The Saturated Sensorium

Edited By Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen

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.

Sujets

• Medieval
• Histoire
• History
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Aarhus University Press
• Date de parution: 30 juin 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788771249613
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 26 Mo

Extrait

Edited by Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen, Henning Laugerud & Laura Katrine Skinnebach
THE SATURATED SENSORIUM
Aarhus University Press
THE
[ AGE OF INTERMEDIA ] The Middle Ages
integrated the human senses and unifed their media SATURATED
into a culture of saturated sensation. The saturated
sensorium nurtured principles of perception and SENSORIUMmediation permeated with paradox, intersensorial
entanglement, and multimodal interchange. This Principles of Perception and Mediation
book addresses medieval modes of multi- and inter- in the Middle Ages
mediality in material as well as immaterial culture
and cultural history. It exemplifes the sensory and
multisensory experiences sustained by medieval
religion, art, archaeology, architecture, literature,
liturgy, music, monasticism, miracles, cult, piety, love,
eating, drinking, cognition, recollection, and burial.
It ponders over perceptual practices performed as
ritual, devotion, consumption (sacred or secular),
memory, sanctity (in persons or percepts), church
environment, sacra mental imagery, romantic
representation, and word-image-song-dance
remediation. It illuminates the intertwined and compound
character of the fve Aristotelian categories of visus
(sight), auditus (hearing), tactus (touch), olfactus
(smell), and gustus (taste), showing that there was
indeed far more to the senses and to sense
experience than this classical categorisation might
suggest. It aims to saturate our sense of medieval
mediation beyond established modern and
classical categories of communication.
a
98960_cover_saturated sensorium_r2.indd 1 12/07/15 10:49 THE
SATURATED
SENSORIUM
This page is protected by copyright and may not be redistributed THE
SATURATED
SENSORIUM
Principles of Perception and Mediation
in the Middle Ages
Edited by Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen,
Henning Laugerud & Laura Katrine Skinnebach
Aarhus University Press |
This page is protected by copyright and may not be redistributedTHE SATURATED SENSORIUM
Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages
© Te authors & Aarhus University Press 2015
Layout and cover design: Jørgen Sparre
Te book is typeset in Adobe Garamond and Franklin Gothic
E-book production: Narayana Press, Gylling, Denmark
ISBN 978 87 7124 961 3
Aarhus University Press
www.unipress.dk
Weblinks were active when the book was printed. Tey may no longer be active
This page is protected by copyright and may not be redistributedCONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS · 7
INTO THE SATURATED SENSORIUM · 9
Introducing the Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages
[ Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen ].
SENSORIUM · 24
A Model for Medieval Perception
[ Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen ].
INCARNATION · 72
Paradoxes of Perception and Mediation in Medieval Liturgical Art
[ Kristin Bliksrud Aavitsland ].
SANCTITY · 92
The Saint and the Senses: The Case of Bernard of Clairvaux
[ Brian Patrick McGuire ].
REPRESENTATION · 112
Courtly Love as a Problem of Literary Sense-Representation
[ Jørgen Bruhn ].
REMEDIATION · 130
Remediating Medieval Popular Ballads in Scandinavian Church Paintings
[ Sigurd Kværndrup ].
This page is protected by copyright and may not be redistributedDEVOTION · 152
Perception as Practice and Body as Devotion in Late Medieval Piety
[ Laura Katrine Skinnebach ].
RITUAL · 180
Medieval Liturgy and the Senses: The Case of the Mandatum
[ Nils Holger Petersen ].
ENVIRONMENT · 206
Embodiment and Senses in Eleventh- to Thirteenth-Century Churches
in Southern Scandinavia
[ Mads Dengsø Jessen & Tim Flohr Sørensen ] .
CONSUMPTION · 226
Meals, Miracles, and Material Culture in the Later Middle Ages
[ Jette Linaa ].
MEMORY · 246
The Sensory Materiality of Belief and Understanding in Late Medieval Europe
[ Henning Laugerud ].
BIBLIOGRAPHY · 275
Sources and References for the Saturated Sensorium
INDEX · 303
AUTHORS · 319
This page is protected by copyright and may not be redistributedAcknowledgements
Te Saturated Sensorium was realised
through the generous fnancial support of:
Te Novo Nordisk Foundation
Aarhus University Research Foundation
Faculty for Arts and Humanities,
Linnæus University
Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies,
University of Bergen
This page is protected by copyright and may not be redistributed8
The S A TU r A T ed Sen S ori U m
CONTENTS INDEX
This page is protected by copyright and may not be redistributedINTO THE SATURATED SENSORIUM
INTO THE
SATURATED 9
SENSORIUM
Introducing the Principles of
Perception and Mediation
in the Middle Ages
[ Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen ]
Going Multimedieval
An interdisciplinary group of Scandinavian medievalists met in Aarhus, Denmark in
the spring of 2009, to debate the concept of a seminar with a rather outlandish and
experimental title: Multimiddelalder. Tis translates into something like ‘Multiple
Middle Ages’, while also implying ‘Multi Media Ages’. It would thus involve the
recognition of a multiplicity of media and sense relations beyond established modern
categories and across the accustomed thresholds of modern communication. In this
sense, the Medium Aevum – originally a modern term for what is in principle not
1modern – can be redefned and ofered a new place in media history. Instead of just
preceding or contrasting mediatised modernity, the ‘age in the middle’ may be
appreciated as pivotal in the on-going development of epochal principles of perception
and mediation: an ‘age of the medium’, both historically and in a broader perspective
– suggesting diachronic and synchronic implications alike. A ‘multimedieval’,
mixedmedia culture, that is, of renewed inspiration to late- (or post-)modern fascinations
with the transmedial hybridity, intersensorial entanglements, and multimodal
crossovers now challenging modern ontologies of autonomous, self-contained media.
i n T o T he S A TU r A T ed Sen S ori U m
CONTENTS INDEX
This page is protected by copyright and may not be redistributed For those no longer adhering to the ever more contested and untenable notions
of ‘pure’ art forms, medieval media practices ofer a plentiful reservoir of strategies
for combining, blending, and fusing media modalities into rich and abundant wholes
not forced into a priori categorisations. Here, we do not look for pure optical
painting or listen to purely auditory music excluding other modes of sensation or signif -
10 cation. In place of such select ideals, we may hear of ceremonial soundscapes in
compound spaces of sensation and mediation; we may reconstruct complex
sensescapes of multisensory impressions generated by ritual practices, performers, and
percipients; or we may encounter the miscellaneous materiality of touchable and
kissable imagery featuring iconic appearances, precious objects, inserted relics,
dramatised narratives, and written words to be hymned or read aloud. Here, various
classes of media inform and include each other while various types of sense experience
permeate and saturate each other. Media of perception and expression coincide and
co-operate instead of policing their own inherent boundaries, isolating their own
experiential dominions, or seeking to defne their own particular properties. Here,
we can study theories of, say, musical harmony, which integrate – with an admirable
ease – what we are normally used to think of as entirely diferent arts. Indeed, this
could include wholly diferent domains of existence, ranging from perceptual to
mathematical proportion, from physical to spiritual harmony, from psychic to
cosmic structures.
Terefore, the manifold multiplicity of medieval notions of music may serve to
illustrate the integration and coalescence of areas of life and mediation otherwise
seemingly apart or separate. Presently, this sonorous example will allow us to explain
the basic idea and aim of the present book, itself intended to be a coherent and
amiable amalgamation of several overlapping felds of investigation and facets of social
and cultural history – secular as well as sacred, material as well as communicational,
embodied as well as mental. It is a book about the senses and their media in the
Medium Aevum; about perceptual principles, practices, and paradoxes; about what it
implied to perceive and mediate something in given situations and concrete
contexts. A series of individual but coordinated and correlated chapters each covers a
principal branch of the cultural history of perception and mediation in order to
highlight the integrated and unifed nature of medieval media and senses. Taking
their point of departure in either representative notions and problems signalled by
the chapter headings, or in select exemplary cases of these general principles, they
explore what sensing was, what it meant, what it did: how sensation operated within
2each area, how it was conceived, how i