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The Saturated Sensorium is a book about the senses and their media in the Middle Ages: a book about what it meant to sense and perceive something. The book highlights the integrated and unified nature of medieval senses and media. It discusses the inter- and multi-mediality of cultic and cultural artefacts as well as the sensorial and inter-sensorial dimensions of a wide array of cultural concepts and practices within medieval religion, art, archaeology, architecture, literature, music, food, social life, ritual, devotion, cognition, and memory. These domains of sensory and media history are dealt with, not as isolated anthology articles in only loose connection with one another, but as coordinate and comparative chapters of a coherent book each covering a principal branch of the cultural history of the medieval senses. Across a number of academic disciplines, specialists address the interdisciplinary and compound character of visus (sight), auditus (hearing), tactus (touch), olfactus (smell) and gustus (taste), showing that there was far more to the senses and to sense experience than these five classical Aristotelian categories might suggest. A plentiful variety of sensory modes interacted, crossed, and permeated each other in mutually entangled and braided ways. The saturated sensorium nurtured the sacred and secular practices of mediation, representation, and consumption; the embodied and mental concepts of sanctity, memory, and imagery; the physical and spiritual spaces of environment, cult, and burial; the material and visual culture of sacraments, sensation, and incarnation.
The Middle Ages integrated the human senses and unified their media into a culture of saturated sensation. 'The saturated sensoriùm' nurtured principles of perception and mediation permeated with paradox, intersensorial entanglement, and multimodal interchange. This book addresses medieval modes of multi- and intermediality in material as well as immaterial culture and cultural history. It exemplifies the sensory and multisensory experiences sustained by medieval religion, art, archaeology, architecture, literature, liturgy, music, monasticism, miracles, cult, piety, love, eating, drinking, cognition, recollection, and burial. It ponders over perceptual practices performed as ritual, devotion, consumption (sacred or secular), memory, sanctity (in persons or percepts), church environment, sacramental imagery, romantic representation, and word-image-song-dance remediation. It illuminates the intertwined and compound character of the five Aristotelian categories of 'visus' (sight), 'auditus' (hearing), 'tactus' (touch), 'olfactus' (smell), and 'gustus' (taste), showing that there was indeed far more to the senses and to sense experience than this classical categorisation might suggest. It aims to saturate our sense of medieval mediation beyond established modern and classical categories of communication.
Sensory language is commonly used to describe human encounters with the divine. Scripture, for example, employs perceptual language like 'taste and see that the Lord is good', 'hear the word of the Lord', and promises that 'the pure in heart will see God'. Such statements seem to point to certain features of human cognition that make perception-like contact with divine things possible. But how precisely should these statements be construed? Can the elusive notion of 'spiritual perception' survive rigorous theological and philosophical scrutiny and receive a constructive articulation? Perceiving Things Divine seeks to make philosophical and theological sense of spiritual perception. Reflecting the results of the second phase of the Spiritual Perception Project, this volume argues for the possibility of spiritual perception. It also seeks to make progress towards a constructive account of the different aspects of spiritual perception while exploring its intersection with various theological and philosophical themes, such as biblical interpretation, aesthetics, liturgy, race, ecology, eschatology, and the hiddenness of God. The interdisciplinary scope of the volume draws on the resources of value theory, philosophy of perception, epistemology, philosophy of art, psychology, systematic theology, and theological aesthetics. The volume also draws attention to how spiritual perception may be affected by such distortions as pornographic sensibility and racial prejudice. Since perceiving spiritually involves the whole person, the volume proposes that spiritual perception could be purified by ascetic discipline, healed by contemplative practices, trained in the process of spiritual direction and the pursuit of virtue, transformed by the immersion in the sacramental life, and healed by opening the self to the operation of divine grace.
With the aim to write the history of Christianity in Scandinavia with Jerusalem as a lens, this book investigates the image – or rather the imagination – of Jerusalem in the religious, political, and artistic cultures of Scandinavia through most of the second millennium. Jerusalem is conceived as a code to Christian cultures in Scandinavia. The first volume is dealing with the different notions of Jerusalem in the Middle Ages. Tracing the Jerusalem Code in three volumes Volume 1: The Holy City Christian Cultures in Medieval Scandinavia (ca. 1100–1536) Volume 2: The Chosen People Christian Cultures in Early Modern Scandinavia (1536–ca. 1750) Volume 3: The Promised Land Christian Cultures in Modern Scandinavia (ca. 1750–ca. 1920)
This book addresses the history of the senses in relation to affective piety and its role in devotional practices in the late Middle Ages, focusing on the sense of touch. It argues that only by deeply analysing this specific context of perception can the full significance of sensory religious experience in the Late Middle Ages be understood. Considering the centrality of the body to medieval society and Christianity, this collection explores a range of devotional practices, mainly relating to the Passion of Christ, and features manuscripts, works of devotional literature, art, woodcuts and judicial records. It brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars to offer a variety of methodological approaches, in order to understand how touch was encoded, evoked and purposefully used. The book further considers how touch was related to the medieval theory of perception, examining its relation to the inner and outer senses through the eyes of visionaries, mystics, theologians and confessors, not only as praxis but from different theoretical points of view. While considered the most basic of spiritual experience, the chapters in this book highlight the all-pervasive presence of touch and the significance of ‘affective piety’ to Late Medieval Christians. Chapter 3: Drama, Performance and Touch in the Medieval Convent and Beyond is Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com
Sumptuously illustrated with dazzling objects, this publication explores the ways art and science worked hand in hand in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Through the manipulation of materials, such as gold, crystal, and glass, medieval artists created dazzling light-filled environments, evoking, in the everyday world, the layered realms of the divine. While contemporary society separates science and spirituality, the medieval world harnessed the science of light to better perceive and understand the sacred. From 800 to 1600, the study of astronomy, geometry, and optics emerged as a framework that was utilized by theologians and artists to comprehend both the sacred realm and the natural world. Through essays written by contributors from the fields of art history, the history of science, and neuroscience, and with more than two hundred illustrations, including glimmering golden reliquaries, illuminated manuscripts, rock crystal vessels, astronomical instruments, and more, Lumen cuts across religious, political, and geographic boundaries to reveal the ways medieval Christian, Jewish, and Islamic artists, theologians, and thinkers studied light. To convey the sense of wonder created by moving light on precious materials, a number of contemporary artworks are placed in dialogue with historic objects.
Domestic devotion has become an increasingly important area of research in recent years, with the publication of a number of significant studies on the early modern period in particular. This Special Issue aims to build on these works and to expand their range, both geographically and chronologically. This collection focuses on lived religion and the devotional practices found in the domestic settings of late medieval and early modern Europe. More particularly, it investigates the degree to which the experience of personal or familial religious practice in the domestic realm intersected with the more public expression of faith in liturgical or communal settings. Its broad geographical range (spanning northern, southern, central and eastern Europe) includes practices related to Christianity, Judaism and Islam. This Special Issue will be of interest to historians, art historians, medievalists, early modernists, historians of religion, anthropologists and theologians, as well as those interested in the history of material religious culture. It also offers important insights into research areas such as gender studies, histories of the emotions and histories of the senses.
T&T Clark Handbook of Public Theology introduces the various philosophical and theological positions and approaches in the emerging discourse of public theology. Distinguishing public theology from political theology, as well as from liberation theology, this book clarifies central terms like 'public sphere', 'the secular', and 'post-secularity' in order to highlight the specific characteristics of public theology. Its particular focus lies on the ways in which much of public theology has established itself as a contextual theology in politically secular societies, aiming to continue the apologetical tradition in this specific context. Depending on what is regarded as the most pressing challenge for the reasonable defence of the Christian hope in liberal democracies, public theologians have focused on (social) ethics, ecclesiology, or Soteriology, with the aim to strengthen the virtues needed for democratic citizenship. Here, attention is being paid to Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox perspectives. The volume further illustrates the characteristics of the discourse by introducing the ways in which public theologians have responded to concrete challenges arising in the spheres of politics, economics, ecology, sports, culture, and religion. To highlight the international scope of the public theological discourse, the volume concludes with a summarizing overview of public theological debates in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and Latin America.
This bold new work discusses truth, and the value of a metaphysical approach to truth, from philosophical and theological perspectives.
In Touching the Passion — Seeing Late Medieval Altarpieces through the Eyes of Faith, Donna Sadler explores the manner in which worshipers responded to the carved and polychromed retables adorning the altars of their parish churches. Framed by the symbolic death of Christ re-enacted during the Mass, the historical account of the Passion on the retable situated Christ’s suffering and triumph over death in the present. The dramatic gestures, contemporary garb, and wealth of anecdotal detail on the altarpiece, invited the viewer’s absorption in the narrative. As in the Imitatio Christi, the worshiper imaginatively projected himself into the story like a child before a dollhouse. The five senses, the sculptural medium, the small scale, and the rhetoric of memory foster this immersion.