ABSTRACT
The Book of Martyrs provides a glimpse into how religious violence is sublimated during the Wars of Religion in sixteenth-century France, but it also leads us to ask larger questions about sensory aggression more generally. In the texts emerging from the Wars of Religion, a crisis of the senses occurs and reoccurs, registering within what the author would term an emotive pass-through or conduit. This chapter analyzes some of the ways that the texts mobilize sensory perception but also proposes that sound and hearing have the most to tell us about the terrains of dispute and how these were experienced in the hostilities. The primacy of the visual among modes of sensory perception during the early modern period seems at first glance uncontestable, mostly due to the inertia of the Aristotelian heritage on the conceptualization of sight. The conflict between Catholics and Protestants can also play out as a war of sounds in a more literal sense.
