Victorian sexual norms, though organized around reproductive marriage, were by no means limited to that practice. The Introduction argues that it was common in the period to consider sexual restraint – whether lifelong or temporary – to be productive of health, wellbeing, and energy that could be given to non-sexual endeavours such as religious feeling or art. This idea was found in diverse contexts, underpinned by various models of bodily function, and across the political spectrum. The Introduction outlines the place this productive continence held in an alternative Decadent tradition to that usually explored by Decadent Studies. Far from being incompatible with the embodied pleasure that was so important to Decadent aesthetics, restraint was repeatedly imagined to facilitate such experience, and to answer to the anxieties that many writers associated with the supposed ugliness, degeneration, over-crowding, and haste of the modern world. The Introduction outlines the methodological challenges of its subject and the book’s relationship with other theoretical approaches to sexuality in literature, such as Psychoanalysis, Queer Studies, Gender Studies, and the History of Ideas.

Socrates argues here that the sole pursuit of philosophers is dying and being dead. In doing so, he introduces most of the key topics in the dialogue, including forms, inquiry, the soul, and the philosophical life. Nonetheless, this section of the dialogue is often overlooked, perhaps because it seems simply to assert many of its claims. I argue that we often must wait until later in the dialogue to find the explanation for these claims, as part of the Phaedo’s unfolding structure. Once we take this section seriously, we can appreciate its tight and careful argumentative structure. Moreover, Socrates’ accounts here, in particular his ethical account, are sophisticated theories in their own right. The section also introduces some unusual and important terminology that Socrates uses later in the dialogue, including “auto kath’ auto” (which I argue should be translated “itself through itself”) and terminology for identifying the forms. The chapter ends with a new account of the famous “exchange passage.”

None of us can really remember anything about our lives before the age of two years. How much of what makes us what we are has been set by that time? We challenge the widely-accepted idea that what we are is ‘determined’ by inherited genes and we start to explore how interaction with parents/carers establishes our behaviour. We use examples drawn from fiction and the real world to explore how the brain learns from the conditions in early life. We explain why this adaptability underpins development of our senses, our behaviour and our self-control. This introduces control as one of the themes of the book – how much we are in control of our bodies and how control develops based on environmental cues. We question what effect today’s exposure to digital media may have on the developing brain, and explore new ideas about the development of defence mechanisms, from immunity to the gut microbiome. Through the quote from JM Barrie, author of ‘Peter Pan’: ‘You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end’, we ask whether age two is the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning of development.

The shape and form of boundary walls around and within Greek sanctuaries, and the impact those boundaries had on the experience of the ritual happening within, have attracted little scholarly attention, especially in comparison to work on the powerful impacts of other elements of sanctuary architecture, and architecture more widely. This article, using the case study of the high temenos walls and those of the Telesterion temple structure of the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore at Eleusis, explores the active impact these walls had on particularly the sight- and sound-scapes engaged with by participants. As such it argues for the crucial importance of these walls at Eleusis in creating the intensity, emotion, power, and conviction of the ritual experience of the Mysteries for participants.

This chapter begins with surveyors Alexander and James Gerard, and their attempts to prove that they had climbed higher than Alexander von Humboldt. In examining the measuring practices of East India Company surveyors, the chapter especially deals with moments when scientific instruments were found to be inadequate. These are revealing of the importance instruments played in establishing scientific authority in a world in which the senses were unreliable. This chapter firstly considers responses to damaged instruments, and attempts at repair. This is followed by a discussion of surveyors’ fieldbooks and inscriptive practices. It concludes with an examination of ongoing problems – both conceptual and material – with instruments designed in Europe by those with no experience of the Himalaya. The chapter argues that the staggered recognition of the true scale of the Himalaya reveals multiple levels of displacement in scientific practice: between those in the mountains, those in Calcutta and those in London. In so doing, it emphasises the laboriousness of the instrumental measurements necessary to impose, if incompletely, a form of universality that made global comparisons possible.

Chapter 4 considers the significance of embodied encounters between musicians, listeners and musical instruments. It takes as its focus the experience of touch in musical encounters, charting the sensory intensities and eroticism inherent in fin-de-siècle literary depictions of touching musical instruments and scores and in feeling the transmission of the material touch of music in performance. The chapter examines encounters between bodies and musical instruments in Richard Marsh’s ‘The Violin’, Forster’s ‘Dr Woolacott’ and the anonymous pornographic novel Teleny. Tactile proximity between musician and instrument sees the musical instrument transformed in these texts into a technology for the transmission of touch. The experience of piano playing in Forster’s A Room with a View with Woolf’s The Voyage Out similarly suggests that tactile interaction between the body and the musical instrument allows for marginalized subjects to more fully inhabit a sense of their desiring bodies. Finally, in Vernon Lee’s writing about the archival remains of eighteenth-century music, her sensuous affective connection with the historical past is articulated through a wish for restored tactile contact.

What does Aquinas mean when he speaks of ‘spiritual’ change in explaining sense perception? This chapter is partly exegesis of that notion, partly explication of the author’s own previous invocation of ‘spiritual’ change to characterise the way perception for Aristotle takes on sensible form without matter, and partly explanation of why in philosophy since Descartes it is so difficult to understand how for Aristotle and Aquinas perception is both physical and mental. For both thinkers, it is an ‘unordinary’ physical alteration. That does not make it a ‘mental’ event in any sense that contrasts with ‘physical’. In sight the eye is coloured by the sensible form of red conceived not as a natural form, but as what Aquinas calls an intentio. The notion of intentio here expresses the idea of cognitive awareness, or of sensible form causing knowledge in a being which has the power of cognition. Aquinas calls sight the ‘most spiritual’ of the senses because, whereas with the operation of the other senses ordinary natural processes are required either as causal antecedents or concomitant effects, in sight there is no similar natural change at all. In its power of cognition alone we reach the end of explanation.

Lording Barry’s play, Ram Alley, is a sensory mêlée, written for performance in 1608 and staged by the Children of the King’s Revels company at the Whitefriars playhouse. This chapter explores the world of ‘Ram Alley’, both the area staged in the play, and the real alleyway of that name, a short distance from the playhouse. Using recent scholarly work on the early modern senses, it connects the physical and imagined worlds through an exploration of the perception of a significant segment of the contemporary audience – the men of the Inns of Court whose rooms abutted on the real Ram Alley. Barry shifts our understanding of sensory hierarchy from the supremacy of the visual – an ocular centricity which has classical antecedents and becomes the dominant ideology emerging from the Renaissance - to the olfactory. This chapter demonstrates how the play’s challenge to dominant sensory theory reflects Ram Alley’s wider transgressive intersensoriality.

In De Anima II.6, Aristotle divides perceptibles into three kinds: “special” perceptibles such as colors, sounds, and flavors, which can be perceived in their own right by only one sense; “common” perceptibles such as shapes, sizes, and movements, which can be perceived in their own right by multiple senses; and “incidental” perceptibles, such as the son of Diares, which can be perceived only “incidentally.” In this chapter, I explain what this division amounts to. First, I argue Aristotle’s distinction between perceiving something in its own right and perceiving it incidentally marks a causal distinction: what is perceived in its own right causes perception as such, while what is perceived incidentally coincides with what is perceived in its own right. Second, I argue that, for Aristotle, special perceptibles, unlike common ones, belong to homogeneous bodies on account of their chemical composition and affect sense organs along a range between contrary extremes. Finally, I explain the primacy Aristotle assigns to special perceptibles and his claim that perception of them alone is free from error. I conclude with some brief reflections on the primary/secondary quality distinction.

Roslyn Jolly’s chapter discusses the particular burden carried by the prose of the travel writer. Travel writing faces such potentially opposing tasks as to render a foreign scene strange and exotic while bestowing it with an air of authenticity and verisimilitude, and in doing so makes it appeal to the senses and exercises telling control or choice of narrative perspective. These various pressures and strategies appear fairly consistently throughout the long history of travel writing, which takes in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Orwell and Jonathan Raban. They also cross into prose fiction, where it is influenced by the travel memoir or tourist guide.

Chapter 5 focuses on the material and sensory conditions of Harare’s Magistrates’ Courts at Rotten Row. It specifically examines how human rights lawyers and their clients incorporated the material and sensory conditions in these courts into their courtroom performances, which drew attention to the shortcomings of the courts as spaces in which to the display state authority. While the Magistrates’ Courts were full of spatial and symbolic trademarks that aimed to highlight the power of the law, the political and economic situation in Zimbabwe after 2000 had severely damaged the courts’ material condition. The real and symbolic effects of this material decline undermined law’s authority. For human rights lawyers, these conditions were further indicative of the government’s preoccupation with law’s coercive rather than legitimating utility. Through visual, olfactory and auditory reminders of the horrific conditions in police detention, ZANU-PF demonstrated its control over activists' and lawyers' bodies and minds. Lawyers and their clients, however, also used these sensory dimensions to contest the state's authority. By calling attention to their dirty, damaged and smelly bodies in the dock, lawyers and defendants aimed to expose the decline in moral and professional conduct they observed within Zimbabwe’s judicial and police services.

Apart from three early experiments in playwriting, Wallace Stevens was almost entirely a poet. Yet the fact that Stevens positioned himself so adamantly in the realm of poetry and kept away from the art of the novel does not mean he did not ponder questions of aesthetic affinity. In a 1948 letter, for instance, he shared his perspective on Marcel Proust: “The only really interesting thing about Proust that I have seen recently is something that concerned him as a poet. It seems like a revelation, but it is quite possible to say that that is exactly what he was and perhaps all that he was.” When we consider Proust’s use of similes as well as the way Proust intertwines his studies of the senses, time, and the resources of memory in his monumental work, we begin to grasp Stevens’s appreciation of the French novelist. Goldfarb’s chapter amplifies Proust’s presence in Stevens in three segments: the first addresses Stevens’s relation to modernist fiction; the second probes Stevens’s insight into Proust’s writing style; the third focuses on Proustian echoes in Stevens’s verse, particularly on the interlacing themes of the senses, time, and memory in shorter poems across different volumes.

The study of poetry is a study of technique – metaphor, simile, sound, syntax, and so on. Chapter 11 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho illuminates the technical features of Sappho’s poetry, to help us understand why she was so famous an example of lyric expression in the ancient world.