How did early moderns experience sense and space? How did the expanding cultural, political, and social horizons of the period emerge out of those experiences and further shape them This Element takes an approach that is both global expansive and locally rooted by focusing on four cities as key examples: Florence, Amsterdam, Boston, and Manila. They relate to distinct parts of European cultural and colonialist experience from north to south, republican to monarchical, Catholic to Protestant. Without attempting a comprehensive treatment, the Element aims to convey the range of distinct experiences of space and sense as these varied by age, gender, race, and class. Readers see how sensory and spatial experiences emerged through religious cultures which were themselves shaped by temporal rhythms, and how sound and movement expressed gathering economic and political forces in an emerging global order. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Offering a comprehensive analysis of newly-uncovered manuscripts from two English convents near Antwerp, this study gives unprecedented insight into the role of the senses in enclosed religious communities during the period 1600-1800. It draws on a range of previously unpublished writings-chronicles, confessions, letters, poetry, personal testimony of various kinds-to explore and challenge assumptions about sensory origins. Author Nicky Hallett undertakes an interdisciplinary investigation of a range of documents compiled by English nuns in exile in northern Europe. She analyzes vivid accounts they left of the spaces they inhabited and of their sensory architecture: the smells of corridors, of diseased and dying bodies, the sights and sounds of civic and community life, its textures and tastes; their understanding of it in the light of devotional discipline. This is material culture in the raw, providing access to a well-defined locale and the conditions that shaped sensory experience and understanding. Hallett examines the relationships between somatic and religious enclosure, and the role of the senses in devotional discipline and practice, considering the ways in which the women adapted to the austerities of convent life after childhoods in domestic households. She considers the enduring effects of habitus, in Bourdieu's terms the residue of socialised subjectivity which was (or was not) transferred to a contemplative career. To this discussion, she injects literary and cultural comparisons, considering inter alia how writers of fiction, and of domestic and devotional conduct books, represent the senses, and how the nuns' own reading shaped their personal knowledge. The Senses in Religious Communities, 1600-1800 opens fresh comparative perspectives on the Catholic domestic household as well as the convent, and on relationships between English and European philosophy, rhetorical, medical and devotional discourse.

Mapping Space, Sense, and Movement in Florence explores the potential of digital mapping or Historical GIS as a research and teaching tool to enable researchers and students to uncover the spatial, kinetic and sensory dimensions of the early modern city. The exploration focuses on new digital research and mapping projects that engage the rich social, cultural, and artistic life of Florence in particular. One is a new GIS tool known as DECIMA, (Digitally-Encoded Census Information and Mapping Archive), and the other is a smartphone app called Hidden Florence. The international collaborators who have helped build these and other projects address three questions: how such projects can be created when there are typically fewer sources than for modern cities; how they facilitate more collaborative models for historical research into social relations, senses, and emotions; and how they help us interrogate older historical interpretations and create new models of analysis and communication. Four authors examine technical issues around the software programs and manuscripts. Five then describe how GIS can be used to advance and develop existing research projects. Finally, four authors look to the future and consider how digital mapping transforms the communication of research results, and makes it possible to envision new directions in research. This exciting new volume is illustrated throughout with maps, screenshots and diagrams to show the projects at work. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of early modern Italy, the Renaissance and digital humanities.

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

Offers a new, interdisciplinary account of early modern drama through the lens of playing and playgoing.

Sensation is the subject of a burgeoning field in the humanities. This volume examines its role in the religious changes and transformations of early modern Europe. Sensation was not only central to the doctrinal disputes of the Reformation, but also critical in shaping new or reformed devotional practices. From this vantage point the book explores the intersections between the world of religion and the spheres of art, music, and literature; food and smell; sacred things and spaces; ritual and community; science and medicine. Deployed in varying, often contested ways, the senses were essential pathways to the sacred. They permitted knowledge of the divine and the universe, triggered affective responses, shaped holy environments, and served to heal, guide, or discipline body and soul. Contributors include Alfred Acres, Barbara Baert, Andrew R. Casper, Wietse de Boer, Sven Dupré, Iain Fenlon, Laura Giannetti, Christine Göttler, Jennifer R. Hammerschmidt, Joseph Imorde, Rachel King, Jennifer Rae McDermott, Walter S. Melion, Matthew Milner, Sarah Joan Moran, Yvonne Petry, and Klaus Pietschmann.

Embodiment, Expertise, and Ethics in Early Modern Europe highlights the agency and intentionality of individuals and groups in the making of sensory knowledge from approximately 1500 to 1700. Focused case studies show how artisans, poets, writers, and theologians responded creatively to their environments, filtering the cultural resources at their disposal through the lenses of their own more immediate experiences and concerns. The result was not a single, unified sensory culture, but rather an entangling of micro-cultural dynamics playing out across an archipelago of contexts that dotted the early modern European world—one that saw profound transitions in ways people used sensory knowledge to claim ethical, intellectual, and practical authority.