Gabriel Byng
Making Experience: Discourse, Materiality and the Senses in the later Middle Ages
This talk will reflect on the central theme of the 'Urban Sensorium' collaboration between the universities of Vienna and Chicago. Beginning with a historiographical survey, it will trace the evolution of the histories of the senses, the body, the emotions and material culture through the aftermath of the cultural turn, noting a shared belief in the unsymbolisable and a new interest in embodied forms of cognition. Many important methodological and theoretical questions from the 1980s and earlier remain, however, and this paper will cite the challenges still raised by the work of Joan Scott, Michel Foucault and others.
In trying to respond to these writers, the second half of this talk will take a case study in the representation of experience from the work of the fourteenth-century Dominican Henry Suso. Compiled towards the end of his life, in the 1360s, Suso's 'Life' is highly alert to both the material surroundings and the sensory experience of its central character, 'the Servant'. Highlighting its literary character and its exemplary purpose, this paper will discuss how the text precedes experience, producing and shaping subject, object and their interaction.