ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book engages pre-reformation English religion. It examines the sensory contexts and provisions for liturgy, and explores the sense experiences of pre-reformation liturgical practices. The book forms the theoretical lens on religious practices. It defines late-medieval sensory theories and complications and their integration with pre-reformation religious life. The book turns to the same questions of context and provision for English liturgy in reformation England. The former takes up Henrician and Edwardine recasting of English religious life in iconoclasm, Eucharistic debates, and provision for sensibly godly religion. The book defines the issues sensory history raises for the history of Tudor religion as its guiding principle rather than more common historiographical contours. Liturgical reform and conformity were shaped by what was safe and sacred to sense, and what was not.
