Description
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
Introduction: What and Where is Touch?
Alex Purves
1. Hands Know the Truth: Touch in Euryclea’s Recognition of Odysseus
Silvia Montiglio
2. Touching, Proximity, and the Aesthetics of Pain in Sophocles
Nancy Worman
3. Aristotle and the Priority of Touch
Rebecca Steiner Goldner
4. The Duality of Touch
David Sedley
5. Getting to Grips with Classical Art: Rethinking the Haptics of Graeco-Roman Visual Culture
Verity Platt and Michael Squire
6. In the Body of the Beholder: Herder’s Aesthetics and Classical Sculpture
Helen Slaney
7. The Contaminating Touch in the Roman World
Jack Lennon
8. The Touch of Poetry in the Carmina Priapea
Elizabeth Young
9. In Touch, In Love: Apuleius on the Aesthetic Impasse of a Platonic Psyche
Giulia Sissa
10. Noli me tangere: the Theology of Touch
Catherine Conybeare
11. Losing Touch: Impaired Sensation in Greek Medical Writings
Rebecca Flemming
