The Senses and the English Reformation (review)

The common understanding of late-medieval Christianity in relation to its reformed counterpart is that the former was highly sensual, grounded in a rich visual culture of images, vestments, processions, and sacramentals and depending on practices such as seeing the elevation of the host and the visual veneration of relics. Its Reformation successor would be dominantly aural, based on the hearing of vernacular scripture and preaching; its banishment of the visual made it an internalized and intellectual experience. Such an understanding is, of course, far too simple and moreover accepts uncritically the Reformation self-understanding and its critique of late-medieval religion. The Senses and the English Reformation undertakes to examine attitudes toward the senses, not simply visuality and aurality but smell, taste, and touch as well, from the fifteenth through the end of the sixteenth centuries to determine whether changes in understanding underlay the moving of those tectonic plates that convulsed European religion.

With extraordinary learning, Matthew Milner examines philosophical views of the senses from the high Middle Ages through the sixteenth century. Following from the Aristotelianism of Aquinas, sight was indeed accorded the primacy among the senses. But aurality came a close second, mainly for its ability to perceive interiors. Perhaps surprisingly, smell came next in the hierarchy of the senses, followed by taste, and—considered the basest—touch. The real issue emerged in the role the senses played in human cognition, whether they could be trusted, and if so, to what degree. How did religious objects and actions affect the devout and to what degree were religious elements what they appeared to be? Although it counseled caution in regard to the senses, pre-Reformation piety fully exploited an affective sensation in its liturgical practice.

The underlying question is the degree to which attitudes toward the senses changed between pre-Reformation and post-Reformation English experience and how such change might explain the upheaval in religious expression and understanding. This is what Milner sets out to examine in his study. What he finds, however, is a general consistency in the attitudes toward the senses over this 200-year period, the reformers still governed by traditional assumptions about sensory propriety and theory. The fundamentals of medieval sensory culture appear not to have changed appreciably over the course of the sixteenth century. Fear of idolatry, he notes, is dependent on the same understanding of the senses on which medieval sacramentality was based. In fact, the most ardent nonconformists with Elizabethan religion “appear as the truest inheritors of medieval religious sensing” (p. 290) because of their retention of an intrinsic intentionality in their understanding of religious objects.

What, then, did change in the ways the senses were deployed between the late-medieval and early-modern periods? Here, the explanatory character of the book may disappoint. The major differences must lie with printing; it would be hard to overestimate the impact of the printing press on European eyes and ears in the period. Although Milner acknowledges the position of scripture as the focus of the senses, he has little to say about the ways its authority was enhanced immeasurably by the printing press. Readers will look in vain for reference to the major scholarship on printing—that of Elizabeth Eisenstein, for example.

But the true value of The Senses and the English Reformation lies in its account of English worship and liturgy over the two centuries it treats. Milner richly demonstrates the position played by the senses in English worship from the late-medieval world through the various stages of the Reformation. “Sensation may be the root of all sin,” he notes, “but it was also the cornerstone of redemption”(p. 59) in its sacramental role. Although the overall story will be familiar to historians of the period, the wealth of detail and the attention to the ways in which the various senses informed the liturgical life will amply repay the reading. We learn...