The Sensory Monastery
by Sheila Bonde, Professor of History of Art and Architecture, and Clark Maines, Professor of Art History Emeritus at Wesleyan University
Focusing on the abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes in northern France, founded in the eleventh century, The Sensory Monastery offers a single site as a case study to consider the phenomenology of architecture. The project investigates the sensory in architecture by exploring the visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory, haptic, and spiritual aspects of the site at three distinct periods in its history. Understanding sensory experiences as individual and changing, the project includes seven historically informed narratives of characters in the archaeological record of Saint-Jean. Together with long-form scholarly interpretation, these narratives complement and animate extensive 3D CAD reconstructions of the monastery. The project also includes assets that revive voices and provide readers with additional points of entry, such as searchable site plans, encoded primary texts, and immersive soundscapes.
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Monasteries have interested historians and art historians of religion for centuries. While documents, architecture, and art continue to occupy scholars’ interest, little attention has been given to the sensory experiences of the monks and nuns themselves—to what they heard, smelled, tasted, touched or saw across the centuries of a monastery’s existence. Digital modes of representation have allowed us to re-create the three-dimensional contours of lost abbey spaces, as these changed over time, and to re-present lost phenomenological aspects of medieval monastic experience.
Supported by the Mellon Foundation and, at Brown University, the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Brown Arts Institute
