Description
Book SynopsisSense and Feeling in Daily Living in the Early Medieval English World seeks to illuminate important aspects of daily living and the experience of the environment through sense and emotion, using archaeological, art and textual sources. Twelve papers explore sight, sound, taste, smell, touch, and emotions such as anger, horror, grief and joy.
Similar in theme and method to the first, second and third volumes in the
Daily Living in the Anglo-Saxon World series, the collected articles
illuminate how an understanding of the sensory and emotional landscape that helped form the daily lives of the peoples and the environments of early medieval England can inform the study of England before the Norman Conquest. The sights, smells, and sounds that informed the physical and emotional landscape of town, scriptoria, and hall, for example, explain urban planning, literary imagery and emotional attachment evident among the early medieval English peoples. Experienced senses and emotions are thus as central to understanding the inner and outer landscape of the pre-Conquest English as crafts, towns or water structures.
Trade Review'This book is an excellent resource for scholars who want to broaden the range of evidence they bring to a specific problem or issue... [It is] is also a useful entry point for those new to using materiality as evidence, offering a broad selection of case studies to dip into and think about.'
Georgina Pitt,
Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Association'This collection is both useful and thought-provoking in its juxtaposition of sensory and emotive stimuli and its consistent situation of both in a culture and time period alien to modern experience.'
Carol L. Neuman de Vegvar,
SpeculumTable of ContentsIntroduction
Maren Clegg Hyer and Gale R. Owen-Crocker
1. Sight and Vision in Early Medieval English Art
Catherine E. Karkov
2. ‘Þær wæs hearpan sweg, swotol sang scopes’: Sounds of Pre-Conquest Community
Jill Frederick
3. Sweetness and Bitterness: The Sense of Taste in and around Anglo-Saxon England
Alban Gautier
4. The Blossoms’ Sweet Stench: Smell in Early Medieval England
Maren Clegg Hyer
5. The Sense of Touch: The Haptic Communication of Emotions in Anglo-Saxon England from a Linguistic Perspective
Javier E. Díaz-Vera
6. Bedship and Sex-Play: Sex and Sensuality in Early Medieval England
Christopher Monk
7. Above the Head of a Serpent: Women and Anger in Pre-Conquest England
Hilary Fox
8. Terrifying Sounds in
Beowulf: A Model for Theorizing Fear, Horror and Related Emotions in Pre-Conquest England
Brian O’Camb
9. 'Murnan on Mode': Grief in Early Medieval England
Kristen Mills
10. Sensing Joy in Early Medieval England: Reconstructing Acts of Rejoicing in the Harley Psalter
Christopher Monk
11. Smelly Sheep, Shimmering Silk: The Sensual and Emotional Experience of Textiles
Gale R. Owen-Crocker
12. Gerontophobia in Early Medieval England: Anglo-Saxon Reflections on Old Age
Thijs Porck
Notes
Suggested Readings
