Abstract
❦Touch is trouble in medieval accounts of the five senses; but it is touch that also tenders the most extravagant promises: promises of transcendence, higher knowledge, eternal fame, miraculous cures to mortal ailments, joyous couplings with supernatural bodies. The trouble is traceable to Aristotle; the extravagant promises to the Gospels. The two meet in high medieval culture, with momentous consequences for the subsequent cultural history of the West. Aristotle had, of course, elevated the senses to a lofty role: that of gateways for all forms of knowledge, each sense clearly separable from the next and rationally ordered. 1 As in Plato, the order in question was hierarchical, with sight, physically the coolest and cognitively the most intellectual of the senses, at the top of the pyramid, followed by hearing, smell and taste, with touch at the bottom and hot point of the cognitive pyramid. According to Aristotle (and on this point he was followed by Cicero, Alan of Lille, and the illustrator of Herrade von Landsberg’s Garden of Delights [Hortus deliciarum], among many others), this hierarchy is directly mapped onto human anatomy:
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