How much can we know about sensory experience in the Middle Ages? While few would question that the human senses encountered a profoundly different environment in the medieval world, two distinct and opposite interpretations of that encounter have emerged--one of high sensual intensity and one of extreme sensual starvation.

Presenting original, cutting-edge scholarship, Stephen G. Nichols, Andreas Kablitz, Alison Calhoun, and their team of distinguished colleagues transport us to the center of this lively debate. Organized within historical, thematic, and contextual frameworks, these...

From the dawn of ancient civilization to modern times, the Mediterranean sea looms in the imagination of the people living on its shores as a space of myth and adventure, of conquest and confrontation, of migration and settlement, of religious ferment and conflict. Since its waters linked the earliest empires and centers of civilization, the Mediterranean generated globalization and multiculturalism. It gave birth to the three great monotheisms--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--religions of the book, of the land and of the sea. Over the centuries, the Mediterranean witnessed the rise and...

From the dawn of ancient civilization to modern times, the Mediterranean sea looms in the imagination of the people living on its shores as a space of myth and adventure, of conquest and confrontation, of migration and settlement, of religious ferment and conflict. Since its waters linked the earliest empires and centers of civilization, the Mediterranean generated globalization and multiculturalism. It gave birth to the three great monotheisms--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--religions of the book, of the land and of the sea. Over the centuries, the Mediterranean witnessed the rise and...