Preface

The editors of this volume share an interest in how pre-modern people perceived, thought about, and conveyed sensory experience through a variety of media, and were motivated to explore how connections could be made between their different specialisms in relation to imagery. This interest led to an international interdisciplinary conference, “The Senses and Visual Culture from Antiquity to the Renaissance,” held at the University of Bristol in June 2015. The contributions to this volume are a representative selection of the papers presented at this conference, and they address the interface between the senses and imagery in depth. When revising their papers for publication, contributors were invited to engage with each other’s work with the aim of creating a cohesive volume that demonstrates how geographic, chronological, and disciplinary boundaries may be crossed in the study of pre- and early modern visual culture.