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- All Subjects: Tristan
- Creators: Newhauser, Richard G
- Creators: Malo, Robyn
Description
“The Moral Sense of Touch: Teaching Tactile Values in Late Medieval England” investigates the intersections of popular science and religious education in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the project draws together a range of textual artifacts, from scientific manuals to private prayerbooks, to reconstruct the vast network of touch supporting the late medieval moral syllabus. I argue that new scientific understandings of the five senses, and specifically the sense of touch, had a great impact on the processes, procedures, and parlances of vernacular religious instruction in late medieval England. The study is organized around a set of object lessons that realize the materiality of devotional reading practices. Over the course of investigation, I explore how the tactile values reinforcing medieval conceptions of pleasure and pain were cultivated to educate and, in effect, socialize popular reading audiences. Writing techniques and technologies—literary forms, manuscript designs, illustration programs—shaped the reception and user-experience of devotional texts. Focusing on the cultural life of the sense of touch, “The Moral Sense of Touch” provides a new context for a sense based study of historical literatures, one that recovers the centrality of touch in cognitive, aesthetic, and moral discourses.
ContributorsRussell, Arthur J. (Author) / Newhauser, Richard G (Thesis advisor) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Malo, Robyn (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
This thesis investigates the description of sensation in the scenes immediately before, during, and following the death of Tristan in variations in the Tristan cycle from the 12th through the 15th centuries. Using a sensory studies approach, the project considers these scenes as they are translated and transmitted from Thomas de Bretagne’s Tristan to the Old Norse Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar and Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd and into Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, the last, great medieval treatment of the Tristan story. The scenes are understood in the context of the texts’ sensoria as defined by their cultural and historical contexts and the texts’ underpinning in philosophical and theological thought on the senses. The thesis project argues that the specific cultural preferences and usages of the senses can be made apparent through the comparison of Thomas’s Tristan, the Norse translations, and Malory’s text. Taken together, they show the importance of considering medieval translation when comparing the appearance of the senses in written artefacts from the Middle Ages. The sensory engagement with texts is deeply tied to the making of meaning and ethics in medieval literary works. The differences in how the senses are prioritized and framed suggest a larger variance within European Christian philosophical and theological thought on the senses and provide a potential framework for exploring this phenomenon in other medieval literary cycles.
ContributorsRebe, Tristan J (Author) / Newhauser, Richard G (Thesis advisor) / Bjork, Robert (Committee member) / Cruse, Markus (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021