The Saturated Sensorium
Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages
A part of the subject areas Anthropology, History (Middle Ages) and Cultural studies
Edited by
Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen,
Henning Laugerud and
Laura Katrine Skinnebach
With contributions by
Kristin Bliksrud Aavitsland,
Jørgen Bruhn,
Mads Dengsø Jessen,
Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen,
Sigurd Kværndrup,
Henning Laugerud,
Jette Linaa,
Brian Patrick McGuire,
Nils Holger Petersen,
Laura Katrine Skinnebach and
Tim Flohr Sørensen
More about the book
About the book
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.
Table of contents
INTO THE SATURATED SENSORIUM
Introducing the Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages
SENSORIUM
A Model for Mediaval Perception
INCARNATION
Paradoxes of Perception and Mediation in Medieval Liturgical Art
SANCITITY
The Saint and the Senses: The Case of Bernard of Clairvaux
REPRESENTATION
Courtly Love as a Problem of Literary Sense-Representation
REMEDIATION
Remediating Medieval Popular Ballads in Scandinavian Church Paintings
DEVOTION
Perception as Practice and Body as Devotion in Late Medieval Piety
RITUAL
Medieval Liturgy and the Senses: The Case of the Mandatum
ENVIRONMENT
Embodiment and Senses in Eleventh- to Thirteenth-Century Churches
CONSUMPTION
Meals, Miracles, and Material Culture in the Late Middle Ages
MEMORY
The Sensory Materiality of Belief and Understanding in Late Medieval Europe
