Sense and Feeling in Daily Living in the Early Medieval English World

Sense and Feeling in Daily Living in the Early Medieval English World seeks to illuminate important aspects of daily living and the experience of the environment through sense and emotion, using archaeological, art and textual sources. Twelve papers explore sight, sound, taste, smell, touch, and emotions such as anger, horror, grief and joy.

Similar in theme and method to the first, second and third volumes in the Daily Living in the Anglo-Saxon World series, the collected articlesilluminate how an understanding of the sensory and emotional landscape that helped form the daily lives of the peoples and the environments of early medieval England can inform the study of England before the Norman Conquest. The sights, smells, and sounds that informed the physical and emotional landscape of town, scriptoria, and hall, for example, explain urban planning, literary imagery and emotional attachment evident among the early medieval English peoples. Experienced senses and emotions are thus as central to understanding the inner and outer landscape of the pre-Conquest English as crafts, towns or water structures.

Maren Clegg Hyer is Assistant Professor of English, Snow College. Her many publications include Sense and Feeling in Daily Living in the Early Medieval English World (co-editor with Gale Owen-Crocker, Liverpool University Press 2020) and Old English Lexicology and Lexicography (co-editor with Haruko Momma and Samantha Zacher, Boydell, 2020).

Gale R. Owen-Crocker is Professor Emerita of The University of Manchester; she was formerly Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture and Director of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies. She was co-founder and for 15 years co-editor of the journal Medieval Clothing and Textiles. Her recent books include Clothing the Past: Surviving Garments from Early Medieval to Early Modern Western Europe (with Elizabeth Coatsworth, Brill, 2018), Sense and Feeling in Daily Living in the Early Medieval English World (co-editor with Maren Clegg Hyer, Liverpool University Press, 2020) and Textiles of the Viking North Atlantic (co-editor with Alexandra Lester-Makin, Boydell & Brewer, 2024).