Rethinking the Medieval Senses

How much can we know about sensory experience in the Middle Ages? While few would question that the human senses encountered a profoundly different environment in the medieval world, two distinct and opposite interpretations of that encounter have emerged—one of high sensual intensity and one of extreme sensual starvation.

Presenting original, cutting-edge scholarship, Stephen G. Nichols, Andreas Kablitz, Alison Calhoun, and their team of distinguished colleagues transport us to the center of this lively debate. Organized within historical, thematic, and contextual frameworks, these essays examine the psychological, rhetorical, and philological complexities of sensory perception from the classical period to the late Middle Ages.

Contributors: Marina Brownlee, Princeton University; Alison Calhoun, Johns Hopkins University; Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University; Daniel Heller-Roazen, Princeton University; Andreas Kablitz, Universität zu Köln; Hildegard Elisabeth Keller, University of Zurich; Joachim Küpper, Freie Universität Berlin; Stephen G. Nichols, Johns Hopkins University; David Nirenberg, University of Chicago; Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Johns Hopkins University; Eugene Vance, University of Washington; Gregor Vogt-Spira, Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald; Rainer Warning, University of Munich; Heather Webb, Ohio State University; Michel Zink, Collège de France.