| Abstrakt: |
The Fyve Wyttes, a unique Middle English manual of moral sensology, begins with a promise to instruct readers in the spiritual advantages of governing their bodily senses. While the manual is organized around the metaphor of the senses as windows to the soul, a metaphor popular in the medieval moral tradition, the applicability of this analogy for its "active" readership is limited. As scholarship on the medieval sensorium has shown, the senses-as-windows model is a notably closed, ascetic system calibrated to restrict the intake of sensory distractions. Supplementing this system, the manual draws upon the discourses of marketplace commerce and household management to develop an "open" model of sensory investment, a model attuned to the sensory regimes and labor practices of its claimed audience. Critical to the success of this program is an expanded view of beholding, a dynamic sense-method for looking after oneself and others. The Fyve Wyttes advances a less ascetic, but no less rigorous disciplining of the sensuous body that sought not only to regulate forms of labor, but also to prescribe a religious work ethic and circumscribe its sensory community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
