Hearing, Seeing, Smelling, Tasting and Touching the Voice: Gender and Multimodal Visions in the Lives of Thomas of Cantimpré

Abstract

Modern psychology defines an auditory verbal hallucination that incorporates other bodily senses as a ‘fused hallucination’. Fused hallucinations are relatively infrequent in modern Western experience. In contrast, medieval accounts of voice-hearing that are religious in nature are often fused or multimodal and frequently involve the visual as well as the tactile, olfactory and gustatory senses. This essay explores the nature of unimodal and multimodal visions in the later Middle Ages, with a focus on the thirteenth-century saints’ lives of Thomas of Cantimpré. It argues that in terms of unimodal visionary experiences in the Lives, those involving the sense of vision were more common than auditions, but on the whole multimodal experiences were reported and recorded far more frequently. The frequency and intensity of multimodal visions suggest that both men and women were expected and encouraged to have multisensory experiences of the divine that supported and promoted their exemplary speech. Both men and women were corporeally inclined in their visionary experiences, and these sensorial experiences of the divine were promoted as the basis of their exemplary speech.