A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages

Richard G. Newhauser

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781350077898
• eBook ISBN: 9781474233149
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Understanding the senses is indispensable for comprehending the Middle Ages because both a theoretical and a practical involvement with the senses played a central role in the development of ideology and cultural practice in this period. For the long medieval millennium, the senses were not limited to the five we think of: speech, for example, was categorized among the senses of the mouth. And sight and hearing were not always the dominant senses: for the medical profession, taste was more decisive. Nor were the senses only passive receptors: they were understood to play an active role in the process of perception and were also a vital element in the formation of each individual's moral identity.

From the development of specifically urban or commercial sensations to the sensory regimes of holiness, from the senses as indicators of social status revealed in food to the Scholastic analysis of perception, this volume demonstrates the importance of sensory experience and its manifold interpretations in the Middle Ages.

A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages presents essays on the following topics: the social life of the senses; urban sensations; the senses in the marketplace; the senses in religion; the senses in philosophy and science; medicine and the senses; the senses in literature; art and the senses; and sensory media.

CHAPTER ONE

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The Social Life of the
Senses: Experiencing the
Self, Others, and
Environments

CHRIS WOOLGAR

Any discussion of the senses in medieval Europe must have as its starting point a recognition that, as at any other period, contemporary understanding of the operation of the senses was culturally determined. While there were similar attitudes across Europe, derived from a common intellectual heritage, beliefs and practices varied from country to country, social group to social group, and chronologically. For the first part of the Middle Ages, there is comparatively little written evidence for sensory experience, and we are to a large extent dependent on the oblique and the inferred, on projecting the information we have about philosophical and theological understanding of sensory perception onto society at large, and on deductions from material evidence. For the years after 1100, there is a much wider range of written evidence, with new classes of sources, such as inventories and accounts, that provide incidental information about perception and sensory environments. These allow us to explore the operation of the senses in terms of individual experience. The main focus of this chapter, on the social life of the senses, is therefore on the later period.

In general terms, in the Middle Ages perception was considered a two-way process. Perceptual information was received by the sense organs, much as we might now understand them to operate; but at the same time these organs gave out information. In this way moral and spiritual qualities, as well as perceptual information, passed between perceiver and perceived. The process of perception was understood to be based on direct contact or close proximity. This can be illustrated by the two prevailing theories of the operation of sight—extramission and intromission. In the former, based on Neoplatonism, mediated by St. Augustine, rays of light were sent out from the eye and brought back to it light or fire from the object that was perceived. Intromission, more commonly understood in the later Middle Ages to be the way in which vision functioned, brought to the eye light from the object that was perceived, about its shape and movement, replicated in a series of “micro-images” or species between the object, the eye, and the common sense in the head. Whatever the philosophical and theoretical rationale for perception, significantly for our understanding of the social operation of the senses this contact was popularly believed to bring with it not only the image but also other characteristics of the object. It was an understanding like this that led Thomas Cantilupe, the saintly Bishop of Hereford (d. 1282), to hide his face in his cowl when women passed, lest he be corrupted by seeing them. The lethal power of the sight of the legendary basilisk operated in this way (Woolgar 2006: 21–2, 148–9, 203).

Perception was not limited to those faculties we now see as sense organs, nor to the five senses of antiquity. Speech, for example, was held to be one of the senses of the mouth: the outgoing part, while taste was the receptive part (Woolgar 2006: 84–116). Speaking was an ethical act; the power of words, however, lay as much in their sound as in their comprehension. A fifteenth-century English treatise on child-bearing, derived in part from the Trotula, a compilation originating in southern Italy in the eleventh/twelfth century and in part ultimately from a second-century ce gynecological treatise by Soranus, a Greek physician, described how a birth might be induced. Religious and magical words were written on a scroll, which was then cut into small pieces and given to the woman to drink. Another remedy relied on the apotropaic power of the words of the Magnificat, written on a scroll, and girded about the woman (Barratt 2001: 64–6). Here there was direct contact, ingestion in one case, and touch in another; and the words conveyed a potent moral force. These practices are hard to distinguish from what we might now call magic, but they were in fact closely connected to senses.

There was a strong moral charge associated with perception, especially from the perspective of Christianity. A fourteenth-century English translation of Friar Laurent’s Somme le Roi underscored the importance of keeping well all the bodily wits, the eyes from foolish lookings, the ears from listening to foolish words, the hands from foolish touching, the nostrils from liking sweet smells, and the tongue from too much delight in good food and savors. The senses were the windows of the soul, by which death—that is eternal perdition—might go to the heart (Francis [1942] 1968: 225). That moral charge might also be conveyed through appearance—and sight: physiognomy and gesture were of especial significance in the perceptions that they might transmit about an individual.

Sensation extended beyond the limits we might now set upon it. From the start of life in the womb, to death and beyond the grave, perception was not only affected by the human, but also by other animate and inanimate bodies and objects, of this world and of others. The unborn and the dead were a part of the community, and their perceptions and influences on the senses were of great importance. Practices such as leaving open the mouth of a mother who had died, so that her unborn child might breathe as it was cut from her, surrounding the dead with holy sound, in psalms, and protecting them by burial in consecrated ground, and accounts of resolving the difficulties of the undead, the revenants who appeared sometimes to terrify their neighborhoods or to perform bargains with the living, all speak of these wider processes of perception (Cassidy-Welch 2001: 217–18, 223; James 1922; Powicke and Cheney 1964, 1: 70, 635; Schmitt 1994; Thompson 1902–4, 1: 353).

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE STUDY OF PERCEPTION

Given that medieval notions of sensation expected the individual to be affected directly by the presence of others—or indeed, of objects—and their qualities, physically, morally, and spiritually, texts relating to education, instruction, and regulation generally have much to tell us about sensory culture, in addition to the sources for the aesthetic, philosophical, and religious discussions of sensation considered elsewhere in this volume. Some aspects must have been imbued in the first years of life, transmitted from mother to child, and these are largely opaque to us; but we also have discursive accounts from medieval records which give us insights into perception in action and the socio-sensory environment more generally. From the later Middle Ages, models for behavior appear in books of etiquette and in domestic regulations, principally for elite establishments. Religious direction, marking out sensory practices, appears in regulatory documents, penitentials from the early period, and for the adult, or those old enough to confess, in instructions for confessors, a genre that grew after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215–16. There are further, special categories of religious direction, such as monastic rules and the customaries that amplified them, and the detail of routines for novices to induct them into a new life and its patterns of behavior. While all these religious documents may provide us with a series of normative texts, there are difficulties in establishing the status of the practices they outline: many of the texts are closely related and it is difficult to track how customs and practices evolve. That notwithstanding, they give us information about sensory practice that comes from no other source, and they are used in this chapter to sketch some of the principal elements of the sensory culture of monastic life. Formal legislation provides a further category of social control with a sensory aspect; again, it is important to understand the difference between formal regulation and actual practice. Beyond these texts, discussions of gesture, appearance, and the study of physiognomy are of relevance. To balance theoretical or normative descriptions of behavior, we have a plethora of information about the senses in practice, incidentally documented in records of people going about their daily lives, and this can give us unique information.

PHYSIOGNOMY AND GESTURE

In understanding the sensory consequences of and for individual behavior, the study of physiognomy revealed to medieval men and women much that they needed to know about others. Appearance mattered because it allowed the individual to judge character and it was indicative of moral qualities to be conveyed—by perception—to the observer or those nearby. These ideas were inherited from classical antiquity and, while they were not without their critics, they found a resonance throughout the period (Frank 2000: 135–7, 142–5; Shaw 1998). This was one of the reasons why cosmetics were considered inappropriate: they concealed the true nature of the individual—but their use was widespread, and texts like the Trotula contained information about preparations for women to whiten—or redden—their faces (Green 2001: 138–9). There was a more general notion that to be a good and worthy individual, or, indeed, to be considered fully human, one had to have all one’s faculties. Physical disability and sensory impairment were impediments to moral goodness. At the Augustinian house of Barnwell, in Cambridgeshire, in 1295–6, the instructions for taking in novices required them to have all their natural faculties (naturalia), “that is, eyes and other members,” as well as requiring that they be suitable, fit for society, stable, and well mannered (Clark 1897: 120).

Sensory perfection was required for some general acts. In the late medieval period, those wishing to make a will had to meet various tests of capacity: they had to be in an appropriate spiritual state, typically reached by confession prior to making the will; they had to be sound in mind, a state frequently contrasted with bodily infirmity; but that infirmity notwithstanding, they had to be in full possession of their sensory faculties. Bartolus de Saxoferrato (1313–59), in his commentary on Justinian’s Digest, followed by subsequent commentators, excluded the blind from will-making, as well as those unable to speak. It was for this reason that John Sheppey, Bishop of Rochester, who made his last will in September 1360, recorded that he had the moistness and use of all his senses (habens omnium sensuum meorum umacitatem et usum), except the ability to walk (Helmholz 2004: 402–3; Woolgar 2011: xxix, xxxv, 219).

Beyond appearance, the way that one moved and conducted oneself, in terms of gesture, was especially significant. Medieval society thought about gesture and regulated it. The instructions for the hostillar of Barnwell—responsible for guests—noted that he was frequently in contact with people in a range of conditions and of both sexes. He was to do nothing in his manner of walking, standing, and in all his other movements or speech except what was creditable for a man of religious life. If he had nothing of substance to contribute to conversation, he was to maintain a cheerful countenance and to speak well, for agreeable words multiply friends (Clark 1897: 192).

Instructions for novices in monasteries are especially interesting with regard to the senses: the novice had to leave behind him all the gestures of the secular world and adapt his perceptions to a new life, typically under the tutelage of a master. Treatises such as Hugh of St. Victor’s Institutio novitiorum contained detailed guidance on gesture, that is movements of the whole body, and also on “figure,” the outward manifestation of the soul’s inward movements: the text served as a model for many other instructions for novices (Hugh of St. Victor 1997; Schmitt 1991). The thirteenth-century advice given to Benedictine novices at Eynsham Abbey followed them through the day. They were to abstain from all contact with seculars, with the life that they had left for the monastery: they were not to leave the cloister, except on processions (with the exception of taking the air in the monastic cemetery, which they might do by licence), nor to eat flesh meat (dangerous through its literal link to carnality, absorbed in consumption), even if they were in the infirmary where traditionally this stricture was relaxed. They were to sit in order, on benches, or on the ground, in the cloister; at the midday rest, they were to remain under the bedcovers in the dormitory: they were not to read nor do other work, and their beds were to be between those of the masters and seniors of the house; they were not to talk among themselves unless a master was present; the masters were to sit among them, and were to demit their charge to no one. During the period before their profession there was nothing that they might say or do without the permission of the master, except for confession and the necessities of nature. It was in this period of induction that novices were brought to the models of sensory behavior expected of monks. The detailed regulation of behavior extended to bodily questions, like coughs and colds. Effluvia from the nose or the chest were to be disposed of cautiously, to the ground, and then trodden underfoot, lest the results disturb the squeamish or soil the clothing of others bent in prayer—and these bodily excesses were not to be disposed of within the church. Those with troublesome coughs and phlegm were to be taken out of church by their master and were to rest until the infirmity abated. These instructions tell us not only about the sensory routines that their new life entailed, but also about the importance of preserving the sensory environment of others (Gransden 1963: 37–9, 47).

THE ETIQUETTE OF THE SENSES

Individuals were trained in sensory practices, establishing acceptable patterns of behavior, in the first years of life through interaction between mother and child, or of nurse and household environment more generally. We know of arrangements for clothing, keeping children warm, swaddling and bedding, and for the food of the very young: beyond breastfeeding, mothers and nurses partly masticated food for young children (Orme 2001: 51–92). Paradoxically, we know most about childhood experience from the atypical, from records of accidents or in accounts of miracles. These give a one-sided picture, but an illuminating one, with a looser role for parental supervision in many instances.

On the night of September 6/7, 1303, in the town of Conway in North Wales, Roger, aged 2¼, the son of Gervase the castle cook, went missing. His father had gone that evening to a vigil in church for a funeral. Gervase lived a stone’s throw from the castle: he had left at home Denise, his wife, and Wenthliana, a servant from the castle. Roger was swaddled in the cradle, and Gervase’s two daughters, Agnes, aged 7, and Ysolda, aged 9, were together in bed. After Gervase had left the house, perhaps the time it took one to walk three miles, his wife and Wenthliana also went out, leaving the children asleep. They too went to the church, which was close at hand. They did not lock the door of the house, nor secure it in any other way; it was normally barred from the inside, but this was impracticable if the adults were to get back in. Gervase’s wife and the maid stayed in the church for much of the night; but Gervase returned home and found the door open, the girls in bed asleep, and no sign of Roger. The cloth in which he was swaddled was there along with his clothes. Thinking Roger had left the house, Gervase looked for him in the area round about; but his neighbors, who had been in bed for a long time, knew nothing of Roger. Still believing a neighbor had taken his son in, Gervase returned to the church and told his wife he could not find Roger. Gervase stayed in church until the middle of the night, but became increasingly troubled and returned home to look for Roger with a light. He could not find him at home, nor in the street, nor elsewhere. It was very late, and as he did not wish to wake more of the neighbors, he returned to church and waited for sunrise. The next morning, going to the castle, the constable asked him where he had been: Gervase replied that he had been in church all night watching at a funeral, to which the constable answered that he had watched badly, as his son lay dead in the castle ditch. The child had apparently set out to follow his father to work, as was his habit, but the castle drawbridge was raised and in the dark he had fallen into the dry moat. The coroners had been summoned, had examined the body and were making their formal inquisition with a jury a little way away when John Syward, a burgess of Conway, also climbed down into the ditch and felt the body. John took a penny out of his purse and made the sign of the cross on Roger’s forehead, asking St. Thomas Cantilupe to work a miracle for the resuscitation ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• List Of Illustrations
• Series Preface
• Editor’s Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Sensual Middle Ages
• 1 The Social Life of the Senses: Experiencing the Self, Others, and Environments
• 2 Urban Sensations: The Medieval City Imagined
• 3 The Senses in the Marketplace: Markets, Shops, and Shopping in Medieval Towns
• 4 The Senses in Religion: Liturgy, Devotion, and Deprivation
• 5 The Senses in Philosophy and Science: Mechanics of the Body or Activity of the Soul?
• 6 Medicine and the Senses: Feeling the Pulse, Smelling the Plague, and Listening for the Cure
• 7 The Senses in Literature: The Textures of Perception
• 8 Art and the Senses: Art and Liturgy in the Middle Ages
• 9 Sensory Media: From Sounds to Silence, Sight to Insight
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Copyright