The Senses and the English Reformation

Matthew Milner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754666424
• eBook ISBN: 9781317016359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

It is a commonly held belief that medieval Catholics were focussed on the 'bells and whistles' of religious practices, the smoke, images, sights and sounds that dazzled pre-modern churchgoers. Protestantism, in contrast, has been cast as Catholicism's austere, intellective and less sensual rival sibling. With iis white-washed walls, lack of incense (and often music) Protestantism worship emphasised preaching and scripture, making the new religion a drab and disengaged sensual experience. In order to challenge such entrenched assumptions, this book examines Tudor views on the senses to create a new lens through which to explore the English Reformation. Divided into two sections, the book begins with an examination of pre-Reformation beliefs and practices, establishing intellectual views on the senses in fifteenth-century England, and situating them within their contemporary philosophical and cultural tensions. Having established the parameters for the role of sense before the Reformation, the second half of the book mirrors these concerns in the post-1520 world, looking at how, and to what degree, the relationship between religious practices and sensation changed as a result of the Reformation. By taking this long-term, binary approach, the study is able to tackle fundamental questions regarding the role of the senses in late-medieval and early modern English Christianity. By looking at what English men and women thought about sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, the stereotype that Protestantism was not sensual, and that Catholicism was overly sensualised is wholly undermined. Through this examination of how worship was transformed in its textual and liturgical forms, the book illustrates how English religion sought to reflect changing ideas surrounding the senses and their place in religious life. Worship had to be 'sensible', and following how reformers and their opponents built liturgy around experience of the sacred through the physical allows us to tease out the tensions and pressures which shaped religious reform.

CHAPTER 1
The Senses and Sensing in Fifteenth-Century England

Sensation is so engrained in our perceptions of self and the world that we often forget that, like everything else, sensation has its own history. As Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan reminded us fifty years ago, the senses are just another point of cultural production and negotiation.1 Without their proper historical consideration, however, views on the human experience of the world can lack substantive meaning and nuance. This is as true of our own world as it is of the past. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England was a different sensory world, with pressures, theories and problems separate from our own. The largest gulf that needs to be bridged is caused by under-appreciation of the pre-modern premises that shaped cosmological, natural philosophical and medical thought, and which determined the ways that the senses functioned and were understood. Discussing concepts that often do not easily fit into our own language is analytically difficult. Simply applying categories and terms like physiology, psychology and the mind proves cumbersome as they flow into one another, overlap and are displaced in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English thought. Even assuming there are or were five physical senses – sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch – is not always apparent. The twelfth-century scholastic John of Salisbury asserted there were seven senses, while the potential that speech was a sense was enough for Thomas Tomkins to write a play, Lingua, about it in 1607. Any fruitful discussion of the senses and sensation must begin with the realization that modern framing of the topic brings limitations in a late-medieval and early-modern context.

Sensory history must be grounded in an approach that sees examination of one sense as only part of a greater ‘sensory complex’. The ‘sensorium’, as Ong and McLuhan called it, is a kind of ‘operational’ entity where particular senses are expressions or manifestations of overarching principles that shape sensation and perception within a given cultural context.2 Its analysis can never be linear. Looking at, for example, vision and the visual, results in an expansive investigation of the endless examples of sensory experience. Such a history of the senses can be easily overwhelmed by its source base. Sensation occupies every aspect of human life – even language is as much sensual as it is conceptual.3 Late-medieval English culture recognized this ubiquity, and believed that controlling the senses was the first step in the self-governance that set rational beings apart from animals. Sensation’s ambiguity and omnipresence was its beauty and danger. In the religious cosmology of pre-reformation Europe it offered humanity potential to exercise its most precious God-given gift – free will.

This chapter outlines key elements of late-medieval thought on the senses and sensation and lays the foundations for later discussions of their place in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English religious life. Above all, sensation was a relationship between the object being perceived and the percipient. Its parameters were set by core philosophical beliefs and theoretical positions about what objects and percipients were themselves, and how they could interact. After tracing this relationship discussion turns to what we can best understand as sensory physiology, or the mechanics of sensation independent of any epistemological concerns. Following brief outlining of basic sensory elements in cognition, the chapter concludes by looking at problems surrounding sensation in late-medieval thought. It is evident there were profound challenges to the long-term stability of late-medieval views on sensation; in the short-term, however, their resilience indicates how the senses and sensation played a role in the religious and cultural upheavals of the sixteenth century.

First Principles

The centuries between the reintroduction of Aristotle to Western Europe in the thirteenth century until the end of the sixteenth century constitute a coherent and distinct period in the history of the senses. Aristotle’s De Anima and De Sensu et Sensato and their commentaries overtook older Neoplatonic theories on the senses deriving in large part from Augustine. While medieval scholars have been long acknowledged as syncretists who brought together Christian and ancient philosophies, in this case reconciliation was difficult. Augustinian views on sensation had different concerns than those outlined by Aristotle and his commentators. For Augustine, the senses were active tools of a soul that inhabited its body like a driver in a vehicle. Through them the soul literally reached out into the world to recollect information: the eyes, in particular, emitted rays which encountered the distant sense object in a quasi-tactile form. This extramission theory maintained important Neoplatonic positions on the integrity of human will as well as the mind’s autonomy and its real distinction from the body.4 The revival of Aristotelianism, however, inverted sensory agency. In his De Anima, De Sensu and the rest of the collection known as the Parva Naturalia, the Philosopher saw knowledge as resulting from passive reception of sense data, an infusion of the external world into perceivers themselves. The impact of the Aristotelian commentaries that taught this intromission sensation was second only to scripture and the creedal statements of the Ecumenical councils in shaping medieval thought.5 From the thirteenth century onwards, European thought numbered the senses as five and saw sensation as passive; theoretical positions were adjusted accordingly. Prominent among these stands the work of the great Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas. Despite lack of a Thomist hegemony, philosophical fervour was fuelled by responses to the syncretic and systematic attempts in organizing European thought in toto expressed in Aquinas’ and his contemporaries’ Summae and commentaries. In them Aristotle’s ideas about the senses, and their integration with other ancient sources such as Galenic thought and the Neoplatonism of Augustinian Christianity became, in varying degrees, axiomatic. Aristotelian notions were the first principles of larger theological and philosophical debates on the nature of human knowledge and experience, or within medical treatises on how the senses functioned. Among the works which trace out these debates and positions in England was Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ compendium De Proprietatibus Rerum, translated between 1394 and 1399 by John Trevisa. While the Latin and French versions were more frequently used in the fifteenth century, Trevisa’s translation was published three times during the Tudor period, evidence of its continuing relevance.6 Surprisingly Reginald Pecock’s mid-fifteenth-century English works on moral theology, among them the Donet and the Reule of Cristen Religioun, but primarily the Folower to the Donet, contain similar discussions on the senses explicitly geared towards a wider, non-academic audience. These texts described sensory physiology in a consistent manner over three centuries. Even though there was a tendency after the early fourteenth century to leave the particulars of sensory physiology to medical circles, both medical writers and their more esoterically minded philosophical and theological colleagues took their cue from the Aristotelian axiom ‘nihil est in intellectu quod non prius in sensu’ – there was nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses.

The senses were the bridge between object and percipient. Aristotelian thought determined the shape of this bridge as much as the motion, agency and flow on it. Actions, such as sensation, saw agents activate dormant potentials within the patients they moved, causing further changes, developments and motion.7 In a hierarchy of being more spiritual beings activated lesser ones, in turn activating physical objects. Physical things, though, could not act or move spiritual beings. Passivity was the crux of late-medieval sensation. Sense organs were moved by the external things they perceived causing the transmission of sense data. As a thirteenth-century commentary on the De Anima noted, ‘the five senses agree in being [sic] passive powers of the soul. For we sense by taking in, not by sending out’.8 Even more succinctly Aquinas put it, ‘to sense is not to move, but rather to be moved’.9 This ‘passive power’ meant, as South notes, ‘that there is, in fact, a structural dependence between sense powers’.10 Sensation in pre-modern Europe, including Tudor England, was a causal chain that literally connected the object being sensed to the percipient and the interior soul by moving and affecting the human body and spirit.11 The challenges facing such a theory of sensation revolve around how this causal chain functioned and was maintained. Its shape was determined by what connected object and percipient, as much as each e...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Towards Thinking about Sensation in Tudor Religion
• 1 The Senses and Sensing in Fifteenth-Century England
• 2 Religiosity and Sensing in Pre-Reformation England
• 3 The Senses and Worship: Provision for Liturgy in Late-Medieval England
• 4 Sensing Pre-Reformation English Liturgy
• 5 Sensory Landscapes of Reformation England
• 6 Perception, Polity and Gostly Thynges in Reformation England
• 7 Sensible Reformation in Mid-Tudor England
• 8 Sensing and Worship in Elizabethan England
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index