Touch and the Ancient Senses

✍ Scribed by Alex Purves

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 239
• Series: The Senses in Antiquity
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Unlike the other senses, touch ranges beyond a single sense organ, encompassing not only the skin but also the interior of the body. It mediates almost every aspect of interpersonal relations in antiquity, from the everyday to the erotic, just as it also provides a primary point of contact between the individual and the outside world.　The essays in this volume explore the ways in which　touch plays a defining role in science, art, philosophy, and medicine, and shapes our understanding of topics ranging from aesthetics and poetics to various religious and ritual practices. Whether we locate the sense of touch on the surface of the skin, within the body or – less tangibly still – within the emotions, the sensory impact of touching raises a broad range of interpretive and phenomenological questions.　

This is the first volume of its kind to explore the sense of touch in antiquity, bringing a variety of disciplinary approaches to bear on the sense that is usually disregarded as the most base and obvious of the five. In these pages, by contrast, we find in touch a complex and fascinating indicator of the body’s relation to object, environment, and self.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: what and where is touch?
1 Hands know the truth: touch in Euryclea’s recognition of Odysseus
2 Touching, proximity, and the aesthetics of pain in Sophocle s
3 Aristotle and the priority of touch
4 The duality of touch
5 Getting to grips with classical art: rethinking the haptics of Graeco-Roman visual culture
6 In the body of the beholder: Herder’s aesthetics and classical sculpture
7 Contaminating touch in the Roman world
8 The touch of poetry in the Carmina Priapea
9 In touch, in love: Apuleius on the aesthetic impasse of a Platonic Psyche
10 Noli me tangere: the theology of touch
11 Losing touch: impaired sensation in Greek medical writings
Bibliography
Index