This volume explores aspects of the devotional world of late medieval northern Europe, with a special emphasis on how people interacted with texts, images, artifacts, and other instruments of piety at the level of the senses. The book focuses on the materiality of medieval religion and the manner in which Christians were encouraged to engage their senses in their devotional practices: gazing, hearing, touching, tasting, and committing to memory. In so doing, it brings together the ideals of medieval mystical writing and the increasingly tangible and material practice of piety, which would become characteristic of the period.

About the author

Salvador Ryan is a native of Moneygall, County Offaly. He studied Nua-Ghaeilge and History at National University of Ireland (NUI) Maynooth (now Maynooth University) and Theology at St Patrick’s College Maynooth. He completed his doctoral dissertation on ‘Popular religion in Gaelic Ireland, 1445-1645’ at the Department of History, NUI Maynooth, in 2003, and was based in the department as an IRCHSS Postdoctoral Fellow from 2003-05. From 2005-08 he taught Church History at St Patrick’s College, Thurles, and was employed as Academic Coordinator from 2006-08 before returning to St Patrick’s College, Maynooth as Professor of Ecclesiastical History in 2008.

He is Secretary of the international periodical, Irish Theological Quarterly, and Treasurer of the Catholic Historical Society of Ireland and of its sources journal, Archivium Hibernicum. In 2013 he was appointed to the Advisory Board of the Journal of Baroque Studies published by the International Institute for Baroque Studies at the University of Malta. In 2014 he was appointed to the Editorial Advisory Board of British Catholic History (Cambridge University Press), the journal formerly known as Recusant History. Since 2005 he has been a member of the European Network on the Instruments of Devotion (ENID), which was founded from the University of Bergen, Norway.