Sense and Feeling in Daily Living in the Early Medieval English World

Sense and Feeling in Daily Living in the Early Medieval English World seeks to illuminate important aspects of daily living and the experience of the environment through sense and emotion, using archaeological, art and textual sources. Twelve papers explore sight, sound, taste, smell, touch, and emotions such as anger, horror, grief and joy.

Similar in theme and method to the first, second and third volumes in the Daily Living in the Anglo-Saxon World series, the collected articlesilluminate how an understanding of the sensory and emotional landscape that helped form the daily lives of the peoples and the environments of early medieval England can inform the study of England before the Norman Conquest. The sights, smells, and sounds that informed the physical and emotional landscape of town, scriptoria, and hall, for example, explain urban planning, literary imagery and emotional attachment evident among the early medieval English peoples. Experienced senses and emotions are thus as central to understanding the inner and outer landscape of the pre-Conquest English as crafts, towns or water structures.

Maren Clegg Hyer is Professor of English at Valdosta State University (Georgia). She specializes in researching textiles and other elements of material culture in the literary imagery of early medieval England. Her recent publications include The Material Culture of Daily Living in Anglo-Saxon England (with Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Exeter, 2011); The Material Culture of the Built Environment in the Anglo-Saxon World (with Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Liverpool, 2015); Water and the Environment in the Anglo-Saxon World (with Della Hooke, Liverpool, 2017); Textiles, Text, Intertext: Essays in Honour of Gale R. Owen-Crocker (with Jill Frederick, Boydell, 2016); and Old English Lexicology and Lexicography (with Haruko Momma and Samantha Zacher, Boydell, 2020).

Gale R. Owen-Crocker is Professor Emerita of The University of Manchester; she was formerly Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture and Director of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies. She was co-founder and for 15 years co-editor of the journal Medieval Clothing and Textiles and directed the Manchester Lexis of Cloth and Clothing Project which produced the database http: //lexisproject.arts.manchester.ac.uk/. Her recent books include Clothing the Past: Surviving Garments from Early Medieval to Early Modern Western Europe (with Elizabeth Coatsworth, Brill, 2018); Making Sense of the Bayeux Tapestry: Readings and Reworkings (with Anna Henderson, Manchester, 2016); The Material Culture of the Built Environment in the Anglo-Saxon World (with Maren Clegg Hyer, Liverpool, 2015); Medieval Dress and Textiles in Britain: A Multilingual Sourcebook (with Louise Sylvester and Mark Chambers, Boydell, 2014); The Bayeux Tapestry: Collected Papers (Routledge, 2012); and An Encyclopedia of Dress and
Textiles of the British Isles, c.450-1100 (with Elizabeth Coatsworth and Maria Hayward, Brill, 2012).