In the fourth volume in their series on daily life and material culture in pre-Conquest England, Sense and Feeling in Daily Living in the Early Medieval English World, Maren Clegg-Hyer and Gale R. Owen-Crocker consider how physical sense and emotional experience were conceived in early England, centered on the body's encounters with the world. The collection of essays offers diverse approaches to the ongoing development of the field of material culture studies and to the understanding of daily life in pre-Conquest England.

Each of the first five essays addresses one of the five senses before seven further essays take up feelings both physical and emotional. In “Sight and Vision in Early Medieval English Art,” Catherine Karkov explores how sight, considered the highest of the senses, was also understood to have the power to deceive, as demons can assume pleasant shapes and the world is full of visible temptations. But vision, properly guided, is also a key to discernment, and Karkov next considers texts that emphasize the importance of, for example, witnessing the crucifixion or actively envisioning objects of devotion. Jill Frederick considers the range of sounds available in the early English landscape in “‘Þær wæs hearpan sweg, swotol sang scopes’: Sounds of Pre-Conquest Community,” Frederick argues that the Old English elegies continually connect the pain of exile with the absence of comforting and friendly sound. Turning next to taste, in “Sweetness and Bitterness: The Sense of Taste in and around Anglo-Saxon England” Alban Gautier considers how deeply medieval metaphors of taste are linked to perception. Gautier wisely observes that that “sweetness” is a tricky category and does not necessarily entail a sugary taste, and after exploring the tastes that would have been available in early England, concludes that “sweet” may have been a taste more like suet than sugar. In “The Blossoms’ Sweet Stench: Smell in Early Medieval England,” Clegg-Hyer presents various significant smells in pre-Conquest English textual culture, focusing on the role of smell in types of discernment. While good smells are associated with heaven and bad with hell, the temptation of deceptively good smells becomes an occasion for medieval writers to warn against putting too much stock in physical sense. Finally, in “The Sense of Touch: The Haptic Communication of Emotions in Anglo-Saxon England from a Linguistic Perspective,” Javier E. Díaz-Vera considers how verbs of touch are used metaphorically to talk about emotion.

Following the essays on the five senses, Christopher Monk, in “Bedship and Sex-Play: Sex and Sensuality in Early Medieval England,” focuses both on archaeological traces and artistic depictions of beds and the implications for and connotations of sexuality that come with them. Monk further considers the curious evaluations of sexual sins in different versions of the penitential literature. In “Above the Head of a Serpent: Women and Anger in Pre-Conquest England,” Hilary E. Fox argues that, contrary to scholarly notions of the pre-Conquest English woman as “peace-weaver” (a role extrapolated almost entirely from the poem Beowulf alone) there are plentiful examples of angry women both in early English literature and the literature it might have inherited from the Latin tradition. But the absence of a tradition of antifeminist literature suggests that the presence of these angry women was neither unthinkable nor a common trope. Brian O'Camb uses the tropes of modern horror films to consider the sound effects of Old English poetry in “Terrifying Sounds in Beowulf: A Model for Theorizing Fear, Horror and Related Emotions in Pre-Conquest England.” With these aural effects in mind, the blowing of the horn that prompts the Geats and Danes to suddenly sit outside of Grendel's mother's mere takes on new valences of terror. Kristen Mills, in “‘Murnan on Mode’: Grief in Early Medieval England,” challenges the scholarly commonplace that mourning was a feminine behavior in Old English poetry. While, as Mills shows, there are famous prohibitions against male mourning in poetry, pre-Conquest hagiography commonly depicts men's mourning, including the conventional gestures of mourning including weeping, sitting, singing, and lamenting. Monk returns in “Sensing Joy in Early Medieval England: Reconstructing Acts of Rejoicing in the Harley Psalter” to show how the English Harley Psalter uses color and additional flourish in its illustrations compared to its Carolingian exemplar, suggesting how details of its feasting and dancing scenes—inspired by, rather than depicting the actions described in the psalms—help us envision what the experience of joy might have looked like. Owen-Crocker's “Smelly Sheep, Shimmering Silk: The Sensual and Emotional Experience of Textiles” is a survey of the types of fibers and fabrics available in early medieval England, the arduous physical labor of creating them, and the feelings good and bad associated with wearing them. Although there was criticism of delight in fine garments in early medieval English discourse, evidence suggests some in the church clearly delighted in them all the same. Sense and Feeling ends, much as life does, with the experience of old age, in Thijs Porck's “Gerontophobia in Early Medieval England: Anglo-Saxon Reflections on Old Age.” While previous scholarship has suggested that early medieval England revered old age, Porck offers a rundown of the many warnings, complaints, afflictions, and indeed associations with the pains of hell that in fact characterize old age in pre-Conquest literature.

These essays brim with exempla and exciting angles on many topics. That variety sometimes leaves treatments tantalizingly brief, but with many different disciplines and methods in play, readers will benefit from the varying distinctions between senses and feelings and the disciplinary norms for studying the topics represented here. Although an endnote to the introduction mentions “recent appropriations” of the term “Anglo-Saxon,” scholarship on the racial meaning of the term goes back nearly a century; further discussion and citation would be useful here as well. This being said, the variety in the contributors’ methods, approaches, and objects of study is Sense and Feeling's greatest strength.

The array of fascinating work in Sense and Feeling will surely ignite further study of the senses and experiences investigated, perhaps even in future volumes of this groundbreaking series.