Band 29, Heft 83

The growth of written culture between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries made it possible to preserve information on customary lore and on cultures that were expressed and perpetuated through the senses. Once transcribed, these sensory experiences became subordinate to a medium (writing) that claimed to replace their performative and legal efficacy, eventually relegating them to the realm of folklore, superstition, and deviance. Using two case studies, matrimonial litigation and proceedings about sanctity, this article examines the role of the senses in performing and proving legal reality in early modern ecclesiastical courts. It analyzes the dynamics of a sensory community with shared sensory norms, practices, and perceptions. Looking at culturally coded senses as a basis for regulating social relationships and creating and transferring collective memory, I ref lect on the hierarchy of the senses that accompanied the process of institutionalization and was marked by gender competition.

Diagnostics - the recognition and naming of diseases - plays a key role in the contact between doctors and patients. In the nineteenth century, the diagnostic process underwent a central shift in both its theoretical conception and its practical implementation. The semiotics practiced until then, the »theory of signs«, which - with a prognostic orientation - primarily wanted to distinguish states of »health« and »sickness «, was replaced by diagnostics as a way of thinking in »disease patterns« and disease classifications. Symptoms as sensations became specific signs of illness through the interpretative work of the doctor. This article examines this historical change in sensory perception in diagnostics and asks how, in the late nineteenth century, sensory perceptions in medical diagnostics constituted body knowledge, social actions, and symbolic meaning in a given space and time. It is argued that, paradoxically, the claim to truth of a value-free medical diagnosis that was accomplished with certain senses and techniques did not lead to the dissolution of disease-related stigmatizing stereotypes, but on the contrary had the potential to turn diagnosis into an ineluctable verdict with social consequences.

The mode of irreconcilability was a structural problem of the Weimar Republic. The violent experience of the First World War had intensified the emergence of new patterns of perception which appeared to be almost obsessively related to the body. This development was accompanied by an upswing of visualization opportunities. Using the example of leading Weimar politicians, it can be demonstrated how sensory mobilization could represent gateways for anti-democratic agitation. These practices could destabilize the republic by reviling its representatives by visualization. The early Nazi press expanded the arsenal of sensory mobilization. The destabilization of the moral, political, and aesthetic order worked through a clear radicalization and dynamization of traditional revilement strategies down to the local level.

Using the example of four maps, this essay discusses how the cartography of the oceans enabled perceptions of the earth as a whole and as a continuous realm of possibilities during the nineteenth century. Nautical charts, produced for practical navigation and committed to the precision ethics of physical geography, facilitated the participation of ports such as Bremen in overseas trade. Ocean maps, aiming at providing an overview and filling sea areas with scientific, political, or travel-related information, visualized thinking in global contexts and positioned marine and terrestrial spaces in new relations. Finally, maps of island colonies show the problems that accompanied the overseas communication of knowledge and how cartographers, by overwriting uncertainties, also inscribed ignorance into maps. All in all, from the perspective of the cartography of the oceans, a specific globality emerges that can be regarded as a distinctive cartographic reality.