ABSTRACT
The evocative title of Michael O’Connell’s The Idolatrous Eye (2000) epitomizes the centrality of vision to most discussions of early modern idolatry.1 According to the logic of such discussions, vision is the most dangerous of the senses, because it is the most apt to be fooled into mistaking a non-deity for the true God.2 Despite their having received the most attention, however, eyes are not the only sense organs susceptible to idolatry’s allure. Richard Brathwaite in his 1620 Essaies Upon the Five Senses articulates the theory that each sense harbors the potential for spiritual harm: “[T]he five Sences (as that devout Barnard observeth) be those five gates, by which the world doth besiege us, the Devill doth tempt us, and the flesh ensnare us.”3 Brathwaite recasts the body’s various means of gathering sensory information as just so many chinks in the Christian’s spiritual armor, reminding us that, in the early modern mind, temptation could exert its power well beyond the visual field.
