Knowing bodies, passionate souls : sense perceptions in Byzantium / edited by Susan Ashbrook Harvey and Margaret Mullett.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Harvey, Susan Ashbrook, editor.

Mullett, Margaret, editor.

Alumni and Friends Memorial Book Fund.

Series:

Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine symposia and colloquia

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cognition--Social aspects.

History.

Perception--Social aspects.

Perception.

Senses and sensation.

Senses and sensation--Social aspects.

Intellectual life.

Manners and customs.

Byzantine Empire--Social life and customs--Congresses.

Byzantine Empire.

Byzantine Empire--Intellectual life--Congresses.

Byzantine Empire--Religious life and customs--Congresses.

Senses and sensation--Byzantine Empire--History--Congresses.

Senses and sensation--Social aspects--Byzantine Empire--History--Congresses.

Senses and sensation--Byzantine Empire--Religious aspects--History--Congresses.

Perception--Social aspects--Byzantine Empire--History--Congresses.

Cognition--Social aspects--Byzantine Empire--History--Congresses.

Cognition.

Genre:

Conference papers and proceedings.

Physical Description:

xi, 330 pages : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 29 cm.

Place of Publication:

Washington, DC : Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, [2017]

Summary:

"Byzantine culture was notably attuned to a cosmos of multiple dominions: material, bodily, intellectual, physical, spiritual, human, divine. Despite a prevailing discourse to the contrary, the Byzantine world found its bridges between domains most often in sensory modes of awareness. These different domains were concretely perceptible and were encountered daily amidst the mundane no less than the exalted. Icons, incense, music, sacred architecture, ritual activity; saints, imperial families, persons at prayer; hymnography, ascetical or mystical literature: in all of its cultural expressions, the Byzantines excelled in highlighting the intersections between human and divine realms through sensory engagement (whether positive or negative). Byzantinists have been slow to look at the operations of the senses in Byzantium, especially those of seeing, its relation to the other senses, and phenomenological approaches in general. More recently, work on smell and hearing has followed that on seeing, and yet the areas of taste and touch--the most universal and most necessary of the senses--are still largely uncharted. Nor has much been done to explore how Byzantines viewed the senses, or how they envisaged the sensory interactions with their world. A map of the connections between sense-perceptions and other processes (of perception, memory, visualization) in the Byzantine brain has still to be sketched out. How did the Byzantines describe, narrate, or represent the senses at work? It is hoped to further studies of how individual senses in Byzantium operated in the context of all the senses, and their place in Byzantine thought about perception and cognition. Recent work on dreaming, on memory, and on the emotions has made advances possible, and collaborative experiments between Byzantinists and neurological scientists open further approaches. The happy coincidence of this symposium with the upcoming Garden and Landscape Studies Symposium, 'Sound and Scent in the Garden, ' and a forthcoming exhibition at the Walters Art Museum on the five senses enables cross-cultural comparisons that include gardens in Islamic Spain, Hebrew hymnography, Syriac wine-poetry, Mediterranean ordure, and Romanesque and Gothic precious objects that were not just looked at but also touched, smelled, and heard. Architects, musicologists, art historians, archaeologists, philologists can all contribute approaches to the revelation of the Byzantine sensorium"--Publisher's website.

Contents:

Introduction / Susan Ashbrook Harvey and Margaret Mullett

SIGHT

Sense lives of Byzantine things / Glenn Peers

The materiality of sensation in the art of the later Middle Ages / Martina Bagnoli

SOUND

Perceptions of sound and sonic environments across the Byzantine acoustic horizon / Amy Papalexandrou

Kalophonia and the phenomenon of embellishment in Byzantine psalmody / Spiro Antonopoulos

Geographies of silence in late antiquity / Kim Haines-Eitzen

SMELL

Scent, sound, and the senses in Islamic gardens of al-Andalus / Dede Fairchild Ruggles

The smell of time : olfactory associations with the past in pre-modern Greece / Felipe Rojas Silva and Valeria Segueekov

Fragrant matter : the work of holy oil / Susan Ashbrook Harvey

TASTE

Struggling with Romanos's "Dagger of Taste" / Thomas Arentzen

Monks baking bread and salting fish : an archaeology of early monastic ascetic taste / Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom

TOUCH

Byzantine Christianity and tactile piety (fourth-fifteenth centuries) / Beatrice Caseau

A touch of violence : feeling pain, perceiving pain in Byzantium / Galina Tirnanic

To touch or not to touch : erotic tactility in Byzantine literature / Ingela Nilsson

THE SENSORIUM

Virtual sensations and inner visions : words and the senses in late antiquity and Byzantium / Ruth Webb

Bitter waters and dew of rest : senses and liturgy in early Byzantine Judaism / Laura Lieber

The spiritual senses, monastic and theological / Marcus Plested.

Notes:

Papers from a symposium held April 25-27, 2014 at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Alumni and Friends Memorial Book Fund.

ISBN:

9780884024217

0884024210

OCLC:

951017946