This volume draws on emerging scholarship at the intersection of two already vibrant fields:
medieval material culture and medieval sensory experience. The rich potential of medieval
matter (most obviously manuscripts and visual imagery but also liturgical objects coins
textiles architecture graves etc.) to complement and even transcend purely textual sources
is by now well established in medieval scholarship across the disciplines. So too attention
to medieval sensory experiences-most prominently emotion-has transformed our understanding of
medieval religious life and spirituality violence power and authority friendship and
constructions of both the self and the other. Our purpose in this volume is to draw the two
approaches together plumbing medieval material sources for traces of sensory experience -
above all ephemeral and physical experiences that unlike emotion are rarely fully described
or articulated in texts.
