People living in the modern world tend to hear solely with their ears. In the Middle Ages, however, the borders between the different senses were much more blurred. A German research project aims to explore this complex set of questions

Famously, the Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga opened with a mind-boggling description of the soundscape in a typical Medieval town. Here, cries, trumpets, church bells and the rattles of the crippled people competed with the sensually imbibed impressions of colours, smells, pains, pleasures and pangs of hunger. Huizinga wrote in his introduction: “The contrast between silence and sound, darkness and light, like that between summer and winter, was more strongly marked than it is in our lives.”(1).

In 2016 a research group at the Technical University in Chemnitz got together to establish a research network to explore this complex Medieval Soundscape from a holistic and interdisciplinary point of view.

Funded in 2021 by the German Research Council, the network is now working to study this complex intermingling of senses and bodies. The questions raised in this network are intended to open up for a better understanding of the complexities of sound as mediated by not just instruments but also notations in liturgical manuscripts, writings and architectural settings.

How were the soundscapes of the Middle Ages mediated through the involvement of all senses? And how was the sensual interplay configured aesthetically, liturgically and architecturally?

These are just some of the questions asked.

ABOUT THE FEATURED PHOTO:

Geese and dogs sounding the alarm i front of a castle. Source: Conradus Kyeser: Bellifortis, um 1430, Clm 30150, fol. 28r © Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München

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