This ambitious collection of essays brings together voices from a range of disciplinary backgrounds to consider sensory culture from Anglo-Saxon England through to the Restoration. The scope of edited volumes on the senses is ever increasing, as this book illustrates in almost every possible way: Old English sensory metaphor sits alongside late seventeenth-century epistemology and John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, while approaches drawn from linguistics, disability studies, and the history of science complement the cultural-historical and literary-critical approaches of many contributors. The book does not aim to offer an overview for students, but gathers together research essays in order to “provide a diachronic investigation of the functions and development of sense perception in a given spatial context” (2). To be more than the sum of its parts, such a diverse collection requires shared research questions, explicit interconnections, and clear insights that could not be offered by a study with a narrower historical or methodological focus.

Many chapters respond admirably to this challenge. Dieter Bitterli’s subtle account of the Old English Marvels of the East opens up broader questions about how the senses determine boundaries of the human, animal, and monster (and, incidentally, demonstrates the significant scholarly benefit of including color illustrations). Richard G. Newhauser’s case for the multisensoriality of place represents a significant contribution to the field of sensory studies, as well as offering insights into various Chaucerian works. Part 5, “The Theatre as Sensory Experience,” contains two precise chapters, one by Farah Karim-Cooper, the other by Rory G. Critten and Annette Kern-Stähler, which stand as interrogations of the status of smell and touch as topics of historical inquiry, building on the work of Holly Dugan and others, even while making more local cases for the multisensory nature of Shakespearean playgoing and the dramatic significance of smell in the York Corpus Christi plays. Several other essays similarly address wider sensory concerns through carefully delimited subjects. Some contributions engage rather less directly with current conversations within sensory studies, instead using the senses as a stepping-stone toward other, often-valuable insights, for intance into the politics of Paradise Lost, or the unexpectedly conventional nature of much of John Wyclif’s preaching. Such chapters feel more detached from the thrust of this broad-ranging volume than would perhaps have been the case in collections more narrowly concerned with seventeenth-century poetry or medieval theology. The provision of a substantial introduction and an unusually full afterword by Elizabeth Robertson goes some way toward making the volume’s continuities explicit, but this task feels harder in relation to some chapters than others.

The juxtaposition of material from across so many centuries foregrounds important issues often marginalized in narrower studies, and some of these questions are thoughtfully examined by multiple contributors. Particular attention is given to the historically shifting relationship between knowledge and sensation, and to the significance of the full sensorium in many cultural moments. Other key issues are touched upon only in passing, perhaps representing a missed opportunity in a volume that brings together expertise in so many centuries of English culture. In particular, contributors’ differing views of exactly how ocularcentrism, modernity, and the classical privileging of sight interrelate could usefully have generated an internal conversation, rather than representing a slight discontinuity among those with specialisms in different historical periods. Relatedly, while Aristotelian sensory hierarchies are a constant thread, some chapters seem far more alive to the ways in which cultures might complicate, challenge, or reimagine such hierarchies than do others that refer, for instance, to sight and touch as “traditionally … a ‘major’ and [a] ‘minor’ sense” (38).

There is very little here that will not be of use as a stand-alone essay, and, indeed, Brill’s e-book platform allows for the purchase of individual chapters, each with its own selective bibliography and digital object identifier. As a collective endeavor, while parts of the volume admittedly offer a clearer rationale for its conjunction than do others, there is certainly material to interest sensory scholars of any stripe, and, perhaps, to tempt early modernists to spend a little time with Chaucerian fowls and tenth-century monstrosities.