinas, Sententia libri Ethicorum, 2.8, in Opera omnia iussu impensaque Leonis XIII P. M. edita, vol. 1- (Roma: Ex Typographia Polyglotta S. C. de Propaganda Fide, 1882-), vol. 47; available online at http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/ctc02.html, accessed 12 May 2015: ‘Et ideo convenientius Aristoteles virtutes distinxit secundum obiecta sive secundum materias. Et secundum hoc praedictae virtutes quatuor, non dicuntur principales quia sint generales sed quia species earum accipiuntur secundum quaedam principalia: … temperantia autem est non circa quamlibet refrenationem, sed solum in concupiscentiis delectationis tactus’. See Bejczy, The Cardinal Virtues, 173.
53 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 2a2ae.141.4.resp., in Opera omnia iussu impensaque Leonis XIII P. M. edita, vol. 1- (Roma: Ex Typographia Polyglotta S. C. de Propaganda Fide, 1882-), vol. 10; available online at http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/sth3141.html, accessed 12 May 2015. See Diana Fritz Cates, ‘The Virtue of Temperance (IIa IIae, qq. 141–170)’, in The Ethics of Aquinas, ed. Stephen J. Pope (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002), 321–39, here 322.
54 William Peraldus, Summa de virtutibus, 3.3.9, in Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale MS 678, f. 252ra: ‘Breuitate uero delectationis que non habetur, nisi in transitu cibi…’.
55 Albert the Great, Comm. in III Sent., 33.1.ad 7 et 8, in Opera, ed. Borgnet, vol. 28, 608: ‘Et possumus dicere secundum Aristotelem quod temperantia in maximo et secundum maximum suum posse est in delectabili tactus secundum alimentum et venereis, sed tamen bene se habet in aliis delectabilibus innatis secundum eumdem habitum. Et hoc consonat dictis Aristotelis in multis locis Ethicorum, sicut patet diligenter inspicientibus in libro illo’. See Houser, The Cardinal Virtues, 132.
56 See Houser, The Cardinal Virtues, 80.
57 William Peraldus, Summa de virtutibus, 3.3.18, in Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale MS 678, f. 260va: ‘… periculosior esse uidetur uisus nisi refrenetur quam auditus, et auditus quam olfactus’.
58 William Peraldus, Summa de virtutibus, 3.3.18, in Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale MS 678, f. 260vb: ‘‘Graue curiositatis est uitium, que dum cuiuslibet mentem ad inuestigandam uitam proximi exterius ducit, semper ei sua intima abscondit, ut aliena sciens, se nesciat’. Idem: ‘Curiosi animus quanto peritus fuerit alieni meriti, tanto fit ignarus sui’’. For both citations from Gregory, see Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Euangelia, 2.36.4, ed. Raymond Étaix, CCSL 141 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 335. On curiosity in the Middle Ages, see most recently Patricia Clare Ingham, The Medieval New. Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 143–97, and specifically on sinful curiosity, Richard Newhauser, Sin: Essays on the Moral Tradition in the Western Middle Ages, essays XIII-XV, and Edward Peters, Limits of Thought and Power in Medieval Europe, Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS721 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001).
59 William Peraldus, Summa de virtutibus, 3.3.18, in Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale MS 678, f. 260vb: ‘Antigonus pedagogus Alexandri cytharam eius fregit, adiecitque dicens: ‘Etati tue iam regnare conuenit, pudeatque in corpore regni uoluptatem luxurie dominari’’. The passage is taken from John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 3.14, ed. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, CCCM 118 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993), 223.
60 William Peraldus, Summa de virtutibus, 3.3.18, in Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale MS 678, f. 260vb: ‘Dum blanda uox queritur, sobria uita deseritur’. The quotation, also attributed to Gregory, is found in Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, 4.8, ed. Joseph Strange, 2 vols. (Cologne, etc.: J. M. Heberle [H. Lempertz], 1851), 1: 180.
61 William Peraldus, Summa de virtutibus, 3.3.18, in Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale MS 678, f. 260vb: ‘‘Si continens es, adulationes euita, sitque tibi tam triste laudari a turpibus quam si laudari ob turpia’. Idem: ‘Difficilimum opus continentie est assentationes adulatorum repellere, quorum sermones animum quadam uoluptate resoluunt’’. Both quotations are taken from Martin of Braga, Formula uitae honestae, 4, ed. Claude W. Barlow, in Opera omnia, Papers and Monographs of the American Academy in Rome, 12 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950), 244.
62 Pierre Adnès, ‘Garde des sens’, in Dictionnaire de spiritualité 6 (Paris: Beauchesne et fils, 1967), 117–22.
63 On the importance of the edification of the senses, see Richard G. Newhauser, ‘Introduction: The Sensual Middle Ages’, in A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages, ed. Newhauser, 12–17; idem, ‘Peter of Limoges, Optics, and the Science of the Senses’, The Senses & Society 5 (2010): 28–44.
64 William Peraldus, Summa de virtutibus, 3.3.11, in Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale MS 678, ff. 253va-256vb: on virginity; ibid., 3.3.15–17, ff. 258va-260va: on praise of marriage, contracting marriage, and conjugal sex. The three circumstances in which conjugal sex is said to be meritorious are when sex leads to bearing children, when it is done as part of the obligations of marriage, and when it occurs so that one’s spouse does not fall into the sin of lust.
65 William Peraldus, Summa de virtutibus, 3.3.9, in Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale MS 678, f. 252ra-rb: ‘Chrisostomus super Epistolam ad Hebreos: ‘Nihil salutem, nihil sensuum acumen operatur, nihil sic egritudinem fugat, sicut moderata refectio’. Item sobrietas ualet ad uite diuturnitatem; xxxvii Ecclesiastici: Qui abstinens est, adiciet uitam. Item sobrietas ualet ad iocunditatem et corporalem et spiritualem; Ecclesiastici xxxi: Exultatio anime et corporis uinum moderate potatum’. For the passage from John Chrysostom, see Homiliae XXXIV in Epistolam ad Hebraeos, 29.4, PG 63:206, 208; see also Decretum magistri Gratiani, pars 3 (De consecratione), dist. 5, can. 28, ed. Emil Friedberg, Corpus iuris canonici, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1879–1881), 1: 1419.
66 Still useful for the factors leading to the establishment of the mendicants is Herbert Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter. Untersuchungen über die geschichtlichen Zusammenhänge zwischen der Ketzerei, den Bettelorden und der religiösen Frauenbewegung im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert und über die geschichtlichen Grundlagen der deutschen Mystik, Historische Studien, 267, 2nd ed. (Hildesheim: Olms, 1961).
67 On the central importance of ethical analysis for the medieval sensorium, see Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England, 16–18.