A Research Workshop of the Israel Science Foundation, 25-28 October 2026.
Early modern Europeans saw, heard, touched, tasted and smelled their way into the sacred. Preaching, devotion, mystical practice and confessional polemic alike were conducted in the grammar of sensation, and the boundary between Jew and Christian was often drawn by disputing whose senses could be trusted.
Sacred Sensoria gathers historians, literary scholars, art historians and historians of religion from Europe, North America and Israel in order to study the two sensory regimes together rather than apart, across three days: Frameworks, Contact Zones, and Comparative Senses. Reformation-focused contributions include panels on the Christian sensorium, on devotional and homiletic literature, and on sound, voice and the affective pulpit.
Keynote lectures: Prof. Bruce Gordon (Yale University), Prof. Magda Teter (Fordham University), and Prof. Stefan Michels (Goethe-Universitaet Frankfurt).
Convened by Dr Yaakov A. Mascetti (Bar-Ilan University) with Dr Channah Damatov (Bar-Ilan University).
Attendance is free and open to all; no registration is required.
Visual: The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (Caravaggio), WikipediA
