Summary: This volume traces transformations in attitudes toward, ideas about, and experiences of religion and the senses in the medieval and early modern period. Broad in temporal and geographical scope, it challenges traditional notions of periodisation, highlighting continuities as well as change. Rather than focusing on individual senses, the volume’s organisation emphasises the multisensoriality and embodied nature of religious practices and experiences, refusing easy distinctions between asceticism and excess. The senses were not passive, but rather active and reactive, responding to and initiating change. As the contributions in this collection demonstrate, in the pre-modern era, sensing the sacred was a complex, vexed, and constantly evolving process, shaped by individuals, environment, and religious change. The volumewill be essential reading not only for scholars of religion and the senses, but for anyone interested in histories of medieval and early modern bodies, material culture, affects, and affect theory.

Contents: 1. Problems of Sensory History and the Medieval Laity, John H. Arnold. 2. Virtus regens animam - William Peraldus on Guiding the Pleasures of the Senses, Richard Newhauser. 3. What Makes Things Holy? The Senses and Material Culture in the Later Middle Ages, C. M. Woolgar. 4. Double Conversion - The Sensory Autobiography of Sir Kenelm Digby, Joe Moshenska. 5. The Senses and the Seventeenth-Century English Conversion Narrative, Abigail Shinn. 6. Hearing Exile and Homecoming in the Dutch Stranger Church, Erin Lambert. 7. A Sense of Place - Hearing English Catholicism in the Spanish Habsburg Territories, 1568-1659, Emilie K. M. Murphy. 8. Sensing Sacred Missives - Birch Bark Letters from Seventeenth-Century Missions in New France, Robin Macdonald. 9. "O She's Warm" - Evidence, Assent and the Sensory Numinous in Shakespeare and His World, Subha Mukherji. 10. Robert Southwell's Intimate Exegesis, Bronwyn V. Wallace. 11. God's Nostrils - The Divine Senses in Early Modern England, Elizabeth L. Swann.

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