The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England

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

Annette Kern-Stähler is Full Professor and Chair of Medieval English Studies at the University of Bern. She is particularly interested in the interrelations between material culture, sense perception and affect and in the uses and transformations of space in late medieval England.

Beatrix Busse, Ph.D. (2004), University of Heidelberg, is Full Professor and Chair of English Linguistics at that university. Her research interests include the history of English and historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, stylistics and language in urban spaces.

Wietse de Boer, Ph.D. (1995), is Professor of History at Miami University (Ohio). His publications are focused on the Italian Counter-Reformation, most recently Space and Conversion in Global Perspective, co-edited with Giuseppe Marcocci, Aliocha Maldavsky and Ilaria Pavan.