Penser les cinq sens au Moyen Âge: poétique, esthétique éthique de Florence Bouchet et Anne-Hélène Klinger-Dollé (review)

This interdisciplinary collection contains sixteen essays on scholastic theology and philosophy, monastic mystical texts, medieval poetry, devotional music, and art. Arising from a two-day colloquium in 2013, it places emphasis more on providing a range of different perspectives on medieval texts than on offering a synthesizing overview of the five senses in the Middle Ages. Some chapters discuss human sensation more generally and some medieval treatments of the theme of the five senses, while others consider the discussion of individual senses in a given text, with pride of place given to the 'noble' senses of sight and hearing. Silvana Vecchio's first chapter on Thomas Aquinas's Aristotelian reconsideration of the value of sensory pleasure is a particular highlight, opening up questions about the relationship between the physical senses and their spiritual or symbolic dimensions that echo throughout the collection. Julie Casteigt presents Albert the Great's account of the epistemological value of the senses in the light of the frailty of the postlapsarian human intellect. Cécile Rochelois describes different animals' senses in some bestiary texts, using them as a point of comparison with Albert's discussion of the imperfection of animal senses. The tension between philosophy and theology in considering the knowledge brought by the senses is shared by Alexander Neckam's De naturis rerum, whose encyclopaedic project depends on Genesis's account of creation and is described in Franck Collin's chapter. Sylvain Leroy shows how the senses are used figuratively to refer to spiritual delights in the monastic De hominis moribus per similitudines, apocryphally ascribed to Anselm of Canterbury. The text's concern with the contemplative disavowal of the body is also the subject of Nathalie Nabert's treatment of Carthusian spirituality. The philosophy–theology section of the book closes with Anne-Hélène Klinger-Dollé's consideration of Charles Bovelles's sixteenth-century treatise De sensu, which puts textual figures and visual figures into relation with each other, thinking about psychology and hermeneutics together. Jean-Marie Fritz has a stimulating chapter surveying tropes of synaesthesia in French medieval poetry, followed by Valérie Fasseur's account of confused senses in the Occitan romance Flamenca. Cristina Noacco reflects usefully on the role of the five senses in Richard de Fournival's Bestiaire d'amour while Karin Ueltschi's article considers the sensory perception of dead souls in literary visions of the afterlife. Isabelle Fabre and Gilles Polizzi each have a chapter considering sense imagery in the courtly French lyrics of a fifteenth-century manuscript produced in Cyprus showing the importance of sense for its poetry. The spiritual importance of musical harmony in Hildegard of Bingen's mystical Ordo virtutum is the topic of Florence Bouchet's article, which, as with earlier articles, shows humans' imperfect sensation used as a path to spiritual fulfilment. Anne-Marie De Gendt considers the domesticated animal figures in the tapestry figuring the sense of touch in the Musée de Cluny's La Dame à la licorne series to see a symbolic message about self-control. Finally, Émilie Nadal analyses the representation of the senses in an illuminated manuscript of Guillaume Durand's Pontifical de Pierre de la Jugie. This collection contains useful contributions even if, as is sometimes the case with conference proceedings, the lack of dialogue between different essays means that it does not quite deliver on its promise of genuine interdisciplinarity.