Volume 25, Issue 2

Medieval bags or pouches have survived mainly in church treasuries, preserved in reliquaries and altars. Usually made of silk, they vary considerably in form, colour, motif and size. Although most surviving pouches have been interpreted as containers for relics that were safely stored away in church treasuries, the form of a sewn bag was not mandatory for wrapping a relic to be placed inside a reliquary or an altar. Nor were all bags intended for ecclesiastical use, as is evident from the number of alms bags preserved in church treasuries. Through an analysis of textual sources and surviving items this article explores alternative uses of these highly tactile textiles that served as containers for valued personal belongings, either as an amulet while traveling, as a container of an individual’s relic donation to a church or even by means of theft. Worn close to the body, around the waist on a belt, around the neck and above or underneath garments, the softness and lightness of bags offered high comfort. Ornaments such as fringes, tassels or ribbons with beads invited wearers to touch it and play with it, thus deepening their engagement with the bag and its content.

The miracle play ‘Erscheinung am Lichtmesstage’ of the late medieval ‘Passional’ offers a literary interpretation of the ‘Candlemas’ and its procession with lighted candles. After a woman has been enraptured into transcendent space, she partakes in a light procession together with the Virgin Mary and various other figures. Each of the participants carries a candle, whose light, as the text says, is sacrificed at the end of the procession. One candle, however, becomes subject of a dispute between the woman and a messenger from the Virgin Mary, causing the candle to split in two. The text repeatedly addresses the actual touching of the candle, suggesting that this wax artefact plays an essential role in bridging the immanent and transcendent. This article explores the candle as a ‘Semiophore’, revealing the broad semantic spectrum of the candle and its light. Through the acts of giving, holding, depositing, seizing, pulling, braking, and touching as well as possessing and keeping the candle become the locus of multiple meanings. Ultimately, it functions as a bridge between the ordinary and the divine.

Through the medium of a brass candlestick made in a sixteenth-century German foundry, I discuss the Christian European household’s sensory engagement and spatial control of the Muslim body. I argue that the Europeans’ sensory experience of the turbaned candlestick reflects and reinforces their conceptualization of Islamic culture, which is a blend of fear and fascination. The turbaned candlestick allows us to explore issues rarely discussed in the study of metalwork and the European imagery of ‘the East’. The shape and scale of the candlestick suggest that it could have been treated both as a statuette and as a piece of furniture. The inanimate candlestick would have felt livelier when the user touched its body and felt heat, flame, light and smoke from the candlestick. My analysis of the candlestick suggests that it might have been experienced through a comprehensive play of senses.

Koran manuscripts that fit comfortably within the palm of one’s hand are known as early as the 10th century CE. For the sake of convenience, all dates will be given in the common era (CE) without further mention, and not in the Islamic or Hijra calendar. Their minute and sometimes barely legible script is clearly not intended for comfortable reading. Instead, recent scholarship suggests that the manuscripts were designed to be worn on the body like pendants or fastened to military flag poles. This is corroborated by some preserved cases for these books which feature lugs to attach a cord or chain, but also their rare occurrence in contemporary textual sources. While pendant Korans in rectangular codex form exist, the majority were produced as codices in the shape of an octagonal prism, and others as scrolls that could be rolled up into a cylindrical form. Both resemble the shapes of similarly dated and pre-Islamic amulets or amulet cases. Building on recent scholarship, I will argue in this article that miniature or pendant Koran manuscripts were produced in similar forms and sizes because of comparable modes of usage, but not necessarily by a deliberate imitation of their amuletic ‘predecessors’. The manuscripts’ main functions did not require them to be read or even opened; some of their cases were in fact riveted shut. Accordingly, the haptic feedback they gave to their owners when they carried or touched them was not one of regular books but one of solid objects (like amulets) or even jewellery, which then reinforced this practice.

Small pendant discs known as Scandinavian gold bracteates are visually impressive indicators of status and identity during the early medieval Migration Period (c. 450–550 CE). Much of the emphasis in bracteate studies has been on typological classification and iconographic interpretation of the pictures, along with decipherment of the inscriptions, yet the sensory impression made by bracteates has been neglected. For decades, archaeologists considered it futile to speculate on the experiential; however, recent research has begun to contend with the materiality of senses and emotions in the past. In this paper, I focus on the both sensory effect of experiencing the pendants and the emotional impact of the objects on those who wore and handled them. Since bracteates are often discovered in women’s graves and show evidence of wear on their suspension loops, it is assumed that these objects were actually used in life. A spotlight on agency turns the study of bracteates from an emphasis on typology, iconography, and runology to trace instead the agency and multisensory effects of these objects on people and the effects of people’s actions on these items. This allows an examination of how bracteates were entangled with the senses and emotions of those who made, wore, and gazed upon these small but important objects. I consider what it may have felt like to make, receive, wear, lose, or bequeath a bracteate – or to deposit it into a bog or a grave.

This article examines two short narratives by Hans Sachs, ‘Of the Lost Talking Gulden’ (1553) and ‘The Poor Complaining Horse Hide’ (1557), as early ‘it-narratives’ that feature material things as their narrators, focalisers and protagonists: a gulden coin, and a horse hide that is then made into a shoe respectively. The small size of these things and their interaction with humans here works not to make them accessible for human handling, but allows them to provide a macro- and a micro-perspective on human society as an alternative to the normal anthropocentric view of sensory perceptions.

Small, mass-produced pipe-clay figurines were popular devotionalia in the late medieval Low Countries. In this paper, focusing on representations of the Christ Child, I study the sensory and playful ways in which such objects were used as ‘props of perception’ in spiritual games of make-believe or role-play. Not only does this particular iconography invite tactile and playful behaviour, the figurines fit within a larger context of image practices involving visions and make-believe. Through such practices images were animated and imbued with a divine power. Contemporary written sources suggest that, especially for women, ownership of and sensory engagement with small-scale figures provided them with agency.