The Saturated Sensorium

Om bogen

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.

Indholdsfortegnelse

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