Includes bibliographical references and index.

Print version record.

Introduction: The sacred and the senses in an age of reform / Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler -- Insinuating the cross: sight, suggestion, and self in Renaissance painting / Alfred Acres -- Display and devotion: exhibiting icons and their copies in counter-reformation Italy / Andrew R. Casper -- 'In sensus cadentem imaginem': varieties of the spiritual image in Theodoor Galle's Life of Blessed Father Ignatius of Loyola of 1610 / Walter S. Melion -- 'An odour. A taste. A touch. Impossible to describe': Nole me tangere and the senses / Barbara Baert -- 'The beads with which we pray are made from it': devotional ambers in early modern Italy / Rachel King -- 'The melodie of Heaven': sermonizing the open ear in early modern England / Jennifer Rae McDermott -- Beyond vision: the impact of Rogier van der Weyden's Descent from the cross / Jennifer R. Hammerschmidt -- 'A cui ne fece dono': art, exchange, and sensory engagement in Anthony van Dyck's Lamentation for the Antwerp Beguines / Sarah Joan Moran -- Tasting God: the sweetness of crying in the counter-Reformation / Joseph Imorde -- The sense of hearing politicized: liturgical polyphony and political ambition in fifteenth-century Florence / Klaus Pietschmann -- Of eels and pears: a sixteenth-century debate on taste, temperance, and the pleasures of the senses / Laura Giannetti -- To captivate the senses: sensory governance, heresy, and idolatry in mid-Tudor England / Matthew Milner -- Piazza San Marco: theatre of the senses, market place of the world / Iain Fenlon -- A Neapolitan Heaven: the sensory universe of G.B. Giustiniani / Wietse de Boer -- The temptation of the senses at the Sacro Monte di Varallo / Christine Göttler -- Vision, medicine, and magic: betwitchment and lovesickness in Jacques Grevin's Deux livres des venins (1568) / Yvonne Petry -- The return of the species: Jesuit responses to Kepler's new theory of images / Sven Dupré.

Sensation is the subject of a burgeoning field in the humanities. This volume examines its role in the religious changes and transformations of early modern Europe. Sensation was not only central to the doctrinal disputes of the Reformation, but also critical in shaping new or reformed devotional practices. From this vantage point the book explores the intersections between the world of religion and the spheres of art, music, and literature; food and smell; sacred things and spaces; ritual and community; science and medicine. Deployed in varying, often contested ways, the senses were essential pathways to the sacred. They permitted knowledge of the divine and the universe, triggered affective responses, shaped holy environments, and served to heal, guide, or discipline body and soul. Contributors include Alfred Acres, Barbara Baert, Andrew R. Casper, Wietse de Boer, Sven Dupre¿¿, Iain Fenlon, Laura Giannetti, Christine Go¿ttler, Jennifer R. Hammerschmidt, Joseph Imorde, Rachel King, Jennifer Rae McDermott, Walter S. Melion, Matthew Milner, Sarah Joan Moran, Yvonne Petry, and Klaus Pietschmann.