Five Senses, Many Opinions
The list of five senses, sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, comes from Aristotle, and medieval scholars treated it as standard. But the Middle Ages did not have one theory of perception. Natural philosophers asked how the senses worked, theologians asked how they affected the soul, and preachers asked what they did to behavior. These conversations overlapped but did not always agree.
Because the senses were tied to the body, medieval writers explained them with the same physical vocabulary as everything else. Each sense was linked to an organ and, in many accounts, to an element: sight with fire or light, hearing with air, smell with a vapor-like mixture of air and fire, taste with water, and touch with earth. Those assignments varied by author, and some lists differ.
How Perception Was Thought to Work
For Aristotle and his followers, the senses received the “forms” of things without their matter, as wax takes the impression of a ring without taking its metal. An object affected the surrounding medium, such as air or water, and that medium carried the effect to the organ. Smell and taste needed a medium or contact in this scheme, while touch involved direct contact with the body itself.
Vision was the most debated. Some ancient writers imagined rays going out of the eye, while others said light came into it. Ibn al-Haytham, an Arab scholar working in Cairo around the turn of the eleventh century, made an influential case that vision depends on light entering the eye, and his optics were later studied in Latin Europe, where writers such as Roger Bacon discussed them. Many scholars combined elements of the older and newer theories, so the picture remained mixed.
The Inner Senses
Perception did not stop at the eye or ear. Many medieval authors, drawing on Arabic writers such as Ibn Sina, described a series of inner faculties that processed what the outer senses delivered. A common scheme listed a common sense that gathered the separate inputs, an imagination that stored images, an estimative faculty that judged whether something was harmful or helpful, and memory. These were often placed in different chambers, or ventricles, of the brain, and diagrams of them survive in manuscripts.
The details differed from author to author, and later anatomical work did not support the placement. Still, the model shows that medieval thinkers saw perception as a process: the senses supplied raw impressions, and the mind interpreted them.
A Ranking of the Senses
Writers commonly ranked the senses. Sight was usually placed highest, because it reached farthest and brought the most information about the world. Hearing came next, valued above all because it was the path to learning and to hearing the word of God. Smell often held a middle place. Taste and touch were considered the lowest, because they were closest to the body and shared with animals.
Yet touch was also considered the most basic. Aristotle had held that touch is the one sense every animal must have, and some medieval writers repeated that view. So the same sense could be called necessary and low. That tension runs through discussion of the senses: they were both gifts for knowing the world and routes to bodily desire.
Not everyone put sight first. In religious teaching, hearing had a special status, since faith was said to come through the word. A preacher might therefore praise hearing for its role in belief, while a natural philosopher praised sight for its role in knowledge.
Moral Warnings
Medieval moralists worried that the senses were doors through which sin entered the soul. Each sense had its own temptation:
- Sight could lead to vanity, envy or desire. Monastic writers urged guarding the eyes. The phrase “lust of the eyes,” from the New Testament, was often quoted.
- Hearing could be corrupted by gossip, flattery and idle songs. Some preachers criticized the entertainments of courtly love as dangerous to virtue.
- Smell was linked to perfumes, luxury and sensual pleasure, but also to the sweet scent associated with holiness, sometimes called the odor of sanctity.
- Taste was tied to gluttony and drunkenness, one of the deadly sins.
- Touch was most strongly associated with lust, and ascetic writers urged restraint of bodily contact.
Another concern was curiosity, the urge to look at everything just for the pleasure of looking. Augustine had warned against it, and later writers repeated the warning. Yet the senses could also be used rightly. Beautiful music, incense and images could lift the mind toward God, and churches were designed with that in mind: the light through stained glass, the chant, the smell of incense, the touch of holy objects. Debate over whether sensory pleasure helped or hindered devotion was lively, and medieval writers did not settle it with a single answer.
The Senses in Art and Practice
The five senses appear as a subject in visual art, especially in the late Middle Ages. The best-known example is the set of tapestries called The Lady and the Unicorn, made around the end of the fifteenth century, in which five panels are widely read as representing the senses and a sixth carries a mysterious motto. The interpretation is debated, so it is best to say they are “usually read” this way.
Animals were also used to illustrate the senses in popular lore. Bestiaries and later writers pointed to the eagle for sight, the vulture for smell, the ape for taste and the spider for touch, though the pairings varied from source to source and were often playful. Doctors, for their part, considered the senses a sign of health, and some medical treatises discuss eye, ear and tongue diseases as well as the effect of humors on sensation. Cooks and apothecaries cared about taste and smell as well, as shown in food and spice use in medieval cuisine.
What We Can and Cannot Know
Most of what survives about medieval perception comes from learned men, mostly clergy and university scholars. Ordinary people’s sensory lives, the sounds of bells, the smells of towns and the feel of rough cloth, are visible only in fragments. Church bells, for example, structured the day for many communities. Treat the neat hierarchy of the senses as one educated tradition, not a complete account of how everyone experienced the world.