Sensing Sacred Texts
edited by James W. Watts
Paperback (Published)
(October 2018)
ISBN: 9781781795767
6.1 x 9.17 inches
Price: $29.95
In stock
Hardback (Published)
(October 2018)
ISBN: 9781781795750
6.1 x 9.17 inches
Price: $100.00
In stock
All the human senses become engaged in ritualizing sacred texts. These essays focus especially on ritualizing the iconic dimension of texts through the senses of sight, touch, kiss, and taste, both directly and in the imagination. Ritualized display of books engages the sense of sight very differently than does reading. Touching gets associated with reading scriptures, but touching also enables using the scripture as an amulet. Eating and consuming texts is a ubiquitous analogy for internalizing the contents of texts by reading and memorization. The idea of textual consumption reflects a widespread tendency to equate humans and written texts by their interiority and exteriority: books and people both have material bodies, yet both seem to contain immaterial ideas. Books thus physically incarnate cultural and religious values, doctrines, beliefs, and ideas. These essays bring theories of comparative scriptures and affect theory to bear on the topic as well as rich ethnographic descriptions of scriptural practices with Jewish, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and modern art and historical accounts of changing practices with sacred texts in ancient and medieval China and Korea, and in ancient Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures.
Chapter 1 Introduction James W Watts Chapter 2 What the Book Arts Can Teach Us About Sacred Texts: The Aesthetic Dimension of Scripture S. Brent Plate Chapter 3 How the Bible Feels: The Christian Bible as Effective and Affective Object Dorina Miller Parmenter Chapter 4 Engaging All the Senses: On Multi-sensory Stimulation in the Process of Making and Inaugurating a Torah Scroll Marianne Schleicher Chapter 5 On Instant Scripture and Proximal Texts: Some Insights into the Sensual Materiality of Texts and their Ritual Roles in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond Christian Frevel Chapter 6 Touching Books, Touching Art: Tactile Dimensions of Sacred Books in the Medieval West David Ganz Chapter 7 Infusions and Fumigations: Literacy Ideologies and Therapeutic Aspects of the Qur'an Katharina Wilkens Chapter 8 Seeing, Touching, Holding and Swallowing Tibetan Buddhist Texts Cathy Cantwell Chapter 9 Neo-Confucian Sensory Readings of Scriptures: the Reading Methods of Chu Hsi and Yi Hwang Yohan Yoo Chapter 10 Scripture's Indexical Touch James W Watts
James W. Watts is Professor in the Department of Religion at Syracuse University.
- Edited by James W. Watts
"....an important contribution to the study of sacred texts . . . on a descriptive, analytical and theoretical level. This collections [sic] of essays will likely appeal to scholars entrusted in religious practices relating to the sensing [sic] sacred texts and how the sensory element relates to the semantic dimension." --Skarpeid, Jon, Anthropos, 115.2020 "Sensing Sacred Texts, edited by James W. Watts, offers a feast for the eyes and the imagination by introducing its readers to a range of ways that sacred texts engage the senses of those who read, hear, venerate, taste, touch, smell, and look at them. . . . the books ten essays examine examples of the sensory dimension of scriptures in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Confucianism, and undertake a broader consideration of the sacred status attributed to texts, and to books in particular, in religious and secular cultures alike. Not only do the essays highlight the crucial role played by the material qualities of sacred texts for processes such as identity formation, the establishment of cultural boundaries, and the recruitment of affect, the volumes thirty-eight full-color images will make you want to reach out and touch, taste, or smell the sacred texts in question for yourself." --Joy Palacios, University of Calgary, September 25, 2019
—
Other Titles in this Series
Gender and Sacred Textures
Entanglements of Materiality, Embodiment, and Sacred Texts in Religious Identities
Similar Books
A Companion to Christianity and Sport in Europe and North America (19th-21st centuries)
Volume 1: Western and Eastern Europe
A Connecting Polemic in the Medieval Mediterranean
The Correspondence of Leo III and Ê¿Umar II
Volume 6
Ars Prophetica
Theology in the Poetry of Twentieth-Century Hebrew Poets Avraham Halfi, Shin Shalom, Amir Gilboa, and T. Carmi
As Messianism Turns to Heresy
The Regenstein Chair Lectures On Lurianic Kabbalah and Shabbatai Tzevi at Hebrew Union College - Cincinnati
Creating the Woman in Antiquity
Proceedings of the 16th Melammu Workshop, Innsbruck, 2–3 June 2022
Volume 13
Cultic Kisses
Fruitful Encounters Between Deities and Humans. Festschrift for Angelika Berlejung on the Occasion of Her 65th Birthday
De/colonizing Theologies
Glocal Histories, Contemporary Challenges, Theoretical Reflections
Volume 4
Drunk the Potion, No Whit Charmed
The Doctrine of Pure and Perfect Souls from Iamblichus to Damascius
Extracanonical Traditions and the Holy Land
Texts, Rituals, and Material Culture in Late Antique Palestine
Fear, Fear of God, God-Fearers
Philological and Historical Perspectives on the World of Ancient Judaism and Christianity
Gender and Iconography in Antiquity
Femininities, Masculinities, Ambiguities, and Beyond in the Ancient Levant, Near East, and Mediterranean