Connecting the Renaissance Senses: Image – Space – Text – Music

This interdisciplinary panel or series of panels will consider the representation of sensory experience in the arts broadly defined. The early modern experiences of vision and touch have received significant attention in recent studies, while those of hearing, taste and/or smell, outside thematic treatments of the five senses or the formalized hierarchy of the senses, remain to be more fully described. Though our particular interest is in the sense of hearing and ideas about sound and sounding objects in the Renaissance, we invite papers that illuminate connections among the senses across the early modern media. Topics we might address, among others, include:

Synaesthesia
The senses as ways of knowing
Imaged or Textual representations of sound / soundscapes
How a sensory understanding of a geography informs its literary / artistic expression
The embodiment of sensual experience

Please send your abstract of no more than 400 words by April 25, 2007 to both
Marlene Eberhart (marlene.eberhart@mcgill.ca) and Carla Zecher
(zecherc@newberry.org)

If selected, we will request a 150-word abstract from you no later than May 15.