Full metadata
Title
The moral sense of touch: teaching tactile values in late medieval England
Description
“The Moral Sense of Touch: Teaching Tactile Values in Late Medieval England” investigates the intersections of popular science and religious education in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the project draws together a range of textual artifacts, from scientific manuals to private prayerbooks, to reconstruct the vast network of touch supporting the late medieval moral syllabus. I argue that new scientific understandings of the five senses, and specifically the sense of touch, had a great impact on the processes, procedures, and parlances of vernacular religious instruction in late medieval England. The study is organized around a set of object lessons that realize the materiality of devotional reading practices. Over the course of investigation, I explore how the tactile values reinforcing medieval conceptions of pleasure and pain were cultivated to educate and, in effect, socialize popular reading audiences. Writing techniques and technologies—literary forms, manuscript designs, illustration programs—shaped the reception and user-experience of devotional texts. Focusing on the cultural life of the sense of touch, “The Moral Sense of Touch” provides a new context for a sense based study of historical literatures, one that recovers the centrality of touch in cognitive, aesthetic, and moral discourses.
Date Created
2016
Contributors
- Russell, Arthur J. (Author)
- Newhauser, Richard G (Thesis advisor)
- Sturges, Robert (Committee member)
- Malo, Robyn (Committee member)
- Arizona State University (Publisher)
Topical Subject
- English Literature
- Literature, Medieval
- Religious history
- Doubting Thomas
- Feeling
- Five Senses
- Mary Magdalene
- Moral Tradition
- Touch
- Christian literature, English (Middle)
- Devotional literature, English (Middle)
- Touch in literature
- Scientific literature--England--History--To 1500.
- Scientific literature
Resource Type
Extent
iv, 206 pages
Language
Copyright Statement
In Copyright
Primary Member of
Peer-reviewed
No
Open Access
No
Handle
https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.40709
Statement of Responsibility
by Arthur J. Russell
Description Source
Viewed on December 21, 2016
Level of coding
full
Note
Partial requirement for: Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2016
Note type
thesis
Includes bibliographical references (pages 184-206)
Note type
bibliography
Field of study: English
System Created
- 2016-12-01 07:01:04
System Modified
- 2021-08-30 01:20:52
- 3 years ago
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