Crossing Senses and Crossing Disciplines at the “Mount of Truth”

A Review of ‘The Senses: Present Issues, Past Perspectives’ Conference, Monte Verità, Switzerland, April 2023

David Howes
Centre for Sensory Studies
Concordia University, Montreal

Monte Verità is a centre for cultural and scientific events situated on the outskirts of Ascona, Switzerland, overlooking Lake Maggiore. This utopian site was founded in 1900 as a vegan colony (where everyday practices also included nudism, heliotherapy, gymnastics and meditation) and sanatorium. It soon turned into an artist’s retreat that also attracted anarchists and theosophists, writers such as Herman Hesse and dancers the likes of Rudolf van Laban and Isadora Duncan. To the early founders and visitors, then, Monte Verità was a place of sensory immersion: they tasted vegan food, listened to Wagner, worked the land, and enjoyed the touch of the sun on their naked skin. In 1920, the founders decamped to Spain (and later Brazil) and the site gradually deteriorated, until 1926, when the property was bought by the visionary German banker and exotic and modern art collector Baron Eduard von der Heydt, who had a hotel built in the Bauhaus style {1}. Soon, the parade of spiritual, sensual, and intellectual pilgrims and art enthusiasts resumed, including Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, D.H. Lawrence, Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Harald Szeemann, who chronicled the site for an exhibition in 1978, which now forms part of the permanent collection in Casa Anatta, seat of the Monte Verità Museum (Monina et al. 2023).

The “Mount of Truth” was the ideal location for a conference organized by Annette Kern-Stähler, Chair of Medieval English Studies at the University of Bern, and her two postdocs, Hannah Piercy and Will Brockbank, on the theme of “The Senses: Present Issues, Past Perspectives.” The conference was co-organized by Elizabeth Robertson (University of Glasgow), who has had a long-standing collaboration with Kern-Stähler centring on the senses {2}. They invited a number of scholars at the forefront of contemporary sensory research (engineering, psychology, philosophy of perception) to each present a paper on a current issue in sensory studies (multisensoriality, virtual reality, sensory engineering, kinaesthesia, pain and hallucinations). In each panel, medievalists working in different fields (art history, literature, history, religious studies) responded to these input talks, which resulted in a fascinating discussion across sensory boundaries and disciplines.

Kicking off the conference was an introductory panel in which Fiona Macpherson, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience at the University of Glasgow, gave a lucid overview of contemporary understandings of the senses. This was followed by Kern-Stähler and Robertson’s response from a medievalist perspective, which not only complicated the received wisdom about the medieval sensorium but also brought out the ways in which art and literature present sensation as intersubjective and as situated – that is, as tied to particular times and places. The conference organizers invited me, a sensory anthropologist and Co-Director of the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University, Montreal, to present the keynote and to engage in a wide-ranging cross-disciplinary conversation centring on the history of the senses – and their “extensions” via diverse media, from illuminated manuscripts to head-mounted displays, such as the HoloLens.

The genius of “The Senses” conference lay in the way it promoted a cross-disciplinary approach to the study of “the sensorium” (defined by Walter Ong (1991) as “the entire perceptual apparatus as an operational complex” and by his mentor, Marshall McLuhan (1962), as a “collideroscope”) and sought to bring different historical epistēmēs – most notably, the medieval and the modern – into conversation. By cross-disciplinary I mean an approach that both crosses the disciplines, as when swordsmen cross or clash swords, and blends or interweaves them. Cross-disciplinarity is not to be confused with the standard “multidisciplinary” and/or “interdisciplinary” approaches to research topics currently in vogue, which (frankly) pale by comparison.

“The Senses” conference ran from Sunday the 23rd of April to Wednesday the 26th, 2023, opening and closing over two sumptuous lunches. You can see the full programme here and a cross-section of the abstracts of the papers presented at the conference can be found at the end of this review. I should forewarn the reader that this conference review is not very level-headed, or complete. It goes off on numerous tangents. But perhaps its very fragmentary, tangential (and occasionally tendentious) timbre is more in keeping with the truly “collideroscopic” spirit of “The Senses” conference than if I had tried to be more rational and balanced in my account.

The call for papers for the conference pitched a wide array of questions, such as: How does the construction of the senses in medieval culture enrich our understanding of the contemporary problem of multisensoriality and cross-modal perception?{3} What role do the senses play in the perception of pain? How might the medieval construction of virtual realities through, for example, the contemplation of devotional images enrich our understanding of virtual reality and its potential? What can medieval literary, visual, and material culture tell us about the mechanisms by which sense data is transformed into thought? Of particular interest to me was the question of the individuation and enumeration of the senses.

The starting point for the conversation around the latter topic was Aristotle’s dictum in De Anima to the effect that “There is no sixth sense in addition to the five [he] enumerated—sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch” – in that order (quoted in Howes 2023: 120). Of course, the objection was raised that, according to contemporary research in neurobiology, humans have at least 10, not just five, senses – and that there could be as many as 22 and radical estimates put the number as high as 33 (Howes 2022a: 81-83). Point taken, but then, why should we defer to the neurobiological perspective when, according to the theological perspective elaborated by Origen, one of the early Church Fathers, there were also “the spiritual senses” corresponding to the physical ones to be considered. “According to Origen these senses enabled one to perceive transcendental phenomena, such as the sweetness of the word of God” (Classen 1993: 3). So too could Origen’s doctrine explain the phenomenon of the blessed “hearing voices” or having a “vision” (Canévet et al. 1993). Nowadays such manifestations would be dismissed as hallucinations (on which more below).

Furthermore, Aristotle’s model was not set in stone. There have been numerous variations on and departures from it throughout Western history (Howes 2022a: ch. 3). Consider Piers Ploughman (circa. 1370-86).

In the medieval poem Piers Ploughman, the five ‘senses’ are ‘Sirs See-well, Hear-well, Say-well [i.e., speech, hence the tongue], Work-well-with-thine-hand and Godfrey Go-Well [i.e. walking, hence the foot]’. The notion of the five senses being sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch was ‘a learned Roman idea’ and translating it posed difficulties for Medieval English writers (Howes and Classen 2013: 171 citing Anderson)

This passage raises all sorts of intriguing (and perplexing) questions: whither smell and taste? What is speech doing on the list? It is not a sense! Most perplexing of all, though, is the sense of walking. We moderns would call it kinaesthesia. However, kinaesthesia like the other interoceptive senses (proprioception, the vestibular system, etc.) wasn’t “discovered” until the nineteenth century (Howes 2022a: 82) What’s it doing cropping up in Piers Ploughman? Or, is it anachronistic to suppose that the figure of Godfrey Go-Well has anything to do with the concept of kinesthesia?

Interestingly, in her opening remarks, Kern-Stähler drew our attention to the fact that in the Fuller Brooch (late 9thcentury), the locus classicus of the five-sense model of the sensorium for the medieval period, the representation of hearing depicts a man with his hand up to an ear, which makes sense, but if you don’t stop there, if you look down at his feet, you can see that he is doing a jig (Figure 1). In other words, he is dancing. Of course, hearing music (in particular) tends to induce movement, from simply tapping one’s foot to marching to breaking into a polka. So, it is not such a stretch to suggest that this Medieval representation foreshadows the concept of kinaesthesia. The trick is to be attentive to the interrelationships of the senses, including hidden relationships (as here, the assimilation of movement to hearing), and not assume that the brooch displays a static typology.

Figure 1: The Fuller Brooch, British Museum

The “Wheel of the Senses” (circa. 1320-1340), a wall painting at Longthorpe Tower, Peterborough, in Cambridgeshire, also touched on by Kern-Stähler in her opening address, also suggests that the medieval conception of the sensorium was far more dynamic than is commonly supposed.

These intimations of sensorial dynamism were picked up on by numerous presenters (Sarah Jane Brazil, Micol Long, Craig Hambling), including Katie Walter, who brought out the portrayal of eye-foot coordination in diverse medieval texts. Walter’s paper posed an important corrective to the overwhelming emphasis on eye-hand coordination in contemporary neurophysiological discussions of the sensorimotor system. And, interestingly, she expatiated on how the medieval discourse on the union and disjunction of the senses was bound up with the discussion of justice – specifically, the proper allocation of functions and respect or recognition among the senses. This put me in mind of the early modern comedy Lingua, Or the Combat of the Tongue and the Five Senses for Superiority (1607), in which the female character, Lady Lingua (or “The Tongue”), tried to make a case for being recognized as a sense alongside the canonical five: Auditus, Visus, Tactus, Gustus, and Olfactus (all male characters). The dispute was judged by Sensus Communis (or “The Common Sense”), who rejected her submission based on what could be called the argument from design. By way of background it is pertinent to note that, according to Aristotle, not only did each sense have its proper object or “sensible” (colour in the case of sight, sound in the case of hearing, odours in the case of smell, etc.), it also had its own Element: Water in the case of sight (because the eye contains water), Air in the case of hearing, Fire in the case of smell, and Earth in the case of touch and taste (because gustation was considered to be “a mode of touch”). Here is an excerpt from the judgment of Common Sense, which sets out the argument from design:

The number of the Senses in this little world is answerable to the first bodies in the great world: now since there be but five in the Universe, the four elements and the pure substance of the heavens [i.e., the Aether], therefore there can be but five Senses in our Microcosm, correspondent to those, as the sight to the heavens, hearing to the air, touching to the earth, smelling to the fire, tasting to the water; by which five means only the understanding is able to apprehend the knowledge of all corporal substances. The number of the Senses in this little world is answerable to the first bodies in the great world: now since there be but five in the Universe, the four elements and the pure substance of the heavens, therefore there can be but five Senses in our Microcosm, correspondent to those, as the sight to the heavens, hearing to the air, touching to the earth, smelling to the fire, tasting to the water; by which five means only the understanding is able to apprehend the knowledge of all corporal substances (Tomkis quoted in Howes 2023: 122).

This construction of the senses as elemental – or, to put this thought another way, our first media – is very different from the modern understanding of the senses as localized in the sense organs or their terminus in the visual cortex, the auditory cortex, the rhinencephalon, and so forth (i.e. the brain). It is cosmological, rather than psychological: that is, the senses went out via the diverse elements and mixed with the world (e.g., the extramission theory of vision) and each other.{4} They were not mere passive receptors (that idea came later, with Locke, the great pacifier); rather, they were active mediators. Interestingly, the idea of perception as action or “action in perception” (Nöe 2006) is supposed to be a recent discovery. However, as we are beginning to see, the medievals entertained a different, and rather more capacious vision: namely, perception as mediation, perception as a two-way street (see Classen 1993: 2-3; Jørgenson 2015: 19-21).

Back to the discussion of kinaesthesia: in line with Katie Walter’s ode to the foot, there were two other presentations, “Embodying Martial Narratives through Virtual Reality” by Michael Ovens and “Wrestling with Pedagogy: A Kinesthetic Perspective on the Education of Princes” by Craig Hambling. These presentations radically challenged the way us moderns, when we present papers at a conference, tend to come across as so many talking heads. In effect, before our very eyes, Ovens and Hambling transformed the conference room into a gymnasium and exercised our minds by themselves exercising their bodies – wrestling with each other and beating each other with sticks – all the while assuming poses inferred from their reading of such texts as Giles of Rome’s Regiment of Princes (circa 1280) and the fifteenth century Alliterative Morte D’Arthure. The conference could have degenerated into a no-holds-barred free-for-all, had the rest of us followed suit. Fortunately, it did not, but Ovens and Hambling succeeded at making their point: the academy (and the Humanities in particular) should develop a more muscular, full-bodied approach to scholarship if the promise of “sensuous scholarship,” as proposed by Paul Stoller (1997), is ever to be realized concretely.

One of the two panels specifically devoted to the topic of “kinaesthesia and proprioception” opened with a paper on “Predictions and Illusions of Heaviness” by the psychologist Gavin Buckingham. (This panel also overlapped with an earlier panel on “hallucinations and illusions.”) Buckingham presented the results of his and other contemporary psychologists’ research on size-weight illusions: the bigger an object the heavier it is presumed to be. He showed how, by (ingeniously) varying the size and/or weight of the objects to be hefted, the illusion (determined by our prior assumptions) could be laid bare, exposed for what it is (an illusion).

What struck me, however, was that Buckingham’s presentation was itself dependent on certain unexamined assumptions, most notably “our modern, metric notion of weight-perception as relatively stable” (Jørgensen 2015: 34), and the way he presumed himself to be in the know about the real or actual weight of the experimental objects. This was not the case in the medieval sensorium. Consider Gregory of Tours’ account of the goings-on at Peter’s shrine. The apostle’s tomb was situated at the bottom of a dark shaft, out of sight and out of reach. A pilgrim could insert their head through a small window at the top of the shaft “to feel the virtue of the apostle’s presence (‘virtus apostolica’)” (ibid.) Next, the pilgrim could lower a piece of cloth onto the tomb, and raise it back up. “Extraordinary to report!” Gregory observed:

If the man’s faith is strong, when the piece of cloth is raised from the tomb it will be so soaked with divine power [divina virtute] that it will weigh much more than it weighed previously; and the man who raised [the cloth] then knows that by its good favour [gratia] he has received [the blessing] that he requested (quoted in Jørgensen 2015: 34).

How would Buckingham make sense of this medieval experiment in weight-perception? I asked him. Were his measuring instruments sensitive enough to detect the “spiritual density” of some test object? Equally pertinent (or impertinent), I asked him: Do you try to ascertain the moral condition of your test subjects (i.e. the state of their soul)? Here it should be noted that “the true devotee at Peter’s shrine …would pray most earnestly, keep vigil, and fast in order to prepare duly for the awe-inspiring encounter with the holy” (ibid.).

Such ritual preparations – or techniques of (sacred) sensing – form no part of contemporary research protocols. Perceptual training, yes; but moral preparation, no. Rather, all Buckingham’s experiments are designed to prove is the “subjectivity” of sense perception. But the so-called illusion that the pilgrim presumably fell for was not purely subjective. Rather, his senses were primed by his observance of a series of very rigorous techniques (fasting, praying, etc.). What is more, according to the prevailing understanding of perception as mediation (discussed above), subject and object were perfectly attuned to each other.{5} Jørgensen calls this the “hagiosensorial matrix of experience”:

Hagiosensorial perception implies the subject’s mode of sensing (e.g. godly vision) as well as an objective and purpose for the senses (e.g. vision of God). … Beatific eyes see beatitude, hallowed hands handle holiness, sanctified senses produce sanctity. … In this ontological construction of the holy, the two dimensions – sanctified object and sanctified subject – presuppose, qualify, and reinforce one another mutually, convincingly … (32).

Buckingham was not persuaded by my arguments regarding the historical relativity and cultural contingency of perception. So I put another question to him: Which is heavier, ping or pong? He got the answer right (pong) but still dismissed my argument. Why? Because it is impossible to measure the weight of the two vocables. But that was precisely my point (See “Quali(a)tative Research” [Howes 2022b]). It was also Richard Newhauser’s point in his paper on “Phantom Sensing.” He related how he had once invited a colleague to his apartment for dinner. Upon entering the apartment, the guest commented on the smell of garlic, which was in fact totally absent. It was because the colleague knew Newhauser to be Jewish that he made a connection to the smell of garlic which, to repeat, had no basis in empirical reality.{6}

The question of the impact of differing ways of sensing on the what of sensing resurfaced in the context of art historian and curator Elizabeth Dospel Williams’ presentation entitled “Medieval Objects and Sensory Experience in the Museum.” Her paper was mainly concerned with how best and most meaningfully to display the Byzantine textiles and Andean quipu in the collection of the Dumbarton Oaks Museum. Her answer was: sensually by means of film, rather than textually by means of labels. Of particular interest to me was her commentary on a singular object in the museum’s collection, a “Pyxis with Imperial Families and Ceremonial Scenes” (1403-1404), made of ivory. “In the galleries, it sits amidst other artworks from the late Roman through late Byzantine periods, safely encased in plexiglass and kept still and at stable temperature and humidity (ivory is particularly sensitive, making me think that objects, too, have sensory perception).” And, she went on, the pyxis “becomes activated when you hold it .. it demanded to be interacted with.”

I admired Williams’ approach, for the problem with much contemporary scholarship when it comes to textiles is that many scholars, with their literate/hermeneutic mindset, are preoccupied with the text in “text-ile,” and so treat textiles as “texts” to be read. This is far too semiotic of them, and out of touch with the objects themselves. It is the tactility of textiles that ought to concern us foremost, as Williams stressed. And such a sense-based approach is not necessarily devoid of semantics: on the contrary, the word “sense” contains both sensation and signification, feeling and meaning (as in the “sense” of a word) in its spectrum of referents. To grasp this, however, requires de-linguifying the prevailing conception of “meaning”; it involves thinking (and sensing) “beyond text” (Cox et al. 2017), and, above all, without labels.

Williams’ sensuous experiments in museum display put me in mind of Constance Classen’s classic essay, “Museum Manners: The Sensory Life of the Early Museum” (2007) as well as her book, The Museum of the Senses: Experiencing Art and Collections (2017), and the “sensory turn” in museology that her work has inspired (Howes 2014, 2022a; Levent and Pascual-Leone 2014). In “Museum Manners,” Classen brings out how the early museum, such as the Ashmolean (est. 1683) was a kind of sensory gymnasium (visitors hefted objects to gauge their weight, and even nibbled on some of them to determine their chemical composition), whereas the sensory regime of the modern art museum is often indistinguishable from the set-up of a sensory restriction laboratory: everything for the eye, nothing for the other senses (except if you rent an audio guide, but it just feeds you text for the most part).

The modern museum is above all designed to facilitate the visitor viewing the art on its walls. There is some question, however, as to whether this does not denature the art, particularly sacred art. Consider the mode of presentation of the Byzantine metal bas-relief icon as described by Bissera Pentcheva in “The Performative Icon” (2018): it should be displayed in the light of flickering candles (not fluorescent light), the air should be suffused with chanting and incense, and the consummation of the act of viewing ought to involve kissing the icon, to “taste how the Lord is sweet” (see further Jørgensen 2015: 16-18). The contemporary art curator would have a fit at this, while the modern art critic (labouring under the influence of Kant’s Critique of Judgment) would denounce such participant sensation for interfering with the cultivation of the sort of “disinterested contemplation” that is supposed to be the essence of the aesthetic attitude. How pallid, not to mention wrong-headed, such an attitude must appear, from our historical perspective. We must recant Kant if we are to make any headway in apprehending the sacred art of the past.

The experience and expression of pain was the focus of a particularly gripping panel. It opened with a presentation by David Bain, who approached the problem of pain through the lens of analytic philosophy. Bain introduced a series of conceptual distinctions that dissected the experience of pain in a profoundly illuminating way. Over supper the previous evening, he informed me that he thought that the field of pain studies could be enhanced considerably by inviting analytic philosophers to compare notes with the experimenters in a laboratory. After hearing him speak, I could not agree more. There should be at least one analytic philosopher attached to every pain research centre.

There followed a series of papers that literally fleshed out Bain’s account of pain even further. These papers were by literary scholars interested in the evocation of pain by means of language. Elizabeth Barry quoted a passage from Coleridge’s literary memoir Biographia Literaria (1817) where a young child ensconced in a dark crib cries out: “Touch me, Mother, that I may be here” (this concerns the pain of social deprivation) and went on to address that wrenching line from King Lear which goes “I will not swear these are my hands: let’s see – I feel this pinprick” (concerning the pain of self-harm); Will Brockbank talked about the treatment of pain in Early English herbals; and. Hannah Piercy showed how images of violent touch and tearing were used to convey pain in the medieval romances Sir Orfeo and Eger and Grime. Contrary to Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain (1987), where she claims that pain “shatters worlds,” these presenters showed how whole worlds, existential worlds, could be constructed out of the fragments. I was profoundly affected by these presentations, and they convinced me that every pain research centre, such as the Centre for Research on Pain (the brainchild of Ronald Melzack) at the Montreal Neurological Institute should be staffed by at least one literary scholar, alongside the analytic philosopher, and all the technicians and physicians in their lab coats. It could be argued that too many cooks in such a laboratory would spoil the broth, and that literary scholars lack the requisite specialization in physiology, but imagine how much more perspicacious the experimental design and richer the reports of such cross-disciplinary research on nociception could prove, compared to the often dry, clinical, unfeeling language of such journals as the Journal of Pain Research.

And one further point, what of the archaic (Christian) notion that “pain ennobles”? There is no room, nor any need for such discourse in the pain research centre, thanks to advances in anaesthesiology. Pain does not have any moral worth to us moderns. The amorality of pain research is not unique to this branch of psychology, though. It (amorality) pervades the whole field of perceptual psychology. Consider J.J. Gibson’s “ecological psychology” of perception in The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966, also 1979). His theory is couched in the language of “information pick-up” in an environment, as if the senses were mere “data gatherers.” The idea of sensory stimuli as “sense data” (which is also central to the account of perception that comes out of analytic philosophy) occludes the fact that said stimuli are hot or cold, redolent or stenchful, harmonious or jarring (like the screech of chalk on a blackboard), etc. etc. The concept of “sense data”, like that of “information,” dispenses with all this, and in the process flattens our senses. These terms should be censored, or at least qualified (Howes 2022b)

Furthermore, I would argue that Gibson’s ecological psychology of perception is an offence to the senses (my senses anyway){7} and an affront to human morality, not to mention his use of the term “ecological” being a complete misnomer. Consider this: Gibson’s theory of the senses as “perceptual systems” was forged in the course of his research experiments on visual perception during and immediately after World War II. The main concern of this research (funded by the US military) was to understand and assess the visual aptitude of fighter pilots (Valiquet 2019). So, Gibson’s theory of perception is martial, not ecological. In it, the senses are seen as “information-seekers” or drones. It is all about “information” and “affordances” (how to land a plane, or zero in on a target), and devoid of conscience.

By contrast, many of the papers at ‘The Senses” conference, such as those by John Merrington, Micol Long and Elisabeth Dutton brought out what could be called the moral economy of the senses in the Middle Ages {8}. Thus, seeing was good so long as it was not adulterous or lecherous (as in the biblical tale of the Elders spying on Susanna); eating was good, providing it was done in moderation (whence the sin of gluttony). In “Calls of Nature,” Dutton delved into how “natural processes” connected actors and audience in the theatre:

However “nuanced” bodies may be, though, their appetites and so-called natural functions, like elimination, were regarded with ambivalence:

In Medwall’s Nature, Sensuality claims the power to create movement, by contrast with Mankind under the power of Reason who is still like stone. But Sensuality is not entirely to be trusted in this play, as the appetites he stimulates are ‘vice’ … and sometimes the sensory stimulus becomes too urgent. In Mankind Tityvillus uses them to distract Mankind from prayer by the need to go to relieve himself. Appetites and excretion seem to be bad. But appetite can also serve good purposes, as for example in the Huy nuns’ convent drama of the Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, when Pilgrim’s physical hunger leads him to the Eucharist. And for Julian of Norwich excretion is even a place to experience God.

How might virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) assist us in reconstructing or plumbing the medieval sensorium, and vice versa? This topic really exercised our imaginations. The whole discussion could have been cut short by Craig Hambling’s quip: “Isn’t the mind the primary locus of virtual reality?”{9} which I thought was quite brilliant, but no one took him up on this point. The discussion otherwise got sidetracked by Henry Ravenhall’s fascinating paper on the illuminated manuscript as an “interactive” medium. To elaborate, we moderns think of the book as addressed to the eye. Marshall McLuhan, with his widely diffused theory of the “Great Divide” between oral and literate mentalities brought on by the invention of writing, and a fortiori the printing press (resulting in the “substitution of an eye for an ear”), is partly responsible for this construction. But it is a misconstruction. As a rapidly growing body of research has brought to light (Howes 2023b), there was more to reading a book than meets the eye in the medieval period. For example, books were read aloud by a lector during mealtimes at the monastery. Books were also for touching. Indeed, Ravenhall has inspected hundreds of medieval manuscripts in which the images have grown smudged due to people swiping them. Not “swiping” in the current sense of activating some function on a cell phone, but swiping with a view to communing with the divine. We moderns instinctively view such smudging as a form of defacement, but in the medieval period swiping was a form of enhancement, it “augmented” the absorption of the sacred text.{10}

The discussion of AR finally came into its own with Andrew Fitzgibbons’ presentation, “Teaching Machines to See: Computer Vision, AI, and Augmented Reality.” Fitzgibbon began by introducing us to the evolutive logic of mathematics (from numerals to sets) in nine easy steps, and went on to describe how mathematical calculations inform the design of AR interfaces such as the HoloLens. The latter device, a cousin of the Oculus Rift, superimposes computer generated images on the real world and induces you to feel as though the 3D image were right there in the room with you. During Fitzgibbons’ demonstration, the conference room was invaded by holographic dinosaurs (in the eyes of those who donned the headsets).

This captivating presentation inspired me to reflect on the ur-form of the AR head-mounted display. Could any precedent be found in the medieval period? Yes, I concluded: the monstrance. The monstrance is “an apparatus of sacred scopophilia” designed to exhibit the consecrated host. The wafer is mounted in a glass cylinder and surrounded by precious imagery (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Three typical late medieval monstrances (all of gilded brass and glass)
The National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen (Jørgensen 2015: illus. III.3)

Here is how the ostensorium “augments,” or ennobles, carnal vision:

As an instrument of vision, the scenic showcase [with its ‘angelic architecture’] fabricated the holy gaze for the spectator: a dedicated focus enhanced and intensified by the host-shaped glass or crystal in the centre. It worked like a lens, an optical and spiritual magnifying glass telescoping visual attention on to the specular body in focus. This sacramental viewing mechanism instrumentalized seeing, in order to invest the eyes with a pious ability to see the sacred, even in a lowly piece of bread – in itself not very spectacular or sensually appealing. Had the humble wafer not been so grandiosely paraded to eager onlookers seeking sensory manifestations of God’s presence, it might have remained merely bread in their perception of it. As the very medium of visualisation, the ostensorium tutored the mediated gaze and coached it to perform the sanctifying transubstantiation in the very act of looking, holy seeing creating holy reality (Jørgenson 2015: 50) {11}

There you have it.

Conclusion

Some readers will no doubt find this review to be rather mixed-up. That is the price to be paid for engaging in cross-disciplinary scholarship, but also its promise. As discussed elsewhere (Howes 2003: 28), cultivating the capacity to be “of two sensoria” (one’s own and that of the culture or period under study) helps one see double, and also be of more than one mind about things.

Did we arrive at the truth of the senses during our sojourn on the “Mount of Truth”? No, but we did succeed at uncovering many alternative perspectives on the sensorium, and exposing some of the unexamined assumptions of contemporary psychology. For a long time, the discipline of psychology has enjoyed a monopoly over the study of the senses: the analysis of sensation, perception, cognition was its exclusive preserve. However, that monopoly (or headlock) began to fragment during the last decades of the twentieth century in the wake of the “sensory turn” in the humanities and social sciences, which gave rise to the history of the senses, anthropology of the senses, and so forth as well as the interdisciplinary fields of visual culture, auditory culture (or sound studies), taste culture, and so forth. All of these forays into psychological terrain were regrouped under the rubric “sensory studies”{12} in the editors’ introduction to the first issue of the journal The Senses and Society, entitled “Introducing Sensory Studies” (Bull et al. 2006). This cross-disciplinary field of inquiry has grown exponentially in the intervening years, to the point where “the sensory turn” has been recast as a “sensorial revolution” (Howes 2022a)! “The Senses” conference provided abundant testimony to the fruitfulness of this revolutionary new domain of investigation, which socializes and historicizes the senses instead of merely psychologizing them.

Notes

{1} Incidentally, the sightlines of the Bauhaus hotel are marvelous, but the acoustics are atrocious, particularly in the meeting rooms and breakfast room. Less (visual ornamentation) is more (noise), or so it seemed to me.

{2} Their latest collaboration, the co-edited volume Literature and the Senses (Kern-Stähler and Robertson 2023), which explores the ways in which literature (from the medieval period to the present) captures and mediates sense experience, is currently in press.

{3} The answer: brilliantly! Read Charles Spence’s Sensehacking: How to Use the Power of Your Senses for Happier, Healthier Living (2021). Then read the first two chapters, by Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen, of The Saturated Sensorium: Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages (2015) and you will find that they are on the same page, the same poly- and inter-sensorial bandwidth. It bears underlining that Charles Spence is no ordinary psychologist (see Howes 2022a: 86, 88-89, 97-98).

{4} For an account of how psychology came unhinged from cosmology see “Unhinging the Senses: From Sensation to Calculation” (Howes 2023a: ch. 4).

{5} With the proviso that the subject had confessed and purified their senses of sin, and that the object was not some chimera of the Devil. Also, there were always the Last Rites, when each of the sensory orifices of the dying person were anointed with holy oil, cleansing them so they would be able to perceive the heavenly sights, sounds and smells in store for them in the afterlife, as discussed at length by Micol Long in her paper.

{6} What produced the empirical reality of modernity? Max Weber had a name for this process: disenchantment (German: Entzauberung). But there was another, equally influential though less well-documented and known process at play, as brought to light by Genevieve Caulfield in her paper, “Can Demons Deceive Our Senses?” – namely: the dis-diabolisation of visual uncertainty (German: Entdiabolisierung).

{7} Gibson’s theory works for vision, and efforts have ben made to extend it to audition, but it fails to account for olfactory perception because with olfaction there simply are not the “invariants” for the perceiving subject to latch on to (see Classen et al. 1994). Anna Sierka’s paper, “Esoteric Sensorium,” brough this point home with a vengeance

{8} See also several contributions in Annette Kern-Stähler, Beatrix Busse and Witse de Boer (eds.) The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England (2016).

{9} Hambling elaborated further on his point in an email to me: “We could broaden our concept of what a VR or AR device is, if we think about how they just provide sensations and we are the ones who construct the reality. That way, a book, a painting, a conversation, a perfume (or any sensation really) are all potentially VR prompts and we are the VR constructor? Modern VR or AR devices are just really good at providing a lot of easily interpreted sensations,” but this is not any different from the pictures we construct in our minds when reading a book, etc.

{10} The medieval reader was an active reader, empowered by the belief that they could affect the reality through the image by, for example, scratching the face of Cain or rubbing out the face of Death. With a sly allusion to the present, Ravenhall referred to this as a “mode of interfacing.”

{11} It is instructive to compare the “instrumentalisation” of perception referred to in this passage to the militarization of the senses in Gibson.

{12} In 2014, my good friend, Richard Newhauser, coined the term “sensology” (defined as “the study of the senses and perception as embodied constructions”) to refer to this field of study. This neologism has a similar ring to “symbology” (of Da Vinci Code fame). Of course, Newhauser – being the scholar and gentleman he is (though he does bear the nickname “Dr. Vice” on account of his expertise regarding the seven sins (Newhauser 2007), was in no way influenced by Dan Brown, yet this does not prevent me from fondly thinking of him as the Tom Hanks of sensory studies.

References

Bull, Michael, Paul Gilroy, David Howes, and Doug Kahn, 2006. Introducing Sensory Studies. The Senses and Society1(1); 5-7

Canévet, Mariette et al. 1993. Les sens spirituels. Paris: Éditions Beauchesne.

Classen, Constance. 1993. Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures, London: Routledge.

Classen, Constance. 2007. “Museum Manners: The Sensory Life of the Early Museum,” Journal of Social History 40(4): 895-914.

Classen, Constance. 2017. The Museum of the Senses: Experiencing Art and Collections. London: Bloomsbury

Classen, Constance, David Howes & Anthony Synnott. 1994. Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell, London and New York: Routledge.

Cox R, Irving A and Wright C (eds.) (2016) Beyond Text? Critical Practices and Sensory Anthropology. Manchester: Manchester University Press

Gibson JJ. 1966. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Gibson JJ. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Howes, David. 2003. Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Howes, David. 2014. “Introduction to Sensory Museology” (2014) The Senses and Society 9(3): 259-67 www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.2752/174589314X14023847039917

Howes, David. 2022a. The Sensory Studies Manifesto : Tracking the Sensorial Revolution in the Arts and Human Sciences. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,

Howes, David. 2022b. “Quali(a)tative Methods: Sense-based Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities,” Qualitative Sociology Review 18(4): 18-37 www.qualitativesociologyreview.org/ENG/volume63.php

Howes, David. 2023a. Sensorial Investigations: A History of the Senses in Anthropology,
Psychology, and Law. University Park, PA : Penn State University Press

Howes, David. 2023b. “Review of Kathryn Rudy and Emma Smith (curators), Sensational Books, ST Lee Gallery, Weston Library, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, 27 May – 4 December 2022,” The Senses and Society 18(1): 81-84 doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2022.2122956

Howes, David and Constance Classen, Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society, London and New York: Routledge, 2014

Jørgensen, Hans Henrik Lohfert et al. (eds.). 2021 The Saturated Sensorium: Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.

Kern-Stähler, Annette, Beatrix Busse and Witse de Boer (eds.). 2016. The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England. Leiden: Brill.

Kern-Stähler, Annette and Elizabeth Robertson. 2023. Literature and the Senses. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Levent, Nina and Alvaro Pascual-Leone. 2014. The Multisensory Museum. Rowman and Littlefield.

McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Monina, Nicoletta et al. (eds.) 2023. Monte Verità: Back to Nature. Torino: Lindau.

Newhauser, Richard (ed.) 2007. The Seven Deadly Sins: From Communities to Individuals. Leiden: Brill.

Nöe, Alva. 2006. Action in Perception. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Ong, Walter J. 1991. “The Shifting Sensorium” in David Howes (ed.), The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Pentcheva, Bissera. 2018. “The Performative Icon” in David Howes (ed.), Senses and Sensation: Critical and Primary Sources, Vol. II: History and Sociology. Abingdon: Routledge.

Scarry, Elaine. 1987. The Body in Pain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Spence, Charles. 2021. Sensehacking: How to Use the Power of Your Senses for Happier, Healthier Living. New York: Viking.

Stoller, Paul. 1997. Sensuous Scholarship. Philadelphia; University of Pennsylvania Press.

Valiquet, Patrick. 2019. “Rejoinder to ‘Musical Events and Perceptual Ecologies’ by Eric Clarke,” The Senses and Society14(3): 346-50.

Addendum:
A Cross-section of Abstracts from “The Senses: Present Issues, Past Perspectives” Conference

Introductory Panel (Annette Kern-Stähler, Fiona Macpherson, and Elizabeth Robertson)

In line with the conference’s format of bringing the medieval into conversation with the present, Annette Kern-Stähler, Fiona Macpherson, and Elizabeth Robertson, who have enjoyed a long-standing collaboration on the senses, kicked off the conference by discussing sketching out contemporary versus medieval ideas of the senses. Fiona Macpherson, professor of philosophy at the University of Glasgow, outlined understandings of the senses in contemporary philosophy. Her talk was followed by Kern-Stähler and Robertson’s response from a medievalist perspective. Kern-Stähler used three medieval images to ouline some of the most important ideas informing the medieval understanding of the senses and to address some of the themes around which the conference panels were structured: the ninth-century Fuller Brooch, which is the first known visual representation of the five senses in art; a figurative diagram of the outer and inner senses from a thirteenth-century manuscript containing pseudo-Augustine’s De spiritu et anima; and the fourteenth-century ‘Wheel of the Senses’, which is displayed on a mural at Longthorpe Tower near Peterborough.

As a follow-up to Kern-Stähler’s remarks about the nature of our project to explore how medieval artists and writers probed the nature of the senses, Elizabeth Robertson provided two examples of representations of touch and sight in medieval art and literature. She considered first the gendering of touch in medieval and early modern representations of the Noli me Tangere scene in which the newly risen Christ prohibits Mary from touching him in contrast to representations of the Doubting Thomas scene in which Christ encourages Thomas to insert his fingers into his wound. She then turned to the representation of Troilus’s first sight of Criseyde in Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century love poem, Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer, Robertson showed, draws on Augustinian theories of extramission and of the gaze as a first step to sin as well as on the new theories of combined intromission and extramission as explored by Roger Bacon. Ultimately the literary passages tell us that Chaucer is less interested in visual theory or moral condemnation, than he is in the simple processes by which one living being senses another. Both examples demonstrate the ways in which art and literature present sensation as intersubjective and as situated, that is, as occurring in a particular time and place.

Sarah Stanbury, Multimodal Perception, Affect, and the Middle English Pearl

In the Middle English poem, Pearl, the senses of sight, smell, sound, and touch govern the actions and emotions of the narrator at nearly every point, and engage with natural philosophy as well as with late medieval theological debates about the place and use of the senses in spiritual knowledge. The poem, told in first person, describes the visionary experience of a mourner encountering a maiden (the lost love-object) in a dream. Lecturing him on Christian grace and then granting him a vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem, the maiden tells him not to mourn; she is among the saved. His spiritual education at her hands on the doctrine of Christian grace involves as well an education in the senses, from multisensory riot to orderly perception of sights, smells, and sounds. Heaven, the maiden shows him, is distinguished by social order, modeled in the Pauline image of the harmonious body, and perceived as well through the serial reception of harmonious sights, smells, and sounds. His reluctant awakening at the end of the poem back to life in the world is also a propulsive return to multisensory embodied knowledge, the poem’s prosody suggests. As much as sensation in heaven is modeled on Christian metaphysics and utopian social ordering, multisensory perception, empathy, and synaesthetic poetry are matters of vibrant and material life.

John Merrington, ‘Un-Bounding the Senses: The Early Middle Ages and Today’

In my paper, I argued that the Aristotelian understanding of the five senses as perceptive faculties was subject to considerable challenge in early medieval Europe. In the hands of Christian thinkers, the senses were redefined as morally charged sites of sin, suffering and redemption. This observation raises questions as to the conflicting pressures toward a moralised or a de-moralised conception of the senses at different moments in history.

Katie Walter, ‘Medieval Sensory Prostheses’

This paper argued that medieval culture offers both sophisticated techniques of, as well as sustained thinking about, prostheses that modify or alter sensation in various ways, and that the wider contexts in which this prosthetic thought is embedded – including the pastoral, the poetic and the political – might help offer new perspectives on contemporary questions of sensory engineering. One key example is the prosthetic relationship of the eye and foot as it is described in Giles of Rome’s thirteenth-century treatise on the governance of kings and princes: the natural, ‘bodily’ example in which the eye and foot supplement the other’s lack, enhancing their respective sensory and motor capacities, is given as part of Giles’s wider discussion of two forms of justice: distributive and commutative. While distributive justice is inherently unequal, based on ideas of merit, the relationship of the eye and foot models commutative justice, which instead is (in Stephen Rigby’s words) based on ‘a mutual exchange of services’. Giles’s example therefore challenges us to think about the aims and achievements of contemporary sensory engineering from the perspective of justice, on equality, and as reaching out beyond the individual to our responsibilities and relation to each other.

Elizabeth Dospel Williams, ‘Medieval Objects and Sensory Experience in the Museum’

Art museums have long privileged the visual experience of medieval art. Exhibition and conservation strategies—necessary to safely preserve our collective past—have effectively limited other lines of inquiry in public imagination and scholarly research alike about the multisensory realities of medieval art. Indeed, that much art history (in general) today still emphasizes the visual effects and production of attests to the profound influence that conditions of access exert over our scholarship.
In this lightening presentation, I foreground present issues through past objects, drawing on the workshop’s overall theme and this session’s topic of analogue and virtual reality. This is because the staff, like myself, working in museums—the curators, conservators, collections managers, art handlers, mountmakers, and anyone with direct responsibility for object care-—consider the material and sensory aspects of museum objects as an everyday reality of our jobs, offering thus unique insight to the medieval sensorial. Today, I’ll use examples of Byzantine, Islamic, Andean materials from my institution, Dumbarton Oaks, to present recent experimental strategies emphasizing sensory experience in our curatorial practice. Textiles and jewelry, my areas of expertise, are particularly informative areas for exploration in analog and digital sensoriality given these objects’ close associations with the body. In proceeds, I will outline different methods for conveying sensory experience of medieval objects to public, students, and scholars alike recently at Dumbarton Oaks. My paper thus probes sensorial engagement with medieval artifacts in current museum practice and with attention to future possibilities, moving from physical engagement to virtual encounters and back again.

Anna Sierka, Esoteric Sensorium: Olfactory Sense and Jewish Demonology

The mystical experience in Jewish esoteric and kabbalistic writings has habitually been described via ocularocentic logic. Although it also involved dimensions of hearing, olfaction, and gustation, the sense of sight remained dominant, ergo, it was conceived in toto as a synesthetic encounter with the Divine conducted thanks to the intermediation of the faculty of imagination. However, in a plethora of sources composed both by the Medieval German Pietists (Ḥasidei Ashkenaz), chiefly, their esoteric theosophy, and the practical kabbalah (qabbalah maʻasit) which subsequently emerged, closer attention was paid to olfaction as a possible indicator of belonging and thus a marker of ontological valuation of the very essence of each being, qualities hidden at first glance and impenetrable for the tactile sense. An intriguing reversal of the capability to sniff an ontological other was perpetuated in Eleazar of Worms’ treatise Sefer ha-Shem, “Book of the Divine Name”, in which he discussed a flying balm enabling nocturnal flights to anointed individuals, the she-demons liliothendowed with a well-attuned sense of smell, and the stench of mortals’ excrements. While the signature scent of mortal man’s body performs an olfactory function of a pheromone alluring lilioth, human feces disgusted them and drove them to punish trespassers who crossed lilioths’ paths or slept on their roads.

Henry Ravenhall, ‘Touch, Animation, and the Virtual: The Interplay of Sensory and Aesthetic Experience in Medieval French Manuscripts’

In this presentation, I suggested that touch was fundamental to how stories in medieval French manuscripts were experienced and understood. Drawing on examples where the touch of the medieval reader “animated”, or interacted virtually with, manuscript illuminations, I argued that touch allowed readers, often collectively, to express moral or political sentiment towards represented subject matter, such as the flagellation of Christ, Helen of Troy’s abduction, Julius Caesar’s assassination, or the tale of a wife beaten by a jealous husband. I contextualized this idea in relation to thirteenth-century thinking on the senses derived from Aristotle and Galen, which posits that all the sensory faculties are involved in the cognitive processing of images and the production of phantasmata.

Craig French, ‘The Problems of Illusion’

In my paper I introduced what philosophers call the philosophical problem of perception. I set this out as a problem for our ordinary thinking about perceptual experience. The crux of it is that we ordinarily take perceptual experiences (such as seeing an apple on a tree) to be simple, direct encounters with objects and features in the mind-independent world. The problem of perception is that this “direct realist” view of common sense doesn’t seem remotely plausible when we reflect upon illusions and hallucinations – as it seems to fail in such cases. Our ordinary common sense intuitions, then, are in tatters. More fully: when you perceive something as being other than it is (illusion), and when you are subject to a purely fabricated sensory experience, not connected to any worldly objects of perception (hallucination), we surely can’t say you are nonetheless directly perceiving a world out there. Yet veridical cases of perception are in essence or inherently no different to these special cases. Much ink has been spilt over such argumentation in philosophical circles. At the end of my paper, I encouraged us to push back against this argumentation, and work to save our common sense intuitions, by suggesting that direct realism can still apply to illusions.

Genevieve E. Caulfield, ‘Can Demons Deceive Our Senses? Witelo (fl. 1270s) on Illusory Visual Perception’

“In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a greater emphasis on the natural fallibility of visual perception demystified illusions, because one major source, demonic interference, could usually be ruled out. The work of Witelo, a thirteenth-century friar best known for his major textbook on optics, and Nicole Oresme, a fourteenth-century French philosopher well known for his influential critiques of magic and astrology, illustrates this well. The implication in Witelo and Oresme’s work is that adequate understanding of natural visual processes all but eliminated the need to attribute visual anomalies to demons. This naturalising tendency suggests that a kind of ‘Entdiabolisierung’ (dis-diabolisation) of visual uncertainty occurred in philosophical circles around this period.
Taken together with an extremely popular thirteenth-century preachers’ manual that similarly described visual error in entirely natural terms, Peter of Limoges’ Tractatus moralis de oculo, this demystification of visual error could have indirectly penetrated the pastoral sphere. In the next century, a wider trend towards ‘Entdiabolisierung’ could have partially contributed to a reactive clerical concern that the laity did not believe in demonic intervention at all. This concern manifested from the 1440s in increasingly forceful reassertions of the present danger of demons interfering in the physical world and, ultimately, the solidification of witchcraft stereotypes and persecution.”

Hannah Piercy, ‘Sensing and Representing Pain in Medieval Romance’
This paper explored pain as a literary, linguistic, and generic problem: not only is pain difficult to put into words, but in medieval romance, pain poses particular kinds of problems when felt by the hero (because it may compromise his heroism) and by the antagonist (because it may risk evoking empathy for them). This paper explored two strategies romances use to represent the sensory experience of pain. The first strategy was the use of striking, multisensory images that evoke tactility in particular. Pain was often considered to be a form of touch in the Middle Ages, so the tactile sense formed an especially appropriate means of representing pain. Focusing on two romances, this paper drew attention to how violent touch and tearing is used to convey pain in Sir Orfeo and Eger and Grime. Turning to the second strategy, it explored how pain resurfaces in these narratives in non-linear ways, as it is displaced, sublimated, and repeated across the text rather than being voiced and expressed at the moment it occurs. Indirect representations of pain may better convey what it means to feel pain, including the potential disorientation this can create, than direct statements such as ‘I am in pain’.

Liz Barry, ‘“Only Touch Me, for My Hand Is Tender”: Touch, Pain and the Ageing Body in Literature and Thought’

This paper examined the psychological and emotional value of touch in older age and across the lifecourse. It argued for the importance of bodily touch, and in particular parental touch, for existential and ontological wellbeing with reference to several key scenes of parental touch in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature including Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. It also considered the possibility of a loss of ontological security in older age, when one might be more isolated through the loss of intimate others as well as social and professional networks. One’s sensitivity to different touch sensations declines as one ages, but one often experiences touch as more pleasurable, perhaps due to a ‘touch hunger’ linked to a loss of intimate or familial touch. The paper went on to read physical pain, even self-administered pain, in the light of this ‘touch hunger’ in the isolated older figures in Shakespeare’s King Lear and Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit.

Elisabeth Dutton, ‘Calls of Nature: The Interoceptive Route to Fall or Redemption’

Medieval plays obviously engage senses, especially the visual and auditory, but also for example in many cases taste, because they were presented in taverns or dining halls where people eating and drinking. Plays draw attention to these circumstances, to the fact that actors and audience actually inhabit the same world of senses and appetite: for example, in Fulgens and Lucres A and B are also household members encouraging the audience to eat and drink. Plays draw attention to food and drink going in … and coming out again. In Satire of the Three Estates Diligence announces the interval by telling the audience to get interval drinks and go to the toilet. These moments draw attention to a different sensory experience for the audience – the processes by which our bodies manage waste disposal of all kinds. Our bodies are in fact remarkably nuanced in interpreting sensations that tell us how to manage excretions: we interpret kinds and degrees of pressure in the anal canal or the bladder so that we can manage ‘movements’ – an interesting euphemism – in such a way as to avoid public embarrassment. Interoceptive senses are involved, interpreting one’s own internal sensations (caused by food inside) and making the appropriate kinesthetic response.
Who or what manages this? The Five senses are usually managed by Wit or Reason, but the overlay of a perceived duality of body and soul seems to interfere with this scheme of senses and introduce a sense of negative morality. In Mankind, for example, the flesh is morally corrupt and has actually become an excretion itself– a ‘stinking dunghill’. In Medwall’s Nature, Sensuality claims the power to create movement, by contrast with Mankind under the power of Reason who is still like stone. But Sensuality is not entirely to be trusted in this play, as the appetites he stimulates are ‘vice’ … and sometimes the sensory stimulus becomes too urgent. In Mankind Tityvillus uses them to distract Mankind from prayer by the need to go to relieve himself. Appetites and excretion seem to be bad. But appetite can also serve good purposes, as for example in the Huy play of the Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, when Pilgrim’s physical hunger leads him to the Eucharist. And for Julian of Norwich excretion is even a place to experience God.

Micol Long, ‘Conceptualizing Kinesthesia as a Sense: Its Significance for Religious Experiences in 12th-13thCentury Cloisters’

In some twelfth-century religious texts, the regulation of one’s gestures and movements is discussed alongside the regulation of the senses, in the context of the presentation of an ideal of perfect self-discipline and self-control, where mind and body are perfectly harmonized. In such descriptions, the material environment is often referred to, showing the situated, embodied and embedded nature of this kind of learning. The material environment is perceived as being able to influence the individual not only in terms of action-possibilities, but also cognitively.