Sensing the Sacred in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Robin Macdonald, Emilie Murphy, Elizabeth L. Swann, Robin Macdonald, Emilie Murphy, Elizabeth L. Swann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317057185
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Europäische Geschichte der Renaissance

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, res-ponding 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.

Part I
Prescription and practice

1 Problems of sensory history and the medieval laity

John H. Arnold

Christian thought in the Middle Ages always struggled with the question of the senses as the source of knowledge, pleasure, and desire. Heir to the Aristotelian principle that all knowledge begins in the senses as well as the Neoplatonic distrust of the body and its carnal modes of knowing, and itself committed to the principle that preternatural and supernatural sources of knowledge were available and meaningful, it was difficult for Christian thinkers to reconcile this classical legacy with its own physics and metaphysics.¹

Gabrielle Spiegel presents the senses as a problem for medieval thinkers. In this essay, I want to suggest that they continue to present a problem, both methodological and interpretive, for modern medievalists. They are problematic, first, because the current history of the senses, particularly when applied to the study of religion, has lost track of some of its intellectual inheritance, leading to an unintended bias in focus; and, second, because how we think we can access the senses is often overly dependent on proscriptive sources, leading to a lack of full contextualisation. However, as I argue below, there are productive paths forward and these can be approached in part by recognising that the senses were a fundamental problem, particularly with regard to the faith of the ordinary laity in the later Middle Ages.

The historiographical problems

The current interest in sensory history and the history of the senses sits at a point where several different historiographical vectors intersect, and a focus on religion adds yet further lines to complicate the picture. However, these historiographies have different purposes, and current work is hampered by a failure to recognise that the underlying projects diverge. The most obvious inheritance comes from the work of the Annales School in the decades following 1980, where the project is to historicise both natural and cultural phenomena in order better to situate the changing nature of the human subject.² At their best, such histories reflect upon the history of affect, of what made people feel and do things at different times in the past, and are necessarily framed by an analysis of the wider political context. Thus, Alain Corbin’s account of church bells across the period of the French Revolution tells us not only about how they sounded and what they meant, nor simply evokes their experience in that time and place, but also situates them within struggles for control. Corbin argues for both a changing sonic habitus (of what becomes aurally ‘natural’) and a more self-conscious political struggle over the soundscape of modern France. It should be noted, however, that not all works aim so high, some preferring simply to evoke or ‘reconstruct’ sensory experience in a particular period, often focusing on a particular sense. This ‘evocative’ project could be linked to a different, and much longer standing, inheritance, namely the study of ‘lived religion’ (la religion vécue). Much work on lived religion has been pleased similarly to reconstruct and make tangible the experience of faith in a particular moment in time, as a kind of exercise in rescuing that which is ‘hidden from history’; though the best examples have again tried to move beyond evocation to something more analytical.³

The other main line of influence comes from the history of science and medicine, and its reconstruction of past understandings of the human body. Here the interest has been in how the senses and bodily sensory experience were explicitly understood and discussed in premodern times, a mode of analysis that is much closer to that of the history of ideas. Foundational medievalist work of this sort analyses the reception of Aristotelian theories of sight in the thirteenth century, attempting thus to understand the development of medieval thought, and, on occasion, to demonstrate its influence beyond the universities – for example, by arguing (as Michael Camille did most brilliantly) that it informed fundamental changes in gothic architecture.⁴ One should note also that there is a particular subset to this more ideas-led approach, namely long-standing work in the field of theology which has studied the medieval notion of the ‘spiritual senses’, asking primarily whether or not they formed a ‘coherent’ system of productive thought.⁵

It is worth unpacking these inheritances because part of the problem with the ‘sensory turn’ – as manifest in the history of medieval religion in particular – is a tendency to take at least one interpretive step backwards in the midst of its other innovations. The different strands described in the preceding paragraphs, whilst not innately opposed, are not very closely attuned in their purposes or analytical frameworks: understanding how and why people were affected sensorily in a particular historical moment may be aided by reference to how the senses (or, as often, one particular sense) were understood to function, but it is not a clear or robust approach. It tends also to focus attention on specific discussions or evocations of the senses – moments at which sight or hearing or taste are explicitly evoked – but at the cost of thinking about moments at which the senses are implicitly addressed.

It is surely right to be wary of assuming that ‘their’ senses corresponded straightforwardly to ‘ours’, as Mark M. Smith has warned, and theories of sensory perception from a period can help us to avoid such essentialism.⁶ But whilst contemporary ideas may allow us to understand some aspects of sensory production – the use of light in Gothic cathedrals, as analysed by Camille for example, or theories regarding the process by which the sound of preaching was imprinted on the ‘inner’ sense of hearing – it is problematical to assume that sensory consumption would be similarly informed and structured for all.⁷ At the very least, it is clearly the case that theories based upon Aristotelian texts and Arabic learning largely developed in the University of Paris in the mid-thirteenth century were not immediately accessible to everyone in medieval Europe. Moreover, the theories had much more to say about the so-called ‘higher’ senses of sight and hearing than other forms of experience. For historians wishing to avoid the sin of projecting modern categories back into the medieval past, the existence of explicit discussion of, for example, extromission/intromission theories of sight can be a welcome aid to avoiding anachronism; but that is not a tremendously secure methodology if one’s project is to understand, for example, the experience of an ordinary member of the laity viewing the Eucharist at weekly mass, who may not have heard much about post-Aristotelian optical theory.

The latter project is much closer to the aims of the ‘lived religion’ inheritance, but the default tendency in recent medievalist work is to abandon the popular for the elite, perhaps unintentionally, and often without reflection. The desire to establish links between scientific theory and cultural practice tends to result in a focus on ‘high’ culture, with a tendency to assume that past experience can be reconstructed from elite didactic texts, which set out idealised religious sensations.⁸ It is not wrong to focus on elite culture, and I am not arguing that elite cultures are hermetically separate from popular cultures – rather, that the former does not simply adumbrate or encompass the latter. But it is curious, in an area much indebted to the work of the Annales School and the legacy of la religion vécue, to find the issue of more general religious experience so quickly abandoned or problematically subsumed. In the desire to evoke fully and sympathetically the sensual experience of religion, guided by medieval texts and images steeped in theological and scientific tradition, there is a danger of mistaking ideology and pedagogy for the revelation of past reality. Thus, discussion of the senses, and the spiritual senses, is situated in time – by reference to theological discourse – but is not fully situated historically, as issues of social, cultural and political context fall out of the analysis.⁹

The issue is particularly acute with regard to medieval theological discussion of the ‘inner’ or ‘spiritual’ senses because of the importance of hierarchies within medieval discourses. The senses are themselves arranged in a hierarchy – often, though not always, with sight at the top – and they are understood to relate to a progression of modes of spiritual perception, where some direct (albeit ‘inner’) sensory experience of God is the eventual goal, whether in this life or the next. As Boyd Coolman explains, with regard to the theology of William of Auxerre in particular, but in a progression shared with various other thinkers, ‘knowledge of God proceeds from an affirmation of creedal doctrines, through a deeper understanding of their meaning and coherence, to a direct and experiential perception of divine realities’.¹⁰ This immediately links the senses to spiritual ability and discernment, where the ordinary lay person is rarely imagined to be particularly capable.¹¹ Lay people are required to affirm the creed, but are less often encouraged to delve into its mysteries. This is part of the problem for medieval theologians: not only were there different intellectual traditions regarding the physics and metaphysics of the senses, as outlined by Gabrielle Spiegel in the quotation at the head of this essay, but the implications of these traditions played out across a varied and spiritually unequal Christian people, ranging from those who were training themselves to ever greater spiritual acuity, to those who were thought to be spiritually dull – but all of whom nonetheless possessed physical senses.

The ordinary laity, then, presented a challenge for medieval Christian writers thinking about the senses; and in a different fashion continue to present a challenge to medievalists of sensory history, who need to think carefully about the purpose and scope of their analyses. If we wish to use sensory history to help us understand medieval religion, we must try to encompass not just ‘religion’ at its spiritual pinnacle, but the everyday religion of the laity. And we may find it useful, in regard to this project, to think about how ‘the senses’ were seen as a problem within the period, particularly with regard to the many.

The sensory problems of the laity

For all Christians, the senses were both an opportunity and a problem. They offered an opportunity, in that one could hope to interpret or commune with God’s presence in the world through bodily experience, and perhaps hope also to connect with the divine through the ‘inner’ or ‘spiritual’ senses (understandings of the nature of these, and their relationship to the outer senses, wavered between metaphor, analogy, and some more innate and progressive connection, the outer leading to the inner). On the other hand, they were also a problem: it was through the senses that the body was bound to the sinful world and could be penetrated by temptation. The bodily senses might, moreover, mislead or misconstrue the spiritual benefit and truth of certain phenomena (most obviously, the Eucharist). For the ordinary lay person, these problems were seen as more severe, as they were not generally held to possess as securely the necessary skills of discernment and discipline that would protect them from exterior temptation, or, more importantly, allow them to read beyond the outer appearance of things. Theological discussion of the spiritual senses did not explicitly exclude any Christian. But such texts ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: sensing the sacred
• Part I Prescription and practice
• Part II Concord and conversion
• Part III Exile and encounter
• Part IV Figuration and feeling
• Afterword: making sense of religion
• Index