ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the place of the senses in the life and work of the seventeenth-century polymath Sir KenelmDigby, who took Protestant communion around 1630, but rejoined the Roman Catholic Church in 1635. While Digby’s conversions have typically been read as superficial and due solely to ambition, they are presented here as more complex phenomena. The chapter argues that Digby deployed accounts of his deeply unusual and vividly realized sensory experiences – especially those derived from his travels through Europe and the Mediterranean – in order to stress the continuity that underlay his apparent changes of faith. Digby’s philosophical works can be read as a form of ‘sensory autobiography’ – a way of asserting that sensory experiences are at once common and shareable, and deeply and irreducibly his.
