A historical study of sensory perception is inevitably limited. The physical world that was sensed is now long gone, only a few of its artifacts preserved. Furthermore, as C. M. Woolgar demonstrates in The Senses in Late Medieval England, the ways in which the senses are understood has changed over the centuries, so that the modern five basic senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch do not necessarily correlate precisely to what was experienced in late medieval England.
Woolgar begins with a substantial discussion of how the senses were conceptualized and perceived in late medieval England. This is a complex topic; not only was there a range of ideas in both popular and intellectual discourse, but French and English terms for the senses bore shifting meanings whose modern equivalents may mislead. “Taste,” for instance, could mean touch as well as taste in the modern sense. Speech was also conceived of as one of the “senses of the mouth.”
Chapters 3–8 deal with the individual senses: touch, sound, speech, taste, smell, and vision. This section of the book is packed with detailed examples drawn from a wide range of literary, legal, economic, and ecclesiastical sources. For these alone the book would be worth reading.
Touch, Woolgar suggests, was considered the least subtle of the senses and was particularly linked with virtue (or lack thereof). He draws the reader's attention to the division between left and right and the association of the left with vice and the right with virtue, symbolism that went back to the classical era and continued unabated through the medieval period. The association between touch and morality was not as simple as is often thought. Sensuality came under the heading of touch, but Woolgar points out that kissing, for instance, could be either virtuous or lecherous. Charms, amulets, the sacraments themselves—all depended on the sense of touch for their efficacy.
The discussion of sound incorporates medieval theories of how sound and hearing work, varieties of sounds, and what medieval people thought about their appropriateness, including, again, moral connotations. This chapter ends with several pages on music, which lead naturally into the next chapter, on speech, perhaps the most powerful of the medieval senses. Woolgar presents examples from sermons and other didactic works to show how important speech was considered to be for its ability to produce effects on the hearers. As with the other senses, speech in itself was morally neutral and could be used either for good, as with prayer, or for bad, as with heresy.
The other sense of the mouth, taste, was given more attention in the medieval era than today. Where modern convention typically recognizes four tastes (sweet, sour, bitter, and salty), medieval Europeans would have perceived eight or nine, and some of those might be subdivided. Medieval physicians considered taste to be linked to well-being, and thus saw eating not only as a potentially pleasurable experience but also as one that could affect both physical and moral health.
Smell, like taste, and like sound until very recently, is a sense that people have not been able to store or reproduce over time. Furthermore, Woolgar points out, the vocabulary of smell has always been borrowed almost entirely from that of the other senses. Yet smell, like the others, was seen as having the same inevitable moral and health implications. Examples here include the odor of sanctity and other religious aromas such as incense, the stinking smell of breaking wind, and the malodorous smells in general that were thought to spread disease.
The sense that has been preeminent in Western tradition is vision, which has also been the one most easily reproduced and transmitted down through the centuries. Nevertheless, even vision was not perceived in precisely the same terms in the medieval era as it is today, as Woolgar demonstrates by describing several distinct theories of color that were present in the Middle Ages. Although the vocabulary of medieval color may appear to correspond to modern terminology, the Anglo-Saxon color “read,” for example, included both yellows and reds. The difference stems from an emphasis in the Middle Ages on brightness and saturation rather than on hue, and thus medieval descriptions of color may mislead the modern reader. Colors and the associations of other qualities with particular shades were significant, and Woolgar argues that it is vital to be aware of their medieval meanings.
The second part of the book is divided into three chapters that look at evidence from episcopal households, households of the English queens, and aristocratic households in an attempt to connect the medieval ideas concerning the senses with specific ways in which they played out in daily life. Woolgar's previous work on great households is evident as he provides details of the sensory experiences that, he theorizes, would have been typical there. Descriptions of day-to-day life—the clothing, foodstuffs, and other material surroundings that create sensory experience—ae whole the text is well written and engaging. Notes and bibliography are both extensive. The index, although thorough, tends to group its subjects, with, for example, “food and drink” including subtopics as diverse as “acorns,” “gold-colored,” “moral impact of,” and “salt.”
The Senses in Late Medieval England, though it does not quite succeed in doing all that its author attempts, is nevertheless a comprehensive consideration of sensory categorizations and perceptions, with a vast array of examples that enable the reader to come as close as seems possible to grasping the textures of medieval life.
