Sensing and feeling

The last two decades have been characterized by a rapid increase in the number of publications considering aspects of the history of emotions and sensory history in the medieval and early modern period. ¹ What these approaches have in common is an interest in the history of the body. The senses are traditionally considered to be stimuli demarcating the border between the body and the broader world which provide a stream of information to the brain, which processes the information and generates emotional responses. In spite of this symbiotic relationship, which invites a consideration of how the body and the broader world interact, these two approaches emerged from different intellectual genealogies and have largely developed along separate academic trajectories. The history of emotions is regarded as a new field, positioned within the coordinates of history, psychology and neuroscience, and consequently its definition has been much discussed. Sensory history, ² on the other hand, is closely tied to anthropology, and as Mark Smith has described it, is better understood as a ‘habit of thinking about the past’. ³ The aim of this chapter is to question the separation of these approaches and to explore areas where they intersect in research into the medieval and early modern past.