Recent scholarship on the senses has demonstrated that an essential step in writing a comprehensive cultural history involves the reconstruction of a period's sensorium, or the "sensory model" of conscious and unconscious associations that functions in society to create meaning in individuals' complex web of continual and interconnected sensory perceptions (Classen 1997: 402; Corbin [1991] 2005; Howes 2008). This reconstructive task of sensology is required for any period. But it has a claim to be particularly indispensable for understanding the Middle Ages because both a theoretical and a practical involvement with the senses played a persistently central role in the development of ideology and cultural practice in this period (Howes 2012; Newhauser 2009). Whether in Christian theology, where the senses could be a fraught and debated presence; or in ethics, which formed a consistent and characteristic element in understanding the senses in the Middle Ages; or in medieval art, where sensory perception was often understood to open the doors to the divine; or in the daily activity of laborers, from agricultural workers to physicians, sailors to craftsmen, in areas in which machines had not yet replaced the sensory evaluation of work by human beings-in all of these areas, and in many more, the senses were a foundational element in evaluating information and understanding the world. For a number of reasons having to do partially with the alterity of sensory information transmitted by medieval texts and partially with the denigration of sensory perception in many theological works in the Middle Ages, medieval scholars have joined in the undertaking of sensology only in the relatively recent past. It can, in fact, be asserted that this "sensory turn" is one of the most important ongoing projects of medieval studies in the twenty-first century. And as a recent survey has demonstrated (Palazzo 2012), the past decade of intensive research has already borne significant fruit in understanding the cultural valences of sensory perception in the Middle Ages in their historical development.
THEOLOGY AND THE PORTALS OF THE SOUL
The fall of Rome and the dissolution of imperial regimes of the senses resulted in a certain "atomization" of paradigms of sensory experience in the context of early medieval courts, the comitatus, the village, or the monastery. For example, in antiquity the indulgence in sensual pleasures by some among the Roman elites, though perhaps not evidence of their identification with the poor, was criticized by authors who considered themselves to uphold traditional standards as a dangerous betrayal of the moral principles that separated the upper levels of society from all that was not "ideally" Roman (women, foreigners, the lower levels of society) (Toner 1995). But located in decentralized monastic environments, sensual indulgence took on the contours of rebelliousness against Christian faith itself, and it could be condemned as both disobedience and a failure in monastic duty. 'Typical for early medieval monastic theology dealing with faith, social regulation, and much else, authority for these views was derived through exegesis and homily from the Bible. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) and Gregory the Great (d. 604), essential figures both in the monastic tradition and for the secular church, were influential in transmitting the conception of the theological danger of indulging the senses (Newhauser [1988] 2007).
The essential question is the relationship of the senses to faith. A state of holiness was effected by and demonstrated through the senses in the Middle .Ages, but it was also a common observationthat.theobject of faith itself was not apprehended by human sense perception. This. understanding of faith was supported through reference to Hebrews 11:1: "Faith is ... a conviction about (or: the evidence of [argumentum]) things that are not visible." One of the most influential contexts in Augustine's works for linking sensory experience to a lack of faith was his exegesis of the parable of the great banquet in Luke 14. Augustine was concerned here with the basis of faith. He noted that Christians cannot say they do not believe in the resurrection of Jesus simply because they cannot see it with their eyes or touch the empty tomb with their hands. For Augustine, such an argument would amount to an undermining of the understanding of the resurrection. To argue this way would be to separate oneself from those attaining heaven just as the second guest who would not come to the great banquet held himself back. "I have just bought five yoke of oxen," he explained to the servant sent to fetch him, "please excuse me; I am going out to test them" (Luke 14:19). For Augustine, the five yoke were the five senses and the banquet the guest missed was the eternal refection. It was important for Augustine that the guest went out to test his oxen (probare illa), for this showed his faithlessness. In effect, the second guest replaced belief with perception and in this way made himself a captive of his senses. He was more interested in perceiving the sensations the senses brought him than in living through his faith (Augustine of Hippo 1845: 112.3.3-5.5). Perception for the sake of perception was a theological dead end.
But sensory indulgence could be destabilizing in other ways as well. Where Gregory the Great adopted the Augustinian interpretation of the parable in Luke 14 and warned against the dangers of sensory perception as an end in his discussion "vas reminiscent of an earlier monastic tradition that identified sensory disobedience as a theological and institutional problem, 'This misuse of the senses led the mind to investigate what in general terms may be called the "study of external matters" (Dagens 1968), but it also took a much more specific and familiar form, namely nosiness about the life of one's fellow human beings. The more someone became acquainted with the qualities of another person, the more ignorant he was of his own internal affairs. Going outside of himself, he no longer knew what was within himself. In this way, testing by means of the senses, which Gregory inherited from Augustine, was not so much Augustine's critique of the rationale for faith, but rather was another sign of the externalization from the self. Living through the senses removed one from the internal life of discipline and obedience where the battle for the perfection of one's own spiritual life was to be fought. The second guest excused himself in words that rang with humility, but nevertheless by disdaining to come to the banquet he revealed arrogance in his actions (Gregory the Great 1999: 2.36.4). He removed himself from the community of those elevated to the eternal refection in his place, the poor and diseased, as he also removed himself from the institutional bonds of the monastery (see Figure 1.1). The lessons found here were still being repeated for monastic and lay audiences in the late tenth/early eleventh century. JElfric, for example, monk of Cerne and later abbot of Eynsham (d. c. 1012), goes into great detail in the description of the senses themselves and their uses in his treatment of the parable from Luke in Homily 23. JElfric was undoubtedly following the lead of Haymo of Auxerre when he elaborated on Gregory the Great's earlier admonition by observing: "we should turn our gaze from evil sights, our hearing from evil speech, our taste from prohibited aliments, our noses from harmful smells, our hands and whole body from foul and sinful contacts, if we are desirous of coming to the delicacies of the eternal refection" (lElfric of Eynsham 1979: 215).
The paradigm of the five external senses and an indication of perhaps its most frequently seen hierarchy informs JElfric's exhortation (from the "superior" sight and hearing to the more "corporeal" taste, smell, and touch; see Vinge 1975). The paradigm was inherited from antiquity through Cicero (Dronke 2002), but it "vas hardly as rigid as it is sometimes made out to be, and in all events it allowed for more multisensoriality than a static hierarchy might be taken to permit (Dugan and Farina 2012). Indeed, as has been cogently argued, the liturgy of the mass developed in ways that "activated" all the senses in a participation with the power of the divinity (Palazzo 2010). The five external senses also served as the basic pattern that was used to develop a parallel system of spiritual senses, a concept that was developed systematically in Western rnedieval theology (Coolman 2004; Gavrilyuk and Coakley 20l2). As Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) presented them, the soul giyes sense to the body, distributed in five bodily members; likewise, the soul gives a corresponding spiritual value to the senses, distributed in five kinds of love: sight is related to the holy love (amor sanctus) of God; hearing to love (dilectio) at a remove from the flesh; smell to the general love (amor generalis) of all human beings; taste to a pleasant or social love (amor iucundus, amor socialis) of one's companions; and touch to the pious love (amor pius) of parents for their young (both humans and animals) (Serm div 10.1, vol. 6/1: 121). Bernard used a rhetorical synesthesia to describe the unity of how the spiritual senses work: in his explication of the Song of Songs he wrote that, "The bride has poured out an oil to whose odor the maidens are drawn to taste and feel how sweet is the Lord" (Serm Cant 19.3.7, vol. 1: 112; see Rudy 2002: 13-14, 54-5). One can see here a model as it was to be used by later contemplatives in which mystical visions also imply multisensual encounters with the divinity: in one of Margaret of Oingt's visions, for example, a dry and barren tree blooms when its branches are flooded with water and on the branches are written the names of the five senses (Bynum 1987: 249).
This elasticity in understanding the relationship between the senses can be further documented in the career of "sweetness" in medieval theology, where Psalm 33:9 was frequently invoked to express an embracing of the senses in all that was desirable in the divinity ("0, taste and see that [or: how] the Lord is sweet"). But "sweetness" also indicates a paradox of tastes, articulating at one and the same time both the sublimeness of the divinity and the stubbornness of human flesh (Carruthers 2006). In dietary theory, which identified foods that corresponded with the humoral composition of the hurnan body, either to complement its healthy state or to reverse unhealthy conditions, sweetness is said to have the closest affinities to the body because its physical properties match those of the body itself. In the West, dietary theory was derived mainly from Constantine the African's translation of the Liber dietarum universalium et particularium by Isaac ]udaeus, who wrote at the end of the ninth and beginning of the tenth centuries. The Latin version of this text was excerpted in the thirteenth century by Bartholomew the Englishman in his De proprietatibus rerum, which circulated also, though less extensively than the Latin text, in John of Trevisa's Middle English translation beginning at the end of the fourteenth century (see Figure 1.2). As the Middle English text expresses it, "The sense of taste experiences pleasure in sweet things because of its similarity to sweetness.... For sweet food supplies abundant nourishment and is naturally comparable to the parts and limbs of the body. This is what Isaac says in the Diets" (Bartholornew the Englishman 1975-88, vol. 1: 118; Woolgar 2006: 106).
The perception of a perfect fit between the qualities of sweetness and the human body itself has been seen to provide part of the reason for the emphasis in monastic theology on the Lord's sweet taste (Fulton 2006: 196-200), but the frequent use of Psalm 33:9 also demonstrates that in articulating the divinity, not only the more"distant" sense of sight was operative, but also the sense of taste, which requires ingestion (Korsmeyer 1999: 20). With the introduction into medieval Western thought of works on nature by Aristotle and his commentators and the transmission and translation of scientific works from Greek and Arabic into Latin, theologians had access to a wider range of material that reflected on sense perception. The system of five , external senses remained influential here as well, serving as the basic paradigm for a parallel series of five internal senses derived ultimately from Aristotle's De anima. These psychological faculties were theorized by Aristotle's interpreters, above all Avicenna (d. 1037) and Averroes (d. 1198), as the steps involved in the process by which meaning was derived from sensation (on imagination among the internal senses, see Karnes 2011). They were understood to work in stages of increasing abstraction, but the process begins with sensation by the senses (or their combination and judgment in the collection point that was called the "common sense") (Heller-Roazen 2008). The work of both Islamic scholars influenced scholastic theologians, importantly among them Albert the Great (d. 1280) (Steneck 1974).
But there were repercussions from those who felt that theologians engaged too much with natural philosophy, such as the condemnations affecting the Parisian theology faculty in 1277 (Aertsen et al. 2001). Of course, this does not rnean that theologians abandoned the senses. The Treatise on Faith by William Peraldus (cl. c. 1271), for example, composed before 1249, gives attention to questions of the senses particularly to argue that the modern dualist heretics of his day (that is to say, Cathars) demonstrated their lack of faith by their faulty senses, perceiving only pure evil in corruptible matter, which they said was the product of the principle of evil. On the other hand, Peraldus notes, taste can judge that a wine is good, hearing that a song is good, and so on; all matter has the potential for goodness, being the creation of a single, good God (Chapter 8; William Peraldus 1512, vol. 1: 40ra). On the other hand, some theologians (perhaps especially among the Dominicans) evince a decided circumspection in treating the topic of the senses, preferring the imperceptible faith as the subject of theological speculation in contrast to the more secular matter of perception by the senses. Roland of Cremona (1178-1259), first Dominican regent master in Paris, included some discussion of the senses in his Questions on the Sentences of Peter but he does not ea rry his inquiry too far, nothing abruptly, "Let that suffice concerning the exterior senses so far as theologians are concerned. Amongst the physici there are some very subtle disputes about these senses, but they have nothing to do with us ..." (Mulchahey 1998: 66). And Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) gave only somewhat cursory attention to the senses in the Summa theologiae because while the task of the theologian included for Aquinas an inquiry into the intellective and appetitive capacities of human beings, since both of them are directly involved with virtue, the senses are related to the body's nutritive powers and can be considered preintellective (Pasnau 2002: 172).
ETHICS, THE SENSES, AND THE PORTALS OF SIN
As the examples of William Peraldus and Thomas Aquinas intimate, the moral valences of the senses are ubiquitous in the Middle Ages; they are, in fact, one of the most distinctive characteristics of the medieval sensorium (Vecchio 2010; Woolgar 2006: 16-18). As has been noted, from Augustine of Hippo and Gregory the Great into the seventeenth century, warnings about the sin of curiosity established that sensory perception was potentially dangerous (Newhauser [1982] 2007). By the early twelfth century; the coenobitic institution's loss of control over the type and quality of sensory input defines the contours of one kind of monastic admonition against vitium curiositatis. The most elaborate and multisensorial examination of sinning by the curious misuse of one's senses can be found in the Liber de humanis moribus, a protoscholastic text that reports the words of Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109). Anselm differentiates twenty-eight types of sinful curiosity that are exclusively concerned with matters of perception located in the dining hall or, even rnore outside the purview of the monastic authorities, in the marketplace. The combination and number of senses involved when a monk is too eager to see what dishes are being served; or tastes the food on the table only to know whether it tastes good or not; or sees, touches, and smells the spices for sale in the market simply to know what each one is like etc.-an of these demonstrate a view of the boundless sensory potentials of the refectory and the unrestrained context of commercial activity that presents a stark challenge to monastic authority (Anselm of Canterbury 1969: 47-50; Newhauser 2010).
The growth of universities as the European population expanded in cities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries gave new intensity to this problem: ]acques de Vitry (d. 1240) relates a narrative that may be used to illustrate this point. It deals with a certain Master Sellawha was visited once in Paris by the ghost of one of his fanner students, a young man of great promise who had died unexpectedly. The student was dressed in a parchment cloak covered with writing and when Sella asked what the writing was, he was told, "These writings weigh more heavily on me than if I had to bear the entire weight of that church tower over there," pointing to the nearby church of St. Germain. "For in these figures are the sophismata et curiositates in which I consumed my days." To show his former teacher what torturous heat he now had to suffer because of these sophisms and curiosities, the student let a drop of sweat fall on Sella's extended hand. It pierced his flesh as if it were the sharpest arrow. ]acques brings his exemplum to a close by remarking pointedly that soon afterwards the teacher quit the schools of logic and entered a monastery of the Cistercians (Jacques de Vitry [1890] 1967: 12-13). The intimate way in which touch is articulated-the weight of the parchment, the heat of hell's fire, the pain of searing sweat-emphasizes the urgency of this sense as a vehicle of religious significance in disciplining the body (Classen 2012: 32).
Outside the university, the normative view of the senses in the moral tradition became a regular feature of the myriad catechetical and pastoral works produced in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215-16) (Casagrande 2002). Many of these works articulate the conception of "guarding the senses" (Adnes 1967), that is to say, they regard the senses as the portals of sin, and the behavioral discipline they envisage is to be created by maintaining "governance" over the senses (which demonstrates how these works function metonymically as part of a program of social control). Typical of texts of this kind is the Somme le roi, composed in 1279 by Laurent, a Dominican friar, for King Philip III of France (the Bold), and a major influence on vernacular works of moral instruction in the centuries to follow. Laurent advises that the senses are to be ruled by reason and deliberation, opened and closed to tempting or uplifting sensory perception, as needed, like windows or water sluices, so that each sense performs its duty without sin or transgression (Laurent (Friar) 2008: 265; see the later use of this image in Middle English in Chapter 34 of [acob's "",vel! in Brandeis 1900: 216-22). Behind Laurent's text lies the more voluminous treatment of the ethical senses in the work of William Peraldus. In his Treatise on Temperance, he notes that taste and touch can be understood as the most important of the senses because they are prerequisites for life itself (i.e., for eating and reproduction), while the other three senses contribute to the wellbeing of life and in this context can be considered of lesser importance. Drawing on Aristotle's libri naturales, Peraldus observes that sight, smell, and hearing are activated at a distance from the object of perception, but taste and touch require proximity to that object:
Whence the pleasures that occur through touch and taste are greater than those that occur through the other three senses. And the inclination to the actions and pleasures stimulated through these two senses is greater than that stimulated through the other three. Likewise, the vices that occur in respect to the actions and pleasures of those two senses are more dangerous; hence, the virtues that are contrary to these vices are more necessary and more noteworthy.
William Peraldus 1512, Chapter 8, vol. 1: 126va-b
Peraldus upends here what is sometimes thought of as the "authoritative" hierarchy of the senses in the Middle Ages. But from the perspective of pastoral concern for the senses, sobriety and (sexual) restraint, the two contrary virtues important enough to receive their own designations in his influential moral theology, are essential elements for both the life of the individual and the functioning of the individual in the community. They reveal the importance to the preacher of the immediacy of sensation and the ethical task of regulating the body.
The moral valences of the senses were not a matter for hortatory treatises and sermons alone. Texts of natural philosophy and their derivatives were drawn on in the presentation of the "bestiary of the five senses," in which each sense was linked to an animal because of the animal's often legendary properties. These series were often illuminated (Nordenfalk 1976, 1985). The representatives taken from the bestiary tradition in such lists could change, but a typical series that mentioned each animal because it was thought to excel all others in the powers of a particular sense included the lynx for its sharp sight, the mole for hearing, the vulture for smell, the spider for touch, and the monkey for taste. The lynx was not an animal always understood in medieval Europe; Richard de Fournival's mid-thirteenth-century Bestiaire d'amour substitutes the lens here, a small worm thought, like the lynx, to have the power to see through walls (2009: 192). Both examples of sharp-sighted animals see,m to represent the reception of a misreading of the Consolation ofPhilosophy (Book 3, prose 8) by Boethius (d. 524/5) who had written of Lynceus, one of the Argonauts endowed with the gift of especially acute vision. In antiquity, human beings had served as the representative of taste, but in the Middle Ages humanity was supplanted by the monkey in this role (Pastoureau 2002: 142). A lesson of humility, because of the limitations of humans to sense their world, was not difficult to draw from this substitution, as Thomas of Cantimpre did in his thirteenth-century encyclopedia of the natural world: "In the five senses a human being is surpassed by many animals: eagles and lynxes see more clearly, vultures smell more acutely, a monkey has a more exacting sense of taste, a spider feels with more alacrity, moles or the wild boar hear more distinctly" (1973: 106; Vinge 1975: 51-3).
The treatment of the olfactory sense demonstrates the wide range of ethical possibilities the senses could have in the medieval sensorium. Susan Harvey has called particular attention to the way in which the olfactory sense aids in the construction of holiness in late antiquity (Harvey 2006), and Peraldus deploys the intensity of smell to characterize the joy of the virtue of hope as a "pre smell" (preodoratio) of life in heaven (Treatise on Hope, 2; William Peraldus 1512: 71 va). The odor of sanctity is ubiquitous in medieval saints' lives. In Chaucer's tale of Saint Cecilia, for example, Tiburce smells the crowns of roses and lilies that the angel has given Cecilia and Valerian, and Tiburce is immediately transformed. As he says: "The sweet odor that I find in my heart has changed me completely into another nature" ("Second Nun's Tale," Chaucer 1987: VII1.251-2). If holiness smells sweetly in Cecilia's tale, one can observe elsewhere that the relationship of the senses to transformation is also validated by the opposite kind of smell: In "The Parson's Tale" (X.208-10), the sinful will have their olfactory sense assaulted by foul odors in hell; and in "The Summoner's Tale" the fart Thomas delivers into the hand of the friar (111.2149) is of sufficient stench that the lord of the village can only imagine the devil put this behavior into Thomas' mind. The sensory regimes of the tales of the Summoner and the Second Nun also underscore the social alignments of the senses and the ethical valences that attach to the estates: the aristocratic Cecilia, described as "of noble kynde" (of noble lineage), smells like a representative of her class, whereas Thomas' thunderous fart turns him in an instant from a "goode man" with a substantial household, which had been his initial description, into a loudly destructive ("noyous") and malodorous churl. Sensory media verify the direct application of the moral valences of the senses: the morality play, The Castle of Perseverance (early fifteenth century), makes the sensory dimensions of Belial (the devil) a sensational olfactory experience, as well as a visual and an auditory one, complete with clouds of burning powder to enforce in the audience the expected stench of evil and the noise of the crack of hell, while on the other hand the virtues defeat the attacking vices by throwing fragrant roses at them (Eccles 1969).
THE EDIFICATION OF THE SENSES
As "vas seen already in the treatment of "sweetness," there is the potential for paradox in the Christian sensorium. More broadly stated, in the Aristotelian tradition of medieval thought, epistemology is based on sensory perception, in that the senses act as the first steps that will result in cognition. As Aquinas put it, the Peripatetic dictum that "there is nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the senses" refers to human epistemology, not to the divine intellect (Quaest. disp. de veritate, quaest. 2, art. 3, arg. 19 and ad. 19; see Cranefield 1970). On the other hand, the Christian moral tradition reacts with suspicion towards the senses as the potential portals of sin. It has been argued that this paradox amounts to an impasse that cannot be perfected, for if the means of perception are also the agents undermining cognition, the connection of perception and the will can have no coherence (Kiipper 2008). But if the senses potentially destabilize cognition, one can observe that the connection of perception and the will still achieves coherence in the Middle Ages in a process ofreforming the interpretation of sensory data, that is to say, through educating the senses. In fact, in all periods of the Middle Ages, sensation was not just guarded, but guided. Guarding the senses is a fairly static situation; education is progressive. Advancing from sensation to cognition involves an interpretive process that always implicates the edification of the senses.
One way of imagining the importance of this process can be found in a remarkable illumination produced probably in the monastery at Heilsbronn in the last quarter of the twelfth century (see Figure 1.3) (Lutze [1936] 1971: 1-5). The image here is well known (jutte 2005: 78), though its implications for the medieval edification of the senses have not been emphasized before. The manuscript contains copies of four books of the Bible (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Canticles, and Lamentations), with some related illustrations, but also an allegorical illumination of the path of life. This ladder of perfection (or damnation) (Eriksson 1964: 448-9) begins in the lower right corner where humanity follows first along the steps of the senses (from the bottom up: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch). At the top of the ladder is heaven with Jesus as the central figure of inspiration. At the bottom one finds Satan in hell with three smaller devils. '[he senses alone carry humanity only to the fork in the ladder; to continue upward, sensory information must be fortified not only by the infusion of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, but also by humanity's moral progress through the cardinal virtues (prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice). The downward fork to hell is marked by the steps of humanity's "depraved habits," amounting to the vices contrary to the cardinal virtues (imprudence, intemperance, inconstancy [leuitas], injustice), inspired by seven demons generated from hell (presumably, the seven deadly sins). 'The senses here provide raw material for cognition, but they achieve the desired moral coherence that is the focus of the illumination only when informed through human effort in virtue aided by grace. As the text along the border of the illustration emphasizes, what is depicted here is the mind (mens) either vexed by fleshly irnaginings or striving virtuously for heaven.
Educating the mind's eye to interpret clearly was one of the first steps taken by Lady Philosophy in Boethius's Consolation ofPhilosophy, wiping away his tears clouded by "mortal things" (Book 1, prose 2). And as the Erlangen manuscript makes clear, visual images were not simply teaching tools of a narrative kind. Indeed, illuminations of all types fulfilled essential functions in guiding .rnystical contemplation, serving "as instruments of visionary experience . . . to induce, channel, and focus that experience" (Hamburger 1989: 174). Later medieval female visionaries have been the center of much scholarly attention for the way they used the sensC?ry dimensions of visual depictions and other material objects in their spiritualpractices. Some of the most interesting material is related in the Sister-Books composed by Dominican nuns in the late Middle Ages in German-speaking areas of Europe. The power of visual images can be documented, for example, among the nuns in St. Katharinenthal (near Diessenhofen, Switzerland), where Hilti Brumsin is related to have prayed before a painting of Jesus' flagellation so intensely that she was guided into a state of ecstasy lasting for two weeks in which she experienced the same pain and bitterness that Jesus had suffered (Lindgren 2009: 62).
Edification of the senses was important not only for the "high culture" end of cognition, but also among all the many groups within the varying levels of society, whatever their different understanding of how sensing worked. Learning to perceive was, of course, common in all professions, from physicians to craftsmen. Without the assistance of sophisticated instrumentation, the professions had to rely more directly on the evaluation of their senses to gather information and they had to train themselves to act on accurate assessment. Touch was essential in some professions: stonemasons had to learn how much pressure to apply when hewing stone, blacksmiths how hard their hammer blows should land on hot iron in order to shape it, bakers how firm a loaf should be when it has risen before being baked. But other senses were called on as well: Constantine the African's Pantegni, adapted from the Arabic of Haly Abbas (as he was known in the West) in the late eleventh century, contains practical instruction on testing medicine by taste, understanding the qualities of medicine by smell, and recognizing medicine by color (Burnett 1991: 232).
The growth of scientific texts in the high and later Middle Ages gave new impetus to the possibilities for explaining sensations in order to provide edification concerning their "correct" interpretation. Roger Bacon (d. 1294) laid out a blueprint for the use of optics as a foundation for the of theology. He concluded his Perspectiva with a section arguing, as he put it, for the "inexpressible utility" of this science for the understanding and propagation of divine truth: "For in divine scripture, nothing is dealt with as frequently as matters pertaining to the eye and vision, as is evident to anybody who reads it; and therefore nothing is more essential to [a grasp of] the literal and spiritual sense than the certitude supplied by this science" (Bacon 1996: 322; see Newhauser 2001; Power 2013: 114). The lists of optical phenomena found in the new works on optics produced in this period had a direct function in edifying the sense of sight, making refraction understandable, for example, or explaining the effects of curved mirrors (Akbari 2004; Biernoff 2002). Peter of Limoges (d. 1306) took this one step further in The Moral Treatise on the Eye (1275-89), creating a "hybridization of science and theology" (Denery 2005: 75-115; Kessler 2011: 14). But edifying all of the senses lay at the heart of Peter's work. Richard de Fournival's Bestiaire d'amour had deployed the senses in a document of literary and erotic seduction, applying animal lore concerning the Sirens to explain how the narrator of the text had been captured by his beloved through his sense of hearing (thereby drawing on a tradition in the medieval French soundscape in which the beloved lady's voice is likened to that of the Sirens, both seductive and death-dealing; see Fritz 2011: 161). Richard used the image of the tiger to explain how the narrator had been captured by sight (as a tiger was said to be stopped in its tracks by the sight of itself in a mirror). He drew on the panther (said to emit an alluring odor) and the unicorn (attracted by the smell of a virgin and then killed by hunters) to explain his capture by his olfactory sense de Fournival 2009: 182-202) (see Figure I.4). 'Touch and taste are not included because the narrator's erotic desire remains as yet unfulfilled. Peter of Limoges, apparently borrowing directly from Richard de Fournival, re-analyzes the same sensory and bestiary material to make of it not a narrative of sexual passion, but a warning about the sin of lust (2009: 104-6). The residue of the sensory attractiveness of love that had been foregrounded in Richard's work remains in Peter's treatise only as a subtext; it has been overlaid with a veneer of explicit warning against women as the inciters to lust, a call to identify potentially arousing sensory stimulation and to curtail it.
Much of the edification of the senses presented here depended on the stability of well-established knowledge. By the late Middle Ages, however, parts of the tradition of the medieval sensorium, in which there was a continuity of perception and meaning, became brittle. A telling realization of disruption in this process of edification can be noted in the great allegorical encyclopedia of English politics, society, and the church that is Piers Ploioman. In Pass us 15 of the B-version (composed around 1379), the personification Anima bemoans a decline in learning that is also a breakdown in the connection of sensory signs and what they used to mean:
Both the educated and the uneducated are now alloyed with sin,
so that nobody loves his fellow human being, nor our Lord either apparently.
For what with war and evil deeds and unpredictable weather,
experienced sailors and clever scholars, too,
have no faith in the heavens orin the teaching of the (natural) philosophers.
Astronorners who used to warn about what would happen in the future
make mistakes all the time now in their calculations;
sailors on their ships and shepheards with their flocks
used to know from observing the sky what "vas going to happenthey often warned people about bad weather and high winds.
Plowmen who work the soil used to tell their masters
from the kind of seed they were going to sow what they would be able to sell,
and what to leave aside and what to live by, the land was so reliable.
Now all people miscalculate, at sea and on the land, as well:
shepherds and sailors, and so do the plowmen:
they are neither able to calculate nor do they understand one procedure after another.
Astronomers are also at their wits' end:
they find that what was calculated in a region of the earth turns out just the opposite.
Langland [1978] 1997, B.15.353-70: 263-4
From the top to the bottom of society, the learned to the uneducated, certainty has been displaced by skeptical recognition of the limits of transmitting the old knowledge. For Langland and his contemporaries, the very foundation of what had been a stable system of sensory evaluation, even of natural signs, had been inexplicably shaken. What had been certain in judgment among the transmitters of folk wisdom, the sailors and shepherds, but also the learned astrologers, was in need of re-evaluation.
SOCIAL ORDER AND THE SENSES
What Langland described as a disruption in learning was only one of the important changes taking place in the late Middle Ages. The aftermath of often cataclysmic events at this time, which importantly included a series of famines in the early fourteenth century and then the Great Plague in the middle of the century" also included changes in social mobility that can be measured by alterations in the sensorium. One response to the reduced supply of labor following the population loss of the Black Death was that wages went up. At the same time, seigneural obligations on the peasantry were reduced. These factors had the effect of increasing the spending power of laborers, which meant they had the capacity now to imitate aristocratic styles of life (Dyer 2005: 126-72). Social imitation allowed for movement among the estates and the emulation of sensory regimes that were formerly above one's rank: the peasants ate, drank, dressed, and in some cases constructed homes like their social superiors.
All of this belongs to the of the history sense of taste, both literally and culturally understood, as the social sense that is one of the determinants identity of and class affiliation (Bourdieu 1984). And the reactions to increased mobility in taste can be used to document this matter, such as one finds in Piers Plourman. After the collapse of the attempt to achieve social harmony through the collective plowing of the half acre and at a time when the threat of famine, personified as Hunger, has been lulled to sleep with enough to eat, some of the lower orders are shown in this poem as no longer accepting the kind of food they ate earlier in the normal course of things:
Nor did any beggar eat bread made from bean rneal, but from fine and good flour, or else pure wheat flour, nor in any way drink a mere half-penny ale, but only the best and the darkest that brewers sell.
Langland [1978] 1997, B.6.302-5: 109
Though he approached this issue with very different class allegiances, John Gower was in agreement with Langland about the disruption of challenges to taste, In the Visio Anglie, which Gower added to the Vox Clamantis in the second half of 1381, he turned the peasants who participated in the Rising of that year into domesticated and wild animals who behave in the most destructive ways: the dogs turn their noses up at table scraps and claim instead weU-fattened food; the foxes find raiding chicken coops beneath them. All of this becomes a vision of the sense of taste in revolt (Gower 2011, 5.383-4, 6.484: 54, 60; see Newhauser 2013). Such gustatory changes are accompanied by a series of other actions that demonstrate the imitation of the upper orders by the peasantry and gentry, and the lower orders' increased amounts of disposable income. Urban designs of houses influenced the building of rural homes; an increased use of pewter for tableware can be attributed to its similarity in appearance to the silver used by aristocrats. The spread of what had been first a court fashion of close-fitting clothes to the lower orders after the mid-fourteenth century is typical of the pattern of aspiration of these orders in imitating aristocratic fashion (Dyer 2005: 136-47). And even within the upper levels of society, the competition to be fashionable led to an ever greater display of clothing accessories, as seen in a story concerning a baroness of Guyenne and the lord of Beaumont related by Geoffrey de La Tour Landry (1371). The lord assured the baroness that although only half of her clothes were trimmed with fur, he would see to it that all of his wife's clothes had fur trim and embroidery (Barnhouse 2006: 119).
Despite local variotionis, the key factor in the medieval diet was social class and its connections to the display of wealth and power, on the one hand, and social competition, on the other (Schulz 2011; Woolgar 2007: 182). If the lower orders imitated those above them in the social hierarchy, the upper orders also did what they could to distinguish themselves by their sensory display, among other means through great feasts (see Figure 1.5). Food at banquets was not just intended to satisfy the palate, but to appeal to the sense of sight as well. Many recipes intended for the upper levels of society specify with particular care the color that food was to take, detailing the ingredients that are to be used to achieve these shades. In The Forme ofCury (The lv'Iethod of Cooking), composed by the chef to King Richard 11 of England and authoritative in the fourteenth century, the cook is instructed to calor blaunche porre (leek sauce) with saffron, noumbles (organ meat) with blood, and the surface of [ounet (lamb or kid in almond milk) with the blue calor of the alkanet plant (Hieatt and Butler 1985: 98, 100, 111-12). At feasts "color, shape, and spectacle were as highly regarded as taste and smell": meat could be ground up, shaped, and tinted green to look like apples, pheasants were cooked in pieces, then put together again in their feathers, and served as if they were still alive (Freedman 2008: 37). Things not being what they seemed to be was often a source of pleasure in the Middle Ages, and surprising the senses in great feasts became one more sign of the power of the upper orders.
Tricking the senses played other roles as well. Sharp practices in the marketplace depended on deceiving the senses of buyers; they became a marker of the power of an experienced class of unscrupulous merchants and the potentil lack of power among all those exposed to the predatory practices of commercialization. Many treatments of greed in the Middle Ages warn about these kinds of activities.WiUiam Peraldus's Treatise on Avarice analyzes the triple deceit committed by some merchants in their scales, weights, and measures (Part 2, Ch. 4; William Peraldus 1512, vol. 2: 58vb-59rb). In a tradition descending from Peraldus through the Somme le roi, The Book of Vices and Virtues (c. 1375) transmitted this analysis to an English audience:
The third [type of avarice committed by merchants] is in the deceit that men and women practice in weights and scales and in false measures, and this can happen in three ways: As when a man has various weights and various measures and he buys using the larger ones and sells using the smaller ones. The second manner is when a man has a true weight or a true measure, but he weighs or measures falsely and perpetrates deceit, as tavern keepers, and those who rneasure out cloth, and those who weigh out spices, and other similar types of men. The third manner is when the person who carries out the sale does so with deceit in terms of the thing he wants to sell by making it weigh heavier or appear to be more beautiful and of a greater quantity than it actually is. Francis [1942] 1968: 40
Sensory manipulation appears here as a function of the profit motive, a harbinger of the potential to use the sensorium for commercial purposes, as it also exposes the underbelly of the kind of sensory stimulation on which consumerism relies (Howes 2005b), for the sharp practices described here give only the appearance of stimulation.
Foundational for a comprehensive historiography of the Middle Ages, an understanding of the wide variety of cultural functions served by the senses is the focus of the chapters in this volume. Whether these functions unfolded in the practicalities of everyday social life, the contemplation of philosophers, or the practice of physicians; whether they describe the individual's sensing of religion, art, literature, or the media; whether they are located in the city or the marketplace, all of the chapters here analyze the functions of the medieval sensorium in a way that brings to light its most characteristic elements. They demonstrate, first of all, the remarkable amount of agency with which the senses were endowed in the long medieval millennium. Sensory organs were not just passive receptors of information, but actively participated in the formation of knowledge. This particular characteristic of the medieval sensorium is sometimes conveniently documented by referring to the extramission theory of vision. Here, sight was said to occur when a visual ray left the eye of the observer and landed on an object, thus relating sight closely to touch (Newhauser 2001). But the theory of extramission was largely replaced by the intromission theory championed by the Perspectivists in the thirteenth century, according to which the process of sight begins when a ray of light enters the (now more passive) eye. Nevertheless, the agency of the senses can still be demonstrated by noting that throughout the Middle A.ges speech continued to be numbered among the senses of the mouth. 'Taking in tastes formed a continuum with the production of the sounds of speech, demonstrating both the agency of the mouth as sense organ and the much wider range of reference in understanding medieval taste than what is expected from that sense today.
Furthermore, the contributors to this volume demonstrate amply that statements of the accepted hierarchy of the senses are often belied by both practical and theoretical sensory realignrnents. Sight and hearing were not always the dominant senses: for the medical profession, taste was more decisi ve (Burnett 1991). Nor were the external senses the only system of sensory perception developed in the Middle Ages: both the internal senses and the spiritualsenses were essential elements ofthe perceptual process in philosophical and contemplative contexts, respectively. The agency of the medieval senses also had ethical implications in the evaluation of sensory information in the process of understanding the world: as a number of the chapters in this volume emphasize, because the senses played an active role in the process of perception, they were a vital element in the formation of the individual's moral identity. In an effort to create a Christian ethics of the senses, moral theologians often contrasted the pleasures of the spiritual senses with those of the external senses. These and many other specifically medieval characteristics of sensory experience and their manifold interpretations in the Middle Ages are the subject of this volume. From the early development of explicitly urban or commercial sensations to the sensory regimes of Christian holiness, from the senses as indicators of social status revealed in food to the scholastic analysis of perception (through the external to the internal senses), the chapters here underscore both how important the project of sensology is for understanding the Middle Ages and how important the Middle Ages are to a comprehensive cultural history of the senses.
