Medieval Sensibility: Flesh, Bones and Books - Dr Katie Walters - Cancelled
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
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This event has unfortunately been cancelled, we are sorry for any inconvenience caused.
Bloomsbury Research Lecture 4
Traditionally, the medieval sensorium has been characterised as operating within a familiar hierarchy, in which sight and hearing are superior to smell, taste and touch. The scholarly 'turn to the senses' has led to both a critique of ocularcentrism and a move to recuperate touch. Recent histories of the senses, however, show themselves to be more than that: they are histories of the body, the domestic, and of material objects, and they are also histories of literature, shaped by narratives around the rise of new literary forms, such as the novel, and shifts in aesthetic sensibility. Inextricably, how we periodise the senses has implications for how we periodise and value literature. This lecture explores modern valuations of medieval touch, the role given to touch in medieval literary and sensory theories, as well as the ways in which reading books is understood to shape bodies in medieval culture. A keyword in this exploration is the Middle English noun 'boistous' a word that means, among other things, 'crude', 'unskilled', 'rude', but also 'coarse' and 'earthy', and which particularly describes the sense of touch and which, I suggest, provides a lens through which to rethink histories of the senses and of literature. In this context, the categories of flesh and bones, softness and hardness are ways of thinking about the relationship between bodies and books. Reading medieval discourses of flesh, bones and books collectively has the potential to intervene in the histories of the senses that are currently being written and the way we understand the medieval period's literary sensibility: unexpectedly, this coarse, earthy, 'boistous' mode can, in fact, cultivate finely perceptible sense
Dr Katie Walter is Lecturer in Medieval English Literature. She is the Co-Director of the Centre for Early Modern and Medieval Studies at the University of Sussex.