Considering a wide range of early modern texts, performances and artworks, the essays in this collection demonstrate how attention to the senses illuminates the literature, art and culture of early modern England. The volume responds to burgeoning interest in the senses from both literary scholars and cultural historians, arguing that early modern ideas about the senses resonate significantly through texts, performances and artworks of the period, even as these art forms themselves provide invaluable suggestions about the place of the senses in early modern culture. Examining canonical and less familiar literary works alongside early modern texts ranging from medical treatises to conduct manuals via puritan polemic and popular ballads, the collection offers a new view of the senses in early modern England.
This book offers dedicated essays on each of the five senses, relating works of art to particular cultural moments, as well as considering the senses collectively in various cultural contexts. It also pursues the sensory experiences that early modern subjects encountered through the act of engaging with texts, performances and artworks. Authors discussed at length include George Chapman, Sir John Davies, John Donne, Robert Herrick, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare and Mary Wroth; art forms including drama, poetry, prose, music, dance, pomanders and painting are all the subject of at least one chapter. This book will appeal to scholars of early modern literature and culture, to those working in sensory studies, and to anyone interested in the art and life of early modern England.

Simon Smith is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of English, University of Oxford, and Junior Research Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford
Jackie Watson has been an Associate Tutor at Birkbeck, University of London
Amy Kenny is a Lecturer at University of California, Riverside

Introduction - Simon Smith, Jackie Watson and Amy Kenny
Part I: Tracing a sense
1. Staging taste - Lucy Munro
2. 'Dove like looks' and 'serpents eyes': staging visual clues and early modern aspiration - Jackie Watson
3. 'Filthy groping and unclean handlings': an examination of touching moments in dance of court and courtship - Darren Royston
4. 'Thou art like a punie-Barber (new come to the trade) thou pick'st our eares too deepe': barbery, ear-wax and snip-snaps - Eleanor Decamp
5. Seeing smell - Holly Dugan
Part II: The senses in context
6. Robert Herrick and the five (or six) senses - Natalie K. Eschenbaum
7. 'Did we lie down because it was night?': the senses of night in the 1590s - Susan Wiseman
8. Love melancholy and the senses in Mary Wroth's work - Aurélie Griffin
Part III: Aesthetic sensory experiences
9. 'I see no instruments, nor hands that play': Antony and Cleopatra and visual musical experience - Simon Smith
10. 'Gazing in hir glasse of vaineglorie': negotiating vanity - Faye Tudor
11. 'Tickling the senses with sinful delight': the pleasure of reading comedies in early modern England - Hannah August
Afterword - Farah Karim-Cooper
Bibliography
Index