The Senses and the English Reformation, by Matthew Milner

Medieval manuals required confessors to ask their charges about the sins they had committed through each of their senses: the operation of the senses was overwhelmingly a moral issue, and to live well was to control one’s senses. Texts such as these tell us about medieval notions of sensation in practice. At the same time, there was a considerable literature about the high culture of cognition—how philosophers and theologians believed perception to work. Medieval sensation was an open process, with the body giving out information as well as receiving it; with the senses ranked in different ways; and with sensory faculties that might now seem unfamiliar to us, such as speech, one of the ‘senses of the mouth’. These ideas are very different to our own, post-Enlightenment understanding of the operation of the senses. How and why long-term changes in perception came about are important questions and it has been argued that the Reformation was critical in this: at its core were doubt and perception. In a ‘protestant’ thesis, medieval religion has been portrayed as deeply sensual, with its images, vestments and relics. Reformers saw this sensuality leading to perdition and their protestant churches sought an austere and intellectual version of the faith, based on a keenly developed personal understanding of religion. The subject of Matthew Milner’s volume is therefore of especial relevance to the study of sensory perception, and an important addition to our understanding of the subject. His analysis of perception, liturgical and religious practices, and the place of intellectual doubt about sensation leads him to a fine critique of the historiography of the Reformation, and an argument for continuity and slow and complex change.

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