This interdisciplinary volume traces continuities and transformations in attitudes toward, ideas about, and experiences of religion and the senses in the pre-modern era. Spanning a broad temporal and geographic range, it challenges traditional notions of periodisation, emphasising the senses' long-standing position as agents of both sanctity and sin.

Introduction Robin Macdonald, Emilie K. M. Murphy, and Elizabeth L. Swann I: Prescription and Practice 1. Problems of Sensory History and the Medieval Laity John H. Arnold 2. Virtus regens animam: William Peraldus on Guiding the Pleasures of the Senses Richard Newhauser 3. What Makes Things Holy? The Senses and Material Culture in the Later Middle Ages C. M. Woolgar II: Concord and Conversion 4. Double Conversion: The Sensory Autobiography of Sir Kenelm Digby Joe Moshenska 5. The Senses and the Seventeenth-Century English Conversion Narrative Abigail Shinn III: Exile and Encounter 6. Hearing Exile and Homecoming in the Dutch Stranger Church Erin Lambert 7. A Sense of Place: Hearing English Catholicism in the Spanish Habsburg Territories, 1568-1659 Emilie K. M. Murphy 8. Sensing Sacred Missives: Birch Bark Letters from Seventeenth-Century Missions in New France Robin Macdonald IV: Figuration and Feeling 9. "O She's Warm": Evidence, Assent and the Sensory Numinous in Shakespeare and His World Subha Mukherji 10. Robert Southwell's Intimate Exegesis Bronwyn V. Wallace 11. God's Nostrils: The Divine Senses in Early Modern England Elizabeth L. Swann Afterword: Making Sense of Religion Michael Schoenfeldt