A Monastic Sensorium: community experience and the built
environment at eighth and ninth century Northern monastic sites.

Abstract

The study of medieval Christian religious contexts has already benefited greatly from
consideration of the historicity of cultural perceptions the senses and the spatial and
sensory environments they create, however many of these studies pertain to the period
subsequent to the writing of the Regularis Concordia in the late eighth century, for example
(Gage 1982). For earlier periods, the sparsity of documentation relating specifically to
liturgy (as noted by Harper 1997; Bedingfield 2002; Pfaff 2009) and problems in concretely
identifying religious sites and buildings has made it difficult to link spatiality with action,
thoughts and perceptions, let alone link this groundwork to wider narratives of the
physical uses of the senses in the creation of abstract concepts such as community or place.
This thesis aims to access this earlier period by focussing on key Northern monastic sites
that have rich primary and secondary data and conducting various considerations of their
sensory milieu, in order to comment on the extent to which sensory investigations can
contribute to the narratives of these places.