Description
Book SynopsisAll the human senses become engaged in ritualizing sacred texts. These essays focus especially on ritualizing the iconic dimension of texts through the senses of sight, touch, kiss, and taste, both directly and in the imagination. Ritualized display of books engages the sense of sight very differently than does reading. Touching gets associated with reading scriptures, but touching also enables using the scripture as an amulet. Eating and consuming texts is a ubiquitous analogy for internalizing the contents of texts by reading and memorization. The idea of textual consumption reflects a widespread tendency to equate humans and written texts by their interiority and exteriority: books and people both have material bodies, yet both seem to contain immaterial ideas. Books thus physically incarnate cultural and religious values, doctrines, beliefs, and ideas. These essays bring theories of comparative scriptures and affect theory to bear on the topic as well as rich ethnographic descriptions of scriptural practices with Jewish, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and modern art and historical accounts of changing practices with sacred texts in ancient and medieval China and Korea, and in ancient Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures..
Table of Contents1. Introduction James W. Watts (Syracuse University/Ruhr University Bochum) 2. What the Book Arts Can Teach Us About Sacred Texts: The Aesthetic Dimension of Scripture S. Brent Plate (Hamilton College) 3. How the Bible Feels: The Christian Bible as Effective and Affective Object Dorina Miller Parmenter (Spalding University) 4. Engaging all the Senses: On Multi-sensory Stimulation in the Process of Making and Inaugurating a Torah Scroll Marianne Schleicher (Aarhus University) 5. On Instant Scripture and Proximal Texts: Some Insights into the Sensual Materiality of Texts and their Ritual Roles in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond Christian Frevel (Ruhr University Bochum) 6. Touching Books, Touching Art: Tactile Dimensions of Sacred Books in the Medieval West David Ganz (University of Zurich) 7. Infusions and Fumigations: Literacy Ideologies and Therapeutic Aspects of the Quran Katharina Wilkens (Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich) 8. Seeing, Touching, Holding, and Swallowing Tibetan Buddhist Texts Cathy Cantwell (Oxford University/Ruhr University Bochum) 9. Neo-Confucian Sensory Readings of Scriptures: the Reading Methods of Chu Hsi and Yi Hwang Yohan Yoo (Seoul National University) 10. Scripture's Indexical Touch James W. Watts (Syracuse University/Ruhr University Bochum)
