Ryan D. Giles (editor) - Beyond Sight: Engaging the Senses in Iberian Literatures and Cultures, 1200-1750

RYAN D. GILES AND STEVEN WAGSCHAL

One visitor to Iberia who left a particularly vivid account of his travels was the Enlightenment thinker and future president of the United States John Adams. On his 1779 voyage to France to carry out a diplomatic mission, Adams found himself stranded on the Galician coast after his frigate, the Sensible, took on water and had to be docked to await lengthy repairs. Adams elected to make the journey by land, across northern Spain, so that much of his journey followed the old Camino route to Santiago albeit in reverse.

Adamss narrative not only records visual impressions, but strikingly describes the sounds, smells, tastes, and feel of eighteenth-century Iberia. His descriptions convey varying attitudes of curiosity, fascination, disapproval, and disgust. For instance, he hears the Spanish language as harmony to the ear, in contrast to our language [which is] insipid and disgusting to them [] less sonorous, and infested with very dissagreable sibillations (12.20). appreciate the feel of the warming sun on the coast, where Adams finds children with necked legs and feet standing on stones in the mud, followed by the sensation of the freezing highlands and the scourge of fleas, lice, and bedbugs (12.14). His written account of Iberia is, in a word, saturated with non-visual, sensory images. It is this often underappreciated range of imagery that concerns us in this volume. Its essays deal with the auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile experiences of Iberian writers and thinkers and span from the heyday of the medieval Camino to Santiago to the century in which Adams made his accidental journey.

In spite of the sensory turn that has characterized studies in the humanities and social sciences over the past decade, very little scholarly attention has been directed to literary and cultural representations of non-visual sensory experiences and much less to the Iberian Peninsula and in its colonies. Here we want to consider how medieval and early modern texts produced, activated, and continued to indulge the other senses (hearing, smell, taste, and touch) from a multitude of perspectives, including literary and cultural history, philosophical aesthetics, and contemporary approaches to cognition. Our aim is to delve into the uses and meanings of these sensations in relation to material culture, employing other approaches that have developed over the past decade, including affective and cognitive studies and theories of embodiment in literature and culture. The essays show how the four non-visual senses, though underappreciated in most previous scholarship, are central to understanding Iberian authors and thinkers during the pre- and early modern periods. Furthermore, the collection has been envisioned as engaging with the growing field of Iberian Studies, conceived of as a dynamic interrelationship among cultures and languages, which are better understood in their plurality rather than in isolation.

Emphasizing non-visual sensual representations, while still considering the power of sight, bridges various areas of interdisciplinary research. The essays engage a portion of the vast historical array of philosophical, medical, artistic, and cognitive conceptualizations of the senses. Both Plato and Aristotle set the stage for thinking about a hierarchical relationship among the senses. For the former, sight was the noblest (Republic bk 6: 256); for Aristotle, above all others the sense of sight is loved (Metaphysics A.1:689), and it was long ago recognized that some animals were superior to humans in the use of certain senses (e.g., Aristotle noted, correctly, that dogs had superior olfaction).

Aristotle and later thinkers theorized correctly that most sensation occurred in the brain, to which the various sensory organs transmitted information. However, there was considerable debate as to what role the nose had in this process, and it is the one sense that does not fit neatly in their hierarchies. For Aristotle olfactory sensation took place in the nose itself just as sight occurs in the eyes but for a majority of later thinkers from antiquity through most of the seventeenth century, including Galen and eventually the important Renaissance anatomist Vesalius, the nose was merely a conduit or hollow tube through which smells travelled to reach the brain where dedicated lobes (still known today as the mamillary bodies, since Avicenna had thought they looked like a womans breasts) sensed the smells (Palmer 62).