ABSTRACT
Vision, touch, and desire are closely related in the literary and philosophical imagination. Modern authors regularly depict the desiring gaze as a tactile one, in which, for example, the desire for knowledge of another person may be represented visually. This chapter synthesizes some recent work on medieval desire and vision, and locates the Vita Nuova in the medieval traditions of desire, simultaneously erotic and spiritual, that this recent scholarship has been exploring. It starts with the physical senses of vision and touch, which, as Richard Newhauser suggests in the same recent issue of The Senses and Society, are more closely related in medieval theory than the people might expect. In the Vita Nuova, Dante's extramissive, phallic gaze disguises a desire for abjection before the object of vision and desire, a reformation of the self in which the self is lost in contemplation of the other.
