ABSTRACT
In reading the religious literature of the Middle Ages, especially visionary literature with its focus on a world beyond time and the earthly body, one might not expect to find descriptions of the five physical senses. Yet medieval mystical writings and visions of heaven and hell abound with images of sensory perception. The twelfth-century Vision of Tundal, in which the soul of an Irish knight journeys through the other world, is a case in point. On its path to conversion, Tundal’s soul undergoes many torments, all described in excruciating physical detail. Once the soul is in paradise, its senses are bathed in delights. In this article I examine sensory imagery in three scenes of the vision, one from hell and two from paradise, to show how the monk Marcus, who recorded Tundal’s vision, sets up hierarchies among body, soul, and senses, as well as within the senses. I will focus largely on images of taste and touch, and of hearing, the “logical” sense to examine harmony, to show how Marcus makes sensory experience vital to his message and uses it to link medieval concepts of celestial harmony to earthly and heavenly hierarchies. In so doing, he appropriates and redefines nature and harmony to retain earthly gender, social (i.e., marital and monastic) and moral hierarchies, and the sense of identity that accompanies them. 1
