The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England Intersections Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture General Editor Karl A.E. Enenkel (Chair of Medieval and Neo-Latin Literature Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster e-mail: kenen_01@uni_muenster.de) Editorial Board W. van Anrooij (University of Leiden) W. de Boer (Miami University) Chr. Göttler (University of Bern) J.L. de Jong (University of Groningen) W.S. Melion (Emory University) R. Seidel (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main) P.J. Smith (University of Leiden) J. Thompson (Queen’s University Belfast) A. Traninger (Freie Universität Berlin) C. Zittel (University of Stuttgart) C. Zwierlein (Harvard University) VOLUME 44 – 2016 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/inte The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England Edited by Annette Kern-Stähler Beatrix Busse Wietse de Boer LEIDEN | BOSTON Cover illustration: The late ninth-century Anglo-Saxon Fuller Brooch, showing the earliest known personification of the Five Senses. Hammered silver and niello, diameter: 11.4 cm. London, British Museum. Image © Trustees of the British Museum. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016008197 Want or need Open Access? Brill Open offers you the choice to make your research freely accessible online in exchange for a publication charge. Review your various options on brill.com/brill-open. Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1568-1181 isbn 978-90-04-31548-8 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-31549-5 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. Contents Acknowledgments vii Notes on the Editors viii Notes on the Contributors x List of Illustrations xiv Introduction 1 Annette Kern-Stähler and Kathrin Scheuchzer PART 1 Sensing and Understanding 1 Sight and Understanding: Visual Imagery as Metaphor in the Old English Boethius and Soliloquies 21 Katherine Hindley 2 Coming to Past Senses: Vision, Touch and Their Metaphors in Anglo-Saxon Language and Culture 36 Javier E. Díaz-Vera PART 2 Vision and Its Distortion 3 Bleary Eyes: Middle English Constructions of Visual Disabilities 69 Beatrix Busse and Annette Kern-Stähler 4 Exterior Inspection and Regular Reason: Robert Hooke’s and Margaret Cavendish’s Epistemologies of the Senses 96 Virginia Richter 5 Hierarchies of Vision in John Milton’s Paradise Lost 117 Tobias Gabel vi contents PART 3 The Perilous Senses 6 Strange Perceptions: Sensory Experience in the Old English “Marvels of the East” 137 Dieter Bitterli 7 The Perils of the Flesh: John Wyclif’s Preaching on the Five Bodily Senses 163 Sean A. Otto 8 The Senses and Human Nature in a Political Reading of Paradise Lost 177 Jens Martin Gurr PART 4 The Multisensual 9 The Multisensoriality of Place and the Chaucerian Multisensual 199 Richard G. Newhauser 10 ‘Eate Not, Taste Not, Touch Not’. The Five Senses in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments 219 Kathrin Scheuchzer PART 5 The Theatre as Sensory Experience 11 Smell in the York Corpus Christi Plays 239 Rory G. Critten and Annette Kern-Stähler 12 The Sensory Body in Shakespeare’s Theatres 269 Farah Karim-Cooper Afterword: From Gateways to Channels. Reaching towards an Understanding of the Transformative Plasticity of the Senses in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods 286 Elizabeth Robertson Index Nominum 297 Acknowledgments Most of the contributions to this volume began their life as papers presented at an international conference on the five senses in medieval and early modern cultures, which we organized in June 2014 at the University of Bern. We would like to thank the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Burgergemeinde Bern and the Universities of Bern and Heidelberg for their generous financial sup- port that made this conference possible. We wish to thank Dr Nicole Nyffenegger, Dr des. Kathrin Scheuchzer, Eva Beyeler, David Jost and Xenia Netos for their invaluable help in organizing and running the conference and, of course, the speakers: Dieter Bitterli, Tobias Gabel, Vincent Gillespie, Jens Martin Gurr, Katherine Hindley, Marianna Hintikka, Farah Karim-Cooper, Richard Newhauser, Melinda Nielsen, Marco Nievergelt, Nicole Nyffenegger, Sean Otto, Virginia Richter, Elizabeth Robertson, Jens Rüffer, Kathrin Scheuchzer, Abigail Shinn, Alessandro Simari, Elizabeth Swann, and Irma Taavitsainen. We feel privileged that the General Editor and the Editorial Board approved publication in this series, and we should like to thank them for their confi- dence in our project and for their generous support and encouragement while we were preparing this volume for print. We wish to extend our gratitude to the peer-reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive comments, to John Thompson for his advice on several con- tributions, and to the staff at Brill, especially Mr Ivo Romein, for their invalu- able part in bringing this book to life. Elizabeth Robertson has been extremely generous in sharing her ideas with us during and after the conference, and we would like to thank her for reflect- ing on, and responding to, the contributions in an afterword to this volume. We have received editorial assistance from a number of people, and we would like to express our appreciation for their careful reading and invaluable assistance: at the University of Heidelberg, Dr Ruth Möhlig-Falke, and at the University of Bern, Dr Rory Critten, Dr des. Kathrin Scheuchzer and Matthias Berger, MA. We would like to thank the contributors to this volume for their patience. We wish to thank our students at Bern and Heidelberg for their lively discus- sions in our seminars on the senses, which helped shape our ideas. For their sense of humour we thank Udo, Axel, Timon and Maël. Bern, Heidelberg and Oxford, Ohio Annette Kern-Stähler, Beatrix Busse and Wietse de Boer Notes on the Editors Beatrix Busse PhD (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. Beatrix Busse is the author of the monograph Vocative Constructions in the Language of Shakespeare (Benjamins 2006). She is cur- rently completing a monograph on nineteenth-century speech, writing and thought presentation for Oxford University Press. Annette Kern-Stähler is Full Professor and Chair of Medieval English Studies at the University of Bern. She holds an MA in Medieval Studies from the University of York and did her doctoral studies at the Universities of Bonn, Münster and Oxford (PhD 2000). She was assistant professor at the University of Münster (Habilitation 2007) and Chair of English Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen. She has held a number of fellowships, among them an Andrew Mellon Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin and a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship at the Huntington Library, San Marino. She has been a professeure invitée at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and is honorary professor at the University of Kent at Canterbury. She has published widely on late medieval literature and culture and is particularly interested in the interrelations between material culture, sense perception and affect. She is the author of the monograph A Room of One’s Own (2002), which explores the uses and transformations of space in late medieval England. Among her research interests are also interrelations between medicine, ethics and literature (Ethik in der Medizin, 2013, co-authored with Bettina Schöne- Seifert and Anna Thiemann) and the role of British writers in the re-education of the Germans after the war: Her monograph A Missionary Zeal was published in 2009, and she is currently completing a monograph on writers as cultural arbiters for Northwestern University Press. Together with Professors Elizabeth Roberston and Fiona Macpherson (both Glasgow) she is running an interna- tional project on the “Senses: Past and Present”, funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Notes On The Editors ix Wietse de Boer is Professor of History at Miami University (Ohio). His research interests are focused on the religious and cultural history of early modern Italy. He is the author of The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Discipline and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan (2001). Recent publications include the Intersections volumes Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe (co- edited with Christine Göttler, 2013) and Space and Conversion in Global Perspective (co-edited with Giuseppe Marcocci, Aliocha Maldavsky, and Ilaria Pavan, 2015). He is currently completing a monograph on religion and sen- sory experience in early modern Italy. Articles on the subject appeared in Intersections volumes 9 (Spirits Unseen, 2009) and 17 (Meditatio – Refashioning the Self, 2010), as well as the Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter- Reformation (2013). Notes on the Contributors Dieter Bitterli has taught Old and Middle English language and literature at the Universities of Lausanne and Zurich (Switzerland), where he works as a lecturer in the English Department. His two main areas of research are Anglo-Saxon litera- ture, including the relations between medieval Latin and the vernacular, and Early Modern emblems and architecture.