Literature and the Senses

Annette Kern-Stähler is professor and chair of Medieval English Studies at the University of Bern. She was professeur invitée at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and honorary professor of English at the University of Kent at Canterbury and held fellowships at the Huntington Library and the Harry Ransom Centre. She studied at the Universities of York, Bonn, Oxford, and Münster. She has published widely on the senses in medieval literature, the uses of space, and post-war British-German relations. Among her most recent publications are two co-edited volumes: The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England (2016), and Secrecy and Surveillance in Medieval and Early Modern England (2019). Elizabeth Robertson is Professor Emerita at the University of Glasgow. Her primary research interests are in gender and religion, literary form, the representation of the soul, and the senses in Middle English literature. Co-founder of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, she has published a monograph on the Ancrene Wisse and over fifty essays in journals and collections of essays including in Studies in the Age of Chaucer and Speculum. She is co-principal investigator of the interdisciplinary project 'The Senses: Past and Present' (with Annette Kern-Stähler and Fiona Macpherson). She has just completed a monograph Chaucerian Consent: Women, Religion and Subjection in Late Medieval England.