The Sense of Smell in the Middle Ages

The Sense of Smell in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Katelynn Robinson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042981593X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Odors, including those of incense, spices, cooking, and refuse, were both ubiquitous and meaningful in central and late medieval Western Europe. The significance of the sense of smell is evident in scholastic Latin texts, most of which are untranslated and unedited by modern scholars. Between the late eleventh and thirteenth century, medieval scholars developed a logical theory of the workings of the sense of smell based on Greek and Arabic learning. In the thirteenth through fifteenth century, medical authors detailed practical applications of smell theory and these were communicated to individuals and governing authorities by the medical profession in the interests of personal and public health. At the same time, religious authors read philosophical and medical texts and gave their information religious meaning. This reinterpretation of scholastic philosophy and medicine led to the development of what can be termed a medically aware theology of smell that was communicated to popular audiences alongside traditional olfactory theory in sermons. Its impact on popular thought is reflected in late medieval mystical texts. While the senses have received increasing scholarly attention in recent decades, this volume presents the first detailed research into the sense of smell in the later European Middle Ages.

The Sense of Smell in the Middle Ages

The Sense of Smell in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Katelynn Robinson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042981593X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
Odors, including those of incense, spices, cooking, and refuse, were both ubiquitous and meaningful in central and late medieval Western Europe. The significance of the sense of smell is evident in scholastic Latin texts, most of which are untranslated and unedited by modern scholars. Between the late eleventh and thirteenth century, medieval scholars developed a logical theory of the workings of the sense of smell based on Greek and Arabic learning. In the thirteenth through fifteenth century, medical authors detailed practical applications of smell theory and these were communicated to individuals and governing authorities by the medical profession in the interests of personal and public health. At the same time, religious authors read philosophical and medical texts and gave their information religious meaning. This reinterpretation of scholastic philosophy and medicine led to the development of what can be termed a medically aware theology of smell that was communicated to popular audiences alongside traditional olfactory theory in sermons. Its impact on popular thought is reflected in late medieval mystical texts. While the senses have received increasing scholarly attention in recent decades, this volume presents the first detailed research into the sense of smell in the later European Middle Ages.

Sensual and Sensory Experiences in the Middle Ages

Sensual and Sensory Experiences in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Carme Muntaner Alsina
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527512347
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
Where was the line between pleasure and irritation in the sensory overload caused by the sounds, colours, and smells of a medieval market? How could pain and suffering be relieved by hoping for, and desiring to experience, an intimate, almost familiar, contact with Christ? This volume shows the different aspects of sensory experiences that medieval people conveyed through documents, literary accounts, and religious practices. The unifying theme here is how pleasure, pain, desire, and fear appear in different—sometimes conflicting—combinations and settings: from the private space of the monastic cell to the shared hustle of the market. The geographic focus of this volume is Mediterranean Europe, although it also touches on other Western contexts. The combination of different points of view here provides an original contribution to the study of sensory experiences in the Middle Ages.

A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages

A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Richard G. Newhauser
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474233147
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
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.

The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England

The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England PDF Author: Annette Kern-Stähler
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004315497
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The essays collected in The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England examine the interrelationships between sense perception and secular and Christian cultures in England from the medieval into the early modern periods. They address canonical texts and writers in the fields of poetry, drama, homiletics, martyrology and early scientific writing, and they espouse methods associated with the fields of corpus linguistics, disability studies, translation studies, art history and archaeology, as well as approaches derived from traditional literary studies. Together, these papers constitute a major contribution to the growing field of sensorial research that will be of interest to historians of perception and cognition as well as to historians with more generalist interests in medieval and early modern England. Contributors include: Dieter Bitterli, Beatrix Busse, Rory Critten, Javier Díaz-Vera, Tobias Gabel, Jens Martin Gurr, Katherine Hindley, Farah Karim-Cooper, Annette Kern-Stähler, Richard Newhauser, Sean Otto, Virginia Richter, Elizabeth Robertson, and Kathrin Scheuchzer

Aroma

Aroma PDF Author: Constance Classen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134822391
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Smell is a social phenomenon, given particular meanings and values by different cultures. Odours form the building blocks of cosmologies, class hierarchies, and political odours. They can enforce social structures or transgress them, unite people or divide them, empower or disempower. The authors argue that the sociology of smell is repressed in the modern West, and its social history ignored. This book breaks the "olfactory silence" of modernity. It offers the first comprehensive exploration of the cultural role of odours in Western history - from antiquity to the present. It also covers a wide variey of non-Western societies. Its topics range from the medieval concept of the "odour of sanctity", to the aromatherapies of South America, and from olfactory stereotypes of gender and ethnicity in the modern West to the role of smell in postmodernity. Its subject matter will fascinate anyone who likes to nose around in the inner workings of culture.

The Saturated Sensorium

The Saturated Sensorium PDF Author: Henning Laugerud
Publisher: Aarhus Universitetsforlag
ISBN: 8771840656
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
The Saturated Sensorium is a book about the senses and their media in the Middle Ages: a book about what it meant to sense and perceive something. The book highlights the integrated and unified nature of medieval senses and media. It discusses the inter- and multi-mediality of cultic and cultural artefacts as well as the sensorial and inter-sensorial dimensions of a wide array of cultural concepts and practices within medieval religion, art, archaeology, architecture, literature, music, food, social life, ritual, devotion, cognition, and memory. These domains of sensory and media history are dealt with, not as isolated anthology articles in only loose connection with one another, but as coordinate and comparative chapters of a coherent book each covering a principal branch of the cultural history of the medieval senses. Across a number of academic disciplines, specialists address the interdisciplinary and compound character of visus (sight), auditus (hearing), tactus (touch), olfactus (smell) and gustus (taste), showing that there was far more to the senses and to sense experience than these five classical Aristotelian categories might suggest. A plentiful variety of sensory modes interacted, crossed, and permeated each other in mutually entangled and braided ways. The saturated sensorium nurtured the sacred and secular practices of mediation, representation, and consumption; the embodied and mental concepts of sanctity, memory, and imagery; the physical and spiritual spaces of environment, cult, and burial; the material and visual culture of sacraments, sensation, and incarnation.

Sensory Reflections

Sensory Reflections PDF Author: Fiona Griffiths
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110562863
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
This volume draws on emerging scholarship at the intersection of two already vibrant fields: medieval material culture and medieval sensory experience. The rich potential of medieval matter (most obviously manuscripts and visual imagery, but also liturgical objects, coins, textiles, architecture, graves, etc.) to complement and even transcend purely textual sources is by now well established in medieval scholarship across the disciplines. So, too, attention to medieval sensory experiences—most prominently emotion—has transformed our understanding of medieval religious life and spirituality, violence, power, and authority, friendship, and constructions of both the self and the other. Our purpose in this volume is to draw the two approaches together, plumbing medieval material sources for traces of sensory experience - above all ephemeral and physical experiences that, unlike emotion, are rarely fully described or articulated in texts.

A History of Scent

A History of Scent PDF Author: Roy Genders
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
ISBN:
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description


The Neurology of Olfaction

The Neurology of Olfaction PDF Author: Christopher H. Hawkes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521682169
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
"Written by two experts in the field, this book provides information useful to physicians for assessing and managing chemosensory disorders - with appropriate case-histories - and summarizes the current scientific knowledge of human olfaction. It will be of particular interest to neurologists, otolaryngologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and neuroscientists."--BOOK JACKET.

PERFUMING POSTERITY

PERFUMING POSTERITY PDF Author: Heather Lyn Young
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
This doctoral dissertation examines the presence and function of the sense of smell in Early Modern Spanish literature. It studies the use of the olfactory in key works of the period and analyzes how each one reflects a certain contemporary aspect of Spanish culture and society. Though its role in literature has not been considered as widely as that of the other senses, smell's indubitable presence in the works and its unique qualities allow for a singular approach to the texts in question as they serve to preserve the beliefs, themes and trends of Renaissance and Golden Age Spain. This work analyzes four texts, one from the late Middle Ages and three from the Early Modern period: Fermoso cuento de una santa enperatrís que ovo en Roma & de su castidat (14th century); La Celestina, Fernando de Rojas (1499); Don Quijote, Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra (1605 and 1615); "La inocencia castigada," María de Zayas (in Desengaños amorosos - 1647). These selected works permit an analysis of the function of smell within a variety of themes and across the span of the period. Serving to orient us in our search for literary scent, Chapter 1 presents considerations for the study of the olfactory in literature - how the senses have been perceived over time, how smell differs from the other senses and how smells are represented verbally. Chapter 2 deals with Fermoso cuento de una santa enperatrís que ovo en Roma & de su castidat and the way that the medieval saint-sinner dichotomy is reflected in pleasant and foul smells, respectively. Chapter 3 reviews the historical, cultural and social changes that took place in Iberia from the end of the Middle Ages into the Early Modern period to better understand changing perceptions and how they appear in literature during this time. Chapter 4 studies La Celestina and the title character's sensorial (olfactory) manipulation of others in the work. Chapter 5 looks at the role of smell, contrasted with the other senses, in Don Quijote's creation of Dulcinea. Chapter 6 analyzes the martyrdom of women in marriage as presented through smell in "La inocencia castigada." The epilogue briefly considers the role of smell in Lazarillo de Tormes and its implications for further study of the olfactory in literature.