Offering a comprehensive analysis of newly-uncovered manuscripts from two English convents near Antwerp; this study gives unprecedented insight into the role of the senses in enclosed religious communities during the period 1600-1800. It draws on a range of previously unpublished writings-chronicles; confessions; letters; poetry; personal testimony of various kinds-to explore and challenge assumptions about sensory origins. Author Nicky Hallett undertakes an interdisciplinary investigation of a range of documents compiled by English nuns in exile in northern Europe. She analyzes vivid accounts they left of the spaces they inhabited and of their sensory architecture: the smells of corridors; of diseased and dying bodies; the sights and sounds of civic and community life; its textures and tastes; their understanding of it in the light of devotional discipline. This is material culture in the raw; providing access to a well-defined locale and the conditions that shaped sensory experience and understanding. Hallett examines the relationships between somatic and religious enclosure; and the role of the senses in devotional discipline and practice; considering the ways in which the women adapted to the austerities of convent life after childhoods in domestic households. She considers the enduring effects of habitus; in Bourdieus terms the residue of socialised subjectivity which was (or was not) transferred to a contemplative career. To this discussion; she injects literary and cultural comparisons; considering inter alia how writers of fiction; and of domestic and devotional conduct books; represent the senses; and how the nuns own reading shaped their personal knowledge. The Senses in Religious Communities; 1600-1800 opens fresh comparative perspectives on the Catholic domestic household as well as the convent; and on relationships between English and European philosophy; rhetorical; medical and devotional discourse.
2016-02-29 2016-02-29File Name: B01CG0W1BW
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