Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction / Annette Kern-Stähler and Kathrin Scheuchzer -- 1 Sight and Understanding: Visual Imagery as Metaphor in the Old English Boethius and Soliloquies / Katherine Hindley -- 2 Coming to Past Senses: Vision, Touch and Their Metaphors in Anglo-Saxon Language and Culture / Javier E. Díaz-Vera -- 3 Bleary Eyes: Middle English Constructions of Visual Disabilities / Beatrix Busse and Annette Kern-Stähler -- 4 Exterior Inspection and Regular Reason: Robert Hooke’s and Margaret Cavendish’s Epistemologies of the Senses / Virginia Richter -- 5 Hierarchies of Vision in John Milton’s Paradise Lost / Tobias Gabel -- 6 Strange Perceptions: Sensory Experience in the Old English “Marvels of the East” / Dieter Bitterli -- 7 The Perils of the Flesh: John Wyclif’s Preaching on the Five Bodily Senses / Sean A. Otto -- 8 The Senses and Human Nature in a Political Reading of Paradise Lost / Jens Martin Gurr -- 9 The Multisensoriality of Place and the Chaucerian Multisensual / Richard G. Newhauser -- 10 ‘Eate Not, Taste Not, Touch Not’. The Five Senses in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments / Kathrin Scheuchzer -- 11 Smell in the York Corpus Christi Plays / Rory G. Critten and Annette Kern-Stähler -- 12 The Sensory Body in Shakespeare’s Theatres / 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 / Elizabeth Robertson -- Index Nominum.

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The essays collected in The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England examine the interrelationships between sense perception and secular and Christian cultures in England from the medieval into the early modern periods. They address canonical texts and writers in the fields of poetry, drama, homiletics, martyrology and early scientific writing, and they espouse methods associated with the fields of corpus linguistics, disability studies, translation studies, art history and archaeology, as well as approaches derived from traditional literary studies. Together, these papers constitute a major contribution to the growing field of sensorial research that will be of interest to historians of perception and cognition as well as to historians with more generalist interests in medieval and early modern England. Contributors include: Dieter Bitterli, Beatrix Busse, Rory Critten, Javier Díaz-Vera, Tobias Gabel, Jens Martin Gurr, Katherine Hindley, Farah Karim-Cooper, Annette Kern-Stähler, Richard Newhauser, Sean Otto, Virginia Richter, Elizabeth Robertson, and Kathrin Scheuchzer