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Title Sensing the sacred in Medieval and early modern culture / edited by Robin Macdonald, Emilie K.M. Murphy, and Elizabeth L. Swann
Published Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018
©2018

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Description 1 online resource (xi, 256 pages)
Contents Introduction: sensing the sacred -- Part I. Prescription and practice -- Problems of sensory history and the medieval laity -- Virtus regens animam: William Peraldus on guiding the pleasures of the senses -- What makes things holy? The senses and material culture in the later Middle Ages -- Part II. Concord and conversion -- Double conversion: the sensory autobiography of Sir Kenelm Digby -- The senses and the seventeenth-century English conversion narrative -- Part III. Exile and encounter -- Hearing exile and homecoming in the Dutch Stranger church -- A sense of place: hearing English Catholicism in the Spanish Habsburg territories, 1568-1659 -- Sensing sacred missives: birch bark letters from seventeenth-century missions in New France -- Part IV. Figuration and feeling -- "O, she's warm": evidence, assent, and the sensory numinous in Shakespeare and his world -- Robert Southwell's intimate exegesis -- God's nostrils: the divine senses in early modern England -- Afterword: making sense of religion
Summary This volume traces transformations in attitudes toward, ideas about, and experiences of religion and the senses in the medieval and early modern period. Broad in temporal and geographical scope, it challenges traditional notions of periodisation, highlighting continuities as well as change. Rather than focusing on individual senses, the volume's organisation emphasises the multisensoriality and embodied nature of religious practices and experiences, refusing easy distinctions between asceticism and excess. The senses were not passive, but rather active and reactive, responding to and initiating change. As the contributions in this collection demonstrate, in the pre-modern era, sensing the sacred was a complex, vexed, and constantly evolving process, shaped by individuals, environment, and religious change. The volume will be essential reading not only for scholars of religion and the senses, but for anyone interested in histories of medieval and early modern bodies, material culture, affects, and affect theory
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on September 07, 2018)
Subject Senses and sensation -- Religious aspects -- History
Human body -- Religious aspects -- History
Civilization, Medieval.
RELIGION -- Christian Life -- General.
Civilization, Medieval
Human body -- Religious aspects
Senses and sensation -- Religious aspects
Genre/Form Electronic books
History
Form Electronic book
Author Macdonald, Robin, editor.
Murphy, Emilie K. M., editor
Swann, Elizabeth L., editor
LC no. 2018007384
ISBN 9781315608389
1315608383
9781317057185
131705718X
9781317057192
1317057198
9781317057178
1317057171