Representations of Heaven and Hell were of paramount importance in Byzantine monumental art to help the faithful visualise the eternal consequences of their actions. This chapter will explore the synergy between liturgy and the representations of Heaven and Hell within the space of the Byzantine church. Together they alerted all the senses and created a lasting impact on the faithful congregation, an ‘image’ which they could carry with them outside the spatial confinements of the church to enhance their chances in their quest of Paradise. To achieve this, the chapter will engage four case studies dated to the late Byzantine period: the Chora monastery in Constantinople (terminus ante quem 1321), a monument that epitomises Palaiologan art, and three examples from Venetian Crete, a former Byzantine territory that remained religiously and culturally closely attached to the dying empire until 1453. These examples present distinctly different moments in reaching Paradise: Church of St John the Baptist, Deliana (c. 1300?), where the gates of Paradise are depicted hermetically closed; Chora Monastery and Church of the Holy Apostles, Kavousi (first decade of the fifteenth century), where St Peter is about to open the gates of Paradise; and Church of St John the Baptist, Axos (1390s), where the gates of Paradise are open.

Part III treats systematic challenges to natural perfectionism, and opens with the so-called fact/value dichotomy. This challenge can be parsed in four main ways. First, the metaphysical challenge, which has historical roots in Hobbes and Hume. This holds that the ‘natural’ cannot accommodate the normative: a claim I argue is question-begging, depriving norms, furthermore, of any proper grounds. Second, the inferential challenge, which maintains that one cannot move validly from ‘is’-type propositions to ‘ought’-type ones. This Humean challenge fails, I argue, since natural perfectionism rests its claims on natural facts that are already inextricably inflected with value. Third, G. E. Moore’s semantic challenge. Moore claims that any naturalistic definition of ‘good’ both commits the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ and falls foul of the ‘open question argument’. I argue that the former is a pseudo-fallacy and that the latter conflates not seeming ‘closed’ with being ‘open’. Fourth, the conceptual challenge attacks ‘thick’ concepts, these being purportedly inextricable amalgams of ‘fact’ and ‘value’. I argue that thick concepts are defensible, for pragmatic, grounding and moral reasons.

I open by charting by the well-worn philosophical distinction between intellection and perception, and unpack the debate over whether (or to what degree) the latter is separable from the former. I conclude that the ‘cognitivist’ position is correct: that human perception is properly infused with conceptual content, this marking us out as the species we are (viz. rational animals). With all this in place, I ask whether there is a cognitive hierarchy among the senses. Aristotle and recent researchers like Viberg answer ‘yes’, vision being at the top, smell at the bottom of the hierarchy. But I argue that this depends on an undue privileging of cognitive extent and precision. I then investigate the imagination and the alleged threat it poses to cognitivism. I argue that the imagination – when functional, and not reducible to fantasy – is in fact a profound aid to cognition (since it enhances it and lends it more ‘colour’). I end by looking at aesthetic perfection, where the role of the imagination is of peculiar importance – though I express scepticism about the traditional hyper-valuation of aesthetic over everyday perceptual experience.

Prior to their rediscovery of Aristotle’s De anima, philosophers in the Latin West developed theories of concepts by mining Aristotle’s logical treatises (especially the Categories and On Interpretation), as well as Platonically influenced works by Augustine, Boethius, and Porphyry. This resulted in several distinctive theories about the ontology of concepts (intellectus), the processes of concept formation, and the relationship between concepts and language. These early developments, however, were eclipsed in the thirteenth century by study of the De anima and Arabic commentaries on it. The intense interest in cognition generated a massive vocabulary for the discussion of concepts (conceptus, species, intentio, similitudo etc.). Comparison of theories of concepts before and after the reception of Aristotle’s De anima demonstrates the extent to which these theories played a dominant albeit shifting role in multiple areas of philosophical and theological discourse, including logic and philosophy of language.

Chapter 6 makes it clear that definitions, categories and expertise have not ended interpretive issues. Definitions are disembodied. All forms of violence and suffering, their definition and recognition remain relational in reality, born out of a labyrinthine complexity – in terms of how they are constructed, communicated, filtered and understood. Preconceptions of who is deserving of recognition, the requisites for social identification, moral commitment or collective empathy reveal this to be the case. Social science takes suffering to be (inescapably) intersubjectively, textually and sensorially understood – so judicial determinations must also go beyond the technical and doctrinal. The chapter’s discussion on temporality continues the theme of sensing. It examines temporal registers in the recognition of torture – exploring the questions: how does time feature and function in juridical understandings of torture? This discussion on time adds to the kaleidoscopic catalogue of sense-centric registers and reasoning operating in the anti-torture field – illustrating it to be a device of inclusion and exclusion.

Cities are not a mere backdrop to historical events; rather, they stimulate a range of felt experiences, defined as the way we feel in and about places and the felt relationships we have to and within them. Cities provoke emotional responses, foster emotional attachments, shape emotional communities and the norms that govern them, and influence how and why decisions about the urban are made. This chapter examines the role of felt experiences in urban history scholarship and calls for more engagement with the emotional dimensions inherent in people–place relations. To achieve this, the chapter examines three foundational themes within urban history: experiencing, planning and remembering through the lens of the felt and the emotional.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the field of diplomatic history took a cultural turn – or rather, a series of turns. Inspired by a host of factors internal and external to the discipline as a whole, a number of foreign relations historians came to feel that there were forces other than strategy, economics, politics, or national interest narrowly defined, at play in the shaping of American policy. The symbolic anthropologist Clifford Geertz had already had enormous influence on social and cultural history, emphasizing what he called -borrowing from Max Weber – the “webs of significance” that shaped the everyday experience of human beings. Borrowing from Geertz, and from scholars of cultural and subaltern studies, historians explored the impact on US relations with others of ritual, gesture, body language, identity (e.g., race, gender, and religion), language, emotion, and the senses. The cultural turn, significantly, led to a greater interest in imperialism and colonialism, and, with that, to greater appreciation for the participation of all sides in international encounters. The study of culture invites self-reflection, allowing historians who deploy it to think hard about the assumptions, stereotypes, prejudices, and emotions that they bring to their work.

Chapter 5 explores the stakes of touching, tasting, smelling, and hearing books. Writers connected bookish words with sensory language to conceptualize the process of mediation.

Chapter 4 focuses on the sensuous quintet integral to Guru Nanak’s metaphysical thought and praxis. Materially made up of transcendent fibers, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and seeing have the cognitive capacity to take audiences off to limitless territories, or inversely, get them tangled up in messy affairs. They belong to everybody irrespective of race, gender, sexuality, class, politics, or religion, and though they are different modalities, they are a part of the same unitary living body and work together intersensorially and synaesthetically. For Guru Nanak there is no stereotypical hierarchy between “lower” and “higher” senses; the five are equally saturated with ontological, ethical, psychological, and soteriological import and flourish in concert. However, in order to understand their critical role and function, the somatic agents are analyzed separately. Hopefully the positive, progressive Nanakian outlook can cure some of the chronic somatophobic abnormalities prevailing across cultures.

Through close analyses of a wide range of Minoan animalian things, we have explored the specificity of their involvements in the experiences of people, and how those engagements contributed to the unique character of sociocultural life in the Aegean, on various levels. Here we draw out key points from across the foregoing analyses. Special attention has come to the objects’ inter-corporeal relationships with living humans and the connections that would have been realized through the objects’ particular qualities—connections with other animals, things, and spaces. Such relations were afforded through different dynamics, including bodily juxtaposition, cultivation of formal assonance, the sharing of specific features (e.g., a forward gaze), and embodiment with the same substances, as well as through similarities in size, composition (e.g., in friezes), and contextualization. Moreover, by working beyond an implicit focus on the design of the objects, to instead emphasize people’s actual experiences with them, we have opened the space for appreciating how both intended and unintended associations involving these complex things were in play together. We should view these not as alternative lenses on the objects, but as forces working concurrently, and upon one another, in the creative realizations that the animalian objects were.

The sociocultural spaces of the “Minoan” Aegean were teeming with animal bodies. Many of these animals were alive, but many were not—and never had been; the latter are our focus here. Realized across a range of media, such as zoomorphic vessels, frescoes, and seal stones, animals’ bodies took on a rich diversity of material and spatial qualities that could afford distinctive interactive experiences that the notion of “representations” fails to capture. By recognizing both biological and fabricated entities as real embodiments of animals, which could coexist and interact in Aegean spaces, the nature of our discussion changes. We see that the dynamics of representation were caught up in a much wider field of relationships involving these crafted bodies, which characterized their engagements with people. Doing so moves us beyond questions of signification and intentional design, and toward a fuller recognition of people’s actual experiences of animalian bodies. Looking closely at a variety of venues, ranging from palatial courts to a modest house bench, our focus thus can turn to how the world of animalian things was a crucial part of social life in Aegean spaces, and how direct interactions with these other animal bodies were central, yet often overlooked and minimized, components of human relations with nonhuman beasts.

What role do settings play in positive solitude? What value do quiet and stillness have? In this chapter, we talk about sensory overload in the modern world and about honoring our senses in solitude. Beyond anecdotal appreciation of the value of quietude is now a growing body of scientific evidence of its importance. Here we talk about quiet as a phenomenon that has been well-studied in recent decades. Those findings on the "science of quiet," in some cases, echo centuries of lived experiences in certain parts of the world and, most recently, the mounting benefits of quiet have gone mainstream.

How do we experience ritual? What role does this experience play in the perception and codification memory? This chapter begins by considering the relationship between senses, cognition, and memory in ritual experiences, in particular, the complex interplay between ritual performance, emotions, and material objects, together with the limitations of script-based approaches to surviving accounts. Situating the volume within current debates on religious ritual in the ancient world from the perspectives of cognitive science of religion and sensory studies, this chapter explores how variability in ritual experiences can be assessed through cognitive approaches to rituals as lived experiences. Having outlined why this volume is timely, necessary, and how it contributes to challenging established views and furthering debate surrounding ritual experiences in the Roman world, the introduction also addresses the challenges of cognitive assessments and how these challenges are met across the volume, through a variety of different contexts and approaches. Lastly, the introduction briefly presents each of the five case studies, drawing on common themes and issues explored in each case study, and considering the global relevance and transdisciplinary applications of scholarship in this volume.

In the last decade, the field of sensory history has made great strides in advancing understandings of the historical and cultural articulations of human ways of knowing. While this body of scholarship has been helpful in broadening our understanding of complex histories infused by the human senses, it nonetheless treats the continents with an uneven hand, largely ignoring the non-Western world. A preliminary ‘history through photographs’, this chapter mobilizes historical sources only recently located and digitally preserved in Mizoram to explore how upland encounters with Christianity were also encounters of the senses. The chapter is organized into six related sections of human knowing: hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, touching, and the upland harhna (or ‘awakening’). By including a sixth ‘sense’ - the non-biological but still sensory-charged world of the historical upland harhna - we can attempt to approach the earliest Christians on their own terms, remaining attentive both to the diversity of sense broadly defined and to the potential hamfistedness of traditional Western models applied without due reflexivity to sensory cultures in other world regions. Paying special attention to the human senses in zo ram reveals a thicker and more highland-specific understanding of how Christianity in the Lushai Hills became a specifically and overwhelmingly Lushai Hills Christianity.