2nd ARDIT International Congress

Senses and sensuality in the Middle Ages

Barcelona, 22-24 May 2015

Program

The rose’s red hue, its intoxicating scent and its thorns show us the many faces of this flower’s truth. Senses are the ways through which humans interact with the world and develop their life learning. For its connection to pleasure and joy, senses have been dually interpreted as sources of sin and immorality yet also as paths of knowledge, since through them we can reach a universe of perceptions which encourage experimentation -and thus, relation- with our surroundings and with our inner self. Julian of Norwich, an English theologian and mystic, expressed with simplicity in the words cited above how she had knowledge of the divine: three types of visions connected to different senses.

In this new researchers’ encounter we seek to open the door to the multiples insights and reflections about senses and sensuality in the Middle Ages, offering a wide range of aspects linked to the multiple narratives which this issue inspires: the ways of knowledge, sensory and spiritual pleasure, or artistic and literary forms which have captured the sensorial universe in the Middle Ages. With a distinctly interdisciplinary intention, the congress aims to give voice to innovative researches on multiple and corresponding fields, such as History, Philosophy, History of Art or Philology, among others. Our main objective with this call is to help build new spaces of creation and of transmission of knowledge, thus confronting the specialization and compartmentalization of expertises usually attributed to the academic world. The accepted papers will define the final sections in which the congress will be divided.

The results of the 2nd ARDIT International Congress were published by Cambridge Scholar Publishing in 2018 under the title:

Sensual and Sensory Experiences in the Middle Ages: On Pleasure, Fear, Desire and Pain

Editors

Carme Muntaner Alsina

David Carrillo-Rangel

Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel

Pau Castell Granados

Contributors

Pablo Acosta-García

Pau Castell Granados

Ivo Elies Oliveras

Lydia Hayes

Albert Lizandra

Carme Muntaner Alsina

Sergi Sancho Fibla

Maria Soler Sala

Josep Suñé-Arce