ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the important place the senses held in fifteenth-century religious life in much of contemporary Northern Europe. It explores the premises that underpinned how God and the sacred were sensibly manifest to believers, what kinds of sensory experiences of the sacred this allowed in late-medieval Christianity, and what such sensing did to English churchgoers. Inevitably what this meant for religious practices and artefacts was that they were in constant tension with the divinity they mediated, always expressing it, but never fully. Alongside the corrupted perceptive abilities of humanity, this created a religiosity that was in a continuous state of becoming, moving towards divinity. Sensing was highly duplicitous: if governed properly, it benefited, instilling virtue; if not, it harmed and ingrained vice. Sensing was a defining component of morality, and determined teaching on vice and virtue. Proper sensing made a soul dwelle in good hoope' without the gurchynge and heuynesse' of sin.
