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Considering a wide range of early modern texts, performances and artworks, the essays in this collection demonstrate how attention to the senses illuminates the literature, art and culture of early modern England. Examining canonical and less familiar literary works alongside early modern texts ranging from medical treatises to conduct manuals via puritan polemic and popular ballads, the collection offers a new view of the senses in early modern England.
The volume offers dedicated essays on each of the five senses, each relating works of art to their cultural moments, whilst elsewhere the volume considers the senses collectively in particular cultural contexts. It also pursues the sensory experiences that early modern subjects encountered through the very acts of engaging with texts, performances and artworks. This book will appeal to scholars of early modern literature and culture, to those working in sensory studies, and to anyone interested in the art and life of early modern England.
An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.
‘Ambitious in its scope, this volume is a significant contribution to cultural criticism and studies of aesthetic response.’
Jennifer Rae McDermott, John Abbott College, Renaissance Quarterly 69.4 (Winter 2016)
'Smith, Watson and Kenny gather a diverse range of Renaissance scholars into conversation to discuss all five portals of the body equally, and raise timely questions for the field of sense studies.'
Karis Grace Riley, Renaissance Studies Volume 31, Number 1
'Departing from previous collections in this area through the range of artistic media that it explores, this volume brings together imaginative and thought-provoking contributions from a range of established and rising scholars. It raises penetrating questions about, and offers fresh understandings of, “the culturally specific role of the senses in textual and aesthetic encounters in early modern England” (9).'
Briony Frost, University of Plymouth, Shakespeare Bulletin Volume 33, Number 4
‘Offers new scholarship aiming to demonstrate the dense texture of ways in which early modern writers and artists recorded sensory experience and coped with its ephemerality and communicative limits.’
Professor Lowell Gallagher, Studies in English Literature
Introduction – Simon Smith, Jackie Watson and Amy Kenny
Part I: Tracing a sense
1. Staging taste – Lucy Munro
2. ‘Dove like looks’ and ‘serpents eyes’: staging visual clues and early modern aspiration – Jackie Watson
3. ‘Filthy groping and unclean handlings’: an examination of touching moments in dance of court and courtship – Darren Royston
4. ‘Thou art like a punie-Barber (new come to the trade) thou pick'st our eares too deepe’: barbery, ear-wax and snip-snaps – Eleanor Decamp
5. Seeing smell – Holly Dugan
Part II: The senses in context
6. Robert Herrick and the five (or six) senses – Natalie K. Eschenbaum
7. ‘Did we lie down because it was night?’: the senses of night in the 1590s – Susan Wiseman
8. Love melancholy and the senses in Mary Wroth’s work – Aurélie Griffin
Part III: Aesthetic sensory experiences
9. ‘I see no instruments, nor hands that play’: Antony and Cleopatra and visual musical experience – Simon Smith
10. ‘Gazing in hir glasse of vaineglorie’: negotiating vanity – Faye Tudor
11. ‘Tickling the senses with sinful delight’: the pleasure of reading comedies in early modern England – Hannah August
Afterword – Farah Karim-Cooper
Bibliography
Index