Sensory Reflections

This volume draws on emerging scholarship at the intersection of two already vibrant fields: medieval material culture and medieval sensory experience. The rich potential of medieval matter (most obviously manuscripts and visual imagery, but also liturgical objects, coins, textiles, architecture, graves, etc.) to complement and even transcend purely textual sources is by now well established in medieval scholarship across the disciplines. So, too, attention to medieval sensory experiences—most prominently emotion—has transformed our understanding of medieval religious life and spirituality, violence, power, and authority, friendship, and constructions of both the self and the other. Our purpose in this volume is to draw the two approaches together, plumbing medieval material sources for traces of sensory experience - above all ephemeral and physical experiences that, unlike emotion, are rarely fully described or articulated in texts.

"Griffiths and Starkey's collection explores the ways in which nine different sorts of objects were--or, at least, might have been--experienced in the Middle Ages. […] All [chapters] offer new ways to think about material things. […T]his is a book worth savoring in all one's senses."

Barbara Rosenwein, The Medieval Review