Knowing Bodies, Passionate Souls: Sense Perception in Byzantium ed. by Susan Ashbrook Harvey and Margaret Mullet (review)

Susan Ashbrook Harvey and Margaret Mullett here present a variety of articles that engage different phenomenological, anthropological, and historical methods of approaching the senses as they existed in Byzantium. They offer an evocative collection of essays that represent well the rich, careful scholarship of the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Studies series. The volume’s studies contribute unique perspectives that range from the aurally constructed space provided by Byzantine Christian chant (87) to the multisensory engagement found in the Islamic Gardens of Al-Andalus (124). In their introduction, the editors describe a distinct thread of continuity between diverse perspectives, methodologies, historical times, and geographical locations. The contributors consider “the full sensory palette, separately and synestheticly, as [they look] anew at the significance of the senses for human flourishing” (1). The volume is grounded in a united desire to understand how sensory experience affected and gave meaning to Byzantine life. It explores if and how the Byzantine sensorium can be reconstructed in a twenty-first-century academic context, and why a phenomenological engagement of sensory faculties may not only reveal aspects of particular historical and cultural contexts, but also imprint itself on the development of contemporary notions of embodied person-hood. Six sections each treat an individual sense and then move on to the sensorium in a systematic fashion.

Beginning with “Sight,” Glenn Peers and Martina Bagnoli introduce the way in which perception might impact our understanding of Byzantine life. Peers focuses on the witness of things, liberating what he calls “non-human persons” from the abstract space of a museum exhibition (14). He allows the reader to witness Byzantine culture and history through the lens of the things that were most intimately present to it; people may die but the witness of their lives remains in their things (15). In a similar way, Bagnoli develops a unique discourse on perception in her study of visual art in the medieval West. Because of the influence of Aristotle and Aquinas, sight was regarded by the Latin West as the primary sense in one’s reception of knowledge (33–35). Bagnoli maintains, however, that there was a holistic engagement of the body’s sensory capacities in the epistemic process (44). The involvement of the senses reached beyond the visual and into the metaphorical element of experience (47–48).

As one turns to the section “Hearing,” the consideration of space becomes central. From Amy Papalexandrou’s discussion of sonic environments in Byzantine social and religious life to Kim Haines-Eitzen’s discourse on silent geographies, this section offers a rich exploration of the way space was understood in relation to hearing for a Byzantine Christian audience (67, 111). The most saturated example of this theme is found in the essay written by Spyridon Antonopoulos. With liturgy as his starting point, Antonopoulos emphasizes the centrality of the Word (both of scripture and the person of Jesus Christ) in Byzantine Christian worship (87). The aurality of expression in the liturgy allowed for a growth of personalization in the development of the extravagant kalophonic chant, a phenomenon Antonopoulos describes as an aesthetics of expression that directly impacted the aural dimension of Byzantine ritual space (95). The liminality of the liturgical space, then, is dependent not only on the visual depiction of icons and other types of religious art, but also on the environment as it was shaped by music, bells, and architectural acoustics (108–9). The focus on liminality and space in this section, while it explicitly highlights the impact of hearing, points to an overarching theme of the whole volume, positioning the senses as a palpable entry point into the Byzantine world.

While the section on hearing, presented through a liturgical and monastic lens, focuses on the Byzantine Christian interest of making external the spiritual realities that existed internally both in the human soul and in God, the opening essay in the next section, “Smell,” presents an inversion...