ABSTRACT
Despite sceptical and religious mistrust of the senses in early modern England, literary perceptions of the divine are arrived at, oftenest, through the senses. This might seem affined to legal practice where sensible tokens were valued. Yet the sensory-spiritual register of imaginative productions engages antagonistically with evidence to posit a distinctive understanding of the relation between knowledge and belief. This essay will focus primarily on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and A Midsummer Night’s Dream to show how the ontology of the theatre, in particular, lends itself to such a formulation of a phenomenology of faith; and how the more elusive narratives of the sensory sacred in this culture are found in explorations of the numinous and its distinctive idiom, rather than in discussions of the straight-forwardly theological. Its larger claim is for the importance of the literary in a historical understanding of the relation between spirituality and the senses.
