Art History Pedagogy & Practice

Volume 3 | Issue 1

Multisensory and Active Learning Approaches to

Teaching Medieval Art
Marice Rose
Fairfield University

Tera Lee Hedrick

Wichita Art Museum

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Rose, Marice and Tera Lee Hedrick. . "Multisensory and Active Learning Approaches to Teaching Medieval Art." Art History Pedagogy
& Practice 3, (1). https://academicworks.cuny.edu/ahpp/vol3/iss1/4

Art History Pedagogy and Practice is published biannually by Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR) in partnership with the Office of Library
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Multisensory and Active Learning Approaches to Teaching Medieval Art
Cover Page Footnote
Marice Rose would like to thank Fairfield University’s Faculty Development and Education committee for
inviting her to present portions of this work at its “Student Centered Teaching and Learning” poster session
on May 3, 2017, and her Art history & Visual Culture colleagues at Fairfield for their continued support. She
is grateful to Rev. Georgios Livaditis of Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, Bridgeport, Connecticut;
Elizabeth Beaudin, Special Collections Curator, Pequot Library; Elise Bochinski, Fairfield University
Librarian and Archivist; and Colin Majtenyi of Knotted Bone Leatherworks for generously sharing their time
and knowledge with medieval art students. Rose and Hedrick are indebted to Lauren Cesiro for introducing
them. Tera Lee Hedrick would like to thank Olivia Holmes, Bridget Whearty, and her other colleagues at
Binghamon University's Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies for their generosity, advice, and
unflagging commitment to inspiring love for the Middle Ages.

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 Rose and Hedrick: Multisensory and Active Learning in Teaching Medieval Art

Multisensory and Active Learning Approaches

to Teaching Medieval Art

Marice Rose, Fairfield University, and Tera Lee Hedrick, Wichita Art Museum

Teaching medieval Western European and Byzantine art can be

challenging. Despite many students immersing themselves in the Game of Thrones’
pseudo-medieval fantasy world, the art and actual history remain a tough sell to
most young adults.1 As specialists in late antique and late Byzantine art, we found
it frustrating to have our enthusiasm for the course content that we love met with
lack of student interest and subpar student work (in comparison with topics from,
say, ancient Egypt or the Italian Renaissance). In this article, we share how we
addressed this with resources and teaching strategies focusing on multiple senses—
those of audiences from the artworks’ original contexts and students’ own—in
order to animate medieval art and improve student learning. We have taught with
this method in courses including: undergraduate general survey and medieval art
courses used by students primarily to fulfill an arts distribution requirement;
Byzantine art seminars for art history majors and minors; and graduate level classes
on more focused topics. Our own approach to this article can be categorized as
descriptive research with regards to our instruction, based on our experiences and
adaptations in the classroom. The pedagogy is grounded theoretically in scholarship
on active and experiential learning and the recent “sensory turn” in art history
scholarship, which is transforming our understanding of medieval European art.
The success of engaging students with the course material was measured by

1
For those fans of the show who do have an interest in medieval art and history, in 2014 the Getty
Museum featured a blog on the television series’ intersections with both fields:
http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/tags/game-of-thrones/. For discussions of the heinous phenomenon of
white supremacist students being attracted to courses that include medieval culture (something
neither of us have encountered to our knowledge): David M. Perry, “What to Do When Nazis are
Obsessed with Your Field,” Pacific Standard, September 6, 2017,
https://psmag.com/education/nazis-love-taylor-swift-and-also-the-crusades; and Sarah E. Bond,
“Hold My Mead: A Bibliography for Historians Hitting Back at White Supremacy,” History From
Below, September 10, 2017, https://sarahemilybond.com/2017/09/10/hold-my-mead-a-
bibliography-for-historians-hitting-back-at-white-supremacy/. Karen Overbey addresses the issue
as well as the importance of medievalists’ and art historians’ expanding their courses’ scope
beyond Western Europe in “Towards the Ethical Practice of Art History,” Material Collective,
August 31, 2018, http://thematerialcollective.org/towards-the-ethical-practice-of-art-history/.

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classroom observation, student written reflections and evaluations of the course,

and the quality of final research projects.2
There are several possible factors for student disengagement in medieval
3
art. A lack of perceived relevance to their own lives and the absence of individual
artists’ names might prevent students from making human connections across time
and geography.4 We believe that a significant reason for student disinterest is that
the familiar lecture format of teaching medieval art—in isolation on slides,
removed from original context and function—focuses only on the visual qualities
of artwork that was never intended to be considered apart from its physical
environment.5 A fuller understanding of medieval art, sacred or secular, may be
gained through actively exploring aspects of its original sensory context, which also
can result in improved student interest and performance as they use their own senses
to participate in class activities.

The Sensory Turn and Medieval Art History

The discipline of art history has traditionally focused on the visual impact
of objects and monuments, but the recent sensory turn has prompted art historians,
architectural historians, and archaeologists to investigate how art objects and
monuments engage all five senses, transforming the “period eye” into the broader
“period sensorium.” 6 The sensory turn began in anthropology, and is based on “the

2
We do not have systematic baseline and post-intervention data to analyze, based on
differentiations in final assessments and course formats in the classes considered here. For typical
data used in art history SoTL, see Marie Gasper-Hulvat, “Active Learning in Art History: A
Review of Formal Literature,” Art History Pedagogy & Practice 2, no. 1 (2017): 20–24,
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/ahpp/vol2/iss1/2/.
3
Difficulties in teaching medieval art met with integrated course design are discussed in Marice
Rose and Roben Torosyan, “Integrating Big Questions with Real World Applications: Models
from Art History and Philosophy,” in Designing Courses for Significant Learning: Voices of
Experience, ed. L. D. Fink and A. Fink (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 61–71; Susan L.
Ward addressed challenges in teaching medieval art history to studio art students in “Teaching
Medieval Art History to Art Students,” SMART: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 3,
no. 1 (1992): 27–33, http://www.medievalists.net/2008/10/teaching-medieval-art-history-to-art-
students/. Ward uses inquiry based learning, giving students a choice of traditional research papers
or creation of medieval-inspired objects.
4
On the importance of the human connection and personal relevance supporting learning, with
bibliography on pedagogical research, see Marice Rose, “Object Lesson: Using Family Heirlooms
to Engage Students in Art History,” Art Education 65 (2012): 49–51.
5
For a literature review of the benefits of active learning, see Gasper-Hulvat, “Active Learning in
Art History,” 19.
6
David Howes, “Taking Leave of Our Senses: A Survey of the Senses and Critique of the Textual
Revolution in Ethnographic Theory” and “Coming to Our Senses: The Sensual Turn in
Anthropological Understanding,” in Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social

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 Rose and Hedrick: Multisensory and Active Learning in Teaching Medieval Art

premise that the sensorium is a social construction … senses are lived and
understood differently in different cultures and historical periods.”7 The sensory
turn has allowed art historians—particularly those researching premodern and non-
western art—to question the primacy of sight in evaluating works of art.8 The
sensory turn is currently informing and transforming the study of medieval art
history, as presented to the wider public in the 2016/2017 exhibition A Feast for
the Senses: Art and Experience in Medieval Europe, curated by Martina Bagnoli
for the Walters Art Museum, in partnership with the Ringling Museum of Art.9
Recent research on medieval art considers investigations of sound in spaces such
as mosques, churches, and bathhouses; the role of scent in domestic and sacred
architecture; the evocation of taste in objects associated with dining and
banqueting; and the changing moral and scientific discourses surrounding the
senses (see Appendix).
In our classes we assigned selected readings, most of which are essentially
case studies—art historians exploring objects or groups of objects from a sensory
perspective—in order to incorporate the content into discussion. Some of the
readings that aided student learning best have been those that examined a single
object or series of objects from the perspective of all five senses. In Hedrick’s and
Rose’s courses, these articles were intended to lay the foundation for the class and
serve as models for how art historians—including the students!—could use

Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 3–58; David Howes, “Charting the
Sensorial Revolution,” Senses and Society 1, no. 1 (2006): 113–128; and Anthony Synnott,
“Puzzling Over the Senses: From Plato to Marx,” in The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A
Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, ed. David Howes (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1991), 61–76. For senses in medieval Europe, see Florence Bouchet and Anne-Hélène
Klinger-Dollé, eds., Penser les cinq sens au Moyen Âge: poétique, esthétique, éthique (Paris:
Classiques Garnier, 2015); Annette Kern-Stähler, Beatrix Busse, and Wietse de Boer, eds. The
Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Richard G. Newhauser,
ed., A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016);
Stephen G. Nichols, Andreas Kablitz and Alison Calhoun, eds., Rethinking the Medieval Senses:
Heritage, Fascinations, Frames (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Eric Palazzo,
ed., Les cinq sens au Moyen Âge (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2016); Simon C. Thomson and Michael
D.J. Bintley, eds. Sensory Perception in the Medieval West (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016); and
Christopher Michael Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006).
7
Howes, “Charting the Sensorial Revolution,” 113.
8
Jenni Lauwrens, “Welcome to the Revolution: The Sensory Turn and Art History,” Journal of
Art Historiography 7 (2012): 1–17. In 2015 the conference “The Senses and Visual Culture from
Antiquity to the Renaissance” took place at the University of Bristol:
https://sensesandvisualculture.wordpress.com/.
9
A Feast for the Senses: Art and Experience in Medieval Europe, Walters Art Museum,
Baltimore, Maryland, October 16, 2016–January 8, 2017 and Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota,
Florida, February 4–April 30, 2017; Martina Bagnoli, ed. A Feast for the Senses: Art and
Experience in Medieval Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).

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multisensory perspectives to more fully engage with premodern works of art. The
students returned to the approaches and ideas raised in these articles throughout the
semester, weeks after the readings had initially been assigned.
One article, written by renowned art historian Bissera Pentcheva, herself a
leading figure in art history’s sensory turn, served as a foundational text for
Hedrick’s seminar students. Assigned at the beginning of the semester, the article
helped model the examination of an object through a multisensory lens. According
to Pentcheva, art historians have ignored the ways that engagement with a
Byzantine icon was a multisensory, rather than purely visual, experience. 10 While
art historians have focused on issues of iconography and style, she notes that
Byzantine multi-media icons deliberately engaged the whole sensorium, from touch
to taste through its own materiality and its role in the multisensory world of the
Byzantine church service. For Pentcheva, icons “appeal to the sense of touch
through the textured surface of the repoussé and enameled-filigree metal
revetments.”11 At the same time, the changing conditions around an icon cause the
object itself to seem alive and animated—“a person’s approach, movement, and
breath disrupt the lights of the candles and oil lamps, making them flicker and
oscillate on the surface of the icon. This glimmer of reflected rays is enhanced by
the rising incense in the air, the sense of touch and taste, and the sound of prayer to
animate the planel.”12 These shifting sensations make the icon “appear alive.”13 For
Pentcheva, this multisensory character is fundamental to the icon’s ability to enact
the presence of Christ or a saint.
Heather Hunter Crawley likewise advocates for an approach to Byzantine
ars sacra that privileges the sensorial and embodied experience of the objects
during worship rather than questions of iconography and aesthetics.14 Crawley’s
article discussed various objects used in Byzantine church services, and the way
each object deliberately exploited sensory engagement—from incense burners
producing scent to liturgical fans creating sound—to facilitate a divine encounter.
For Crawley, some of the most potent religious encounters occurred through objects

10
Bissera V. Pentcheva, “The Performative Icon,” Art Bulletin 88, no. 4 (2006): 631–655. See
also her book The Sensual Icon: Space Ritual and The Senses in Byzantium (University Park, PA:
Penn State University Press, 2010); and for her Icons of Sound research, with Jonathan Abel, on
how Hagia Sophia’s acoustics, visual environment, and Byzantine chant worked together to
enhance spiritual experience, see Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space and Spirit in Byzantium (University
Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2017).
11
Pentcheva, “The Performative Icon,” 631.
12
Pentcheva, “The Performative Icon,” 631.
13
Pentcheva, “The Performative Icon,” 632.
14
Heather Hunter Crawley, “Embodying the Divine: Experience of the Sixth-Century Eucharist,”
in Making Senses of the Past: Towards a Sensory Archaeology, ed. Jo Day (Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013), 160–176.

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 Rose and Hedrick: Multisensory and Active Learning in Teaching Medieval Art

that engage multiple senses. For instance, early Christian patens—the plates used
to hold and distribute eucharistic bread—were typically decorated with a cross or
chi-rho. Crawley notes that the crosses inscribed on the patens would only gradually
become visible during the ritual, and that the light glinting off the objects would
slowly come to be understood as radiating outward from the cross itself. For the
congregant, this would have been an epiphanic moment, one of many in the Divine
Liturgy, augmented by the haptic experience of touching the elevated cross. Both
would occur directly before the communicant ate the eucharistic bread, activating
the sense of taste. For Crawley, Christian ritual objects were not fundamentally
intended to teach worshippers about God, but allow worshippers to encounter God.
Students also responded enthusiastically to readings that examined an
object or object group by focusing on one specific sense. In particular, the students
were deeply influenced by those articles that complicated premodern notions of
vision, considering it as part of the broader sensorium rather than as something
entirely rational, cerebral, and divorced from bodily experience. Several readings
dealt with the ways in which sight and touch were understood to be linked in late
antiquity and the Middle Ages. Two important premodern models of sight,
extramission and intromission, posit the direct contact between the viewer’s body
and the object of vision.15 In extramission, a ray of vision leaves the body, travels
to the object of vision, and then returns to the eye. In intromission, the ray leaves
the visible object and travels to the eye. In both models, sight was itself understood
as a kind of physical contact. Because of this, authors like Georgia Frank emphasize
that for the premodern viewer—in her case, the late antique pilgrim—vision was
not passive, but rather an active force.16 Frank notes in her study that the earliest
Christian pilgrimage accounts emphasize sight and vision, while in subsequent
centuries sight is seemingly replaced by touch as the dominant sense. 17 For Frank,
though, the shift is not as seismic as it may initially appear. Because of the theories
of extramission and intromission, sight and touch “were not exclusive, but rather
convergent senses … sight was not replaced by touch, it had always been a form of
touch.”18 For Frank, then, the viewer and object of vision were understood to be
fundamentally linked through the act of viewing.

15
Robert Nelson, “Descartes’s Cow and Other Domestications of the Visual,” in Visuality Before
and Beyond the Renaissance, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 4–5.
16
Georgia Frank, “The Pilgrim’s Gaze in the Age before Icons,” in Visuality Before and Beyond
the Renaissance, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 98–115.
17
Frank, “The Pilgrim’s Gaze,” 105.
18
Frank, “The Pilgrim’s Gaze,” 109.

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A favorite article—and one cited in nearly half of Hedrick’s students’

seminar papers—was Michael Camille’s “Before the Gaze.”19 In the article,
Camille argues for a fundamental shift in the understanding of vision that occurred
during the late Middle Ages. Camille argued that as extramission gave way to
intromission, the role of the object changed. For Camille, “the intromission model
placed emphasis not upon the viewer, previously the beaconlike source of vision,
but upon the image as the base of the visual pyramid, literally reversing the flow of
the visual rays from subject to object …”20 According to Camille, the change
impacted both making and response, sparking the proliferation of a “range of
powerful religious images.”21 This shifting understanding of vision also resulted in
the medieval image having even greater power than they had previously, as “the
intromission model took the emphasis away from vision and onto the power of
images themselves, whose eyes, as in cult statues and devotional images, could
stare back.”22 Articles such as Camille’s helped the students consider premodern
artworks and objects as powerful forces with their own agency, not merely passive
examples of style or iconography.
Perhaps the most vigorous debate in Hedrick’s class was prompted by an
anthropological study.23 In The Sensory Experience of Blood Sacrifice in the Roman
Imperial Cult, Constance Weddle attended modern Islamic Kurban Bayram
sacrifices outside Istanbul in order to “make suggestions” about the sensory
experience of attending a Roman imperial cult sacrifice. Weddle hoped to gain
basic insight into questions otherwise unexplored and unanswered in both ancient
accounts and modern scholarship—“how far sounds and smells carried, how they
might have affected daily life, whether or how they might have played a role in
reactions and responses to particular cults.”24 Although Weddle emphasized that
she was not at Kurban Bayram sacrifices in order to “analyze socio-religious
practices,” some students found the exercise flawed and even offensive, objecting
to Weddle’s assumption that she will have the same sensory experience as
worshipers—she notes that she comes from the “Western (Christian) tradition.”25
Others took issue not with Weddle’s socio-religious background but with her

19
Michael Camille, “Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of
Seeing,” in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. Robert
Nelson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 197–223.
20
Camille, “Before the Gaze,” 207.
21
Camille, “Before the Gaze,” 207.
22
Camille, “Before the Gaze,” 207.
23
Candace Weddle, “The Sensory Experience of Blood Sacrifice in the Roman Imperial Cult,” in
Making Senses of the Past: Towards a Sensory Archaeology, ed. Jo Day (Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013), 137–159.
24
Weddle, “The Sensory Experience,” 138.
25
Weddle, “The Sensory Experience,” 142.

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 Rose and Hedrick: Multisensory and Active Learning in Teaching Medieval Art

modernity. How, they asked, could one conflate Kurban Bayram with Roman
imperial sacrifice, even if they both involved the sacrifice of cows and bulls? These
reservations centered on the central tenet of sensory studies that sensory experience
is culturally as much as physically conditioned. Because Widdle was neither a
practicing Muslim nor an ancient Roman, students questioned the extent to which
her sensory experience could be understood as reflecting the sensory experiences
of worshipers, noting that the “autoethnographic” approach might not be
appropriate for this research. Other students, however, still found the study
compelling. For them, the experiment was worth undertaking even though it could
and would not be entirely successful. Students were particularly interested in some
of Weddle’s specific observations vis-à-vis material culture. For instance, students
found claims that the smell of blood may have lingered on porous marble altars
“long after the completion of the slaughter”26 compelling, and then raised further
questions about the staining of material by blood and by-products of the sacrifice.
How would such physical traces of the sacrifice have been understood by priests or
worshippers? Would porousness have affected the choice of material by artists and
artisans? Can we ask similar questions of ritual objects from other time periods?
From a pedagogical perspective, the reading was one of the most effective of the
semester in raising potent methodological and art historical questions.
Each article was meant to spur vigorous student engagement, providing
fertile ground for both historical and theoretical conversations. Addressing topics
in class discussion is an important component of Hedrick and Rose’s courses, and
the most common active learning technique in art history SoTL literature.27 For
example, Laetitia LaFollette argues for the efficacy of small group discussion
within large classes in her article on technology and team-based learning.28
Gretchen Bender discusses her revising the art history survey to focus on “slow
teaching” in order “to engage in a conversation with the stuff that human beings
take time to craft and conceptualize.” 29 A key word for Bender is conversation as
opposed to discussion, which has a connotation of being instructor-led. She
recommends collaborative assignments to encourage students to respond to one
another, helping meet her goal of fostering openness to new ideas and

26
Weddle, “The Sensory Experience,” 154.
27
Gasper-Hulvat, “Active Learning in Art History,” 9.
28
She also has students create, in this case a virtual Greek temple. Laetitia La Follette, “Blending
New Learning Technologies into the Traditional Art History Lecture Course,” in
Teaching Art History with New Technologies: Reflections and Case Studies, ed. Kelly Donahue-
Wallace, Laetitia La Follette, and Andrea Pappas (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2008), 53–55.
29
Gretchen Holtzapple Bender, “Why World Art is Urgent Now: Rethinking the Introductory
Survey in a Seminar Format,” Art History Pedagogy & Practice 2, no. 2 (2017): 12–13,
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/ahpp/vol2/iss2/2.

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perspectives—with regard to art and classmates. In our courses, like Bender,

students led discussion of readings while incorporating new material, which helps
foster a classroom environment of collaborative learning. It is rewarding when the
students stop looking to the faculty member for affirmation or feedback, and fully
engage with each other and their thoughts on the topic.

The Sensory Turn and Museums

The sensory turn is rare in art history SoTL literature, but has become
common in recent museum studies scholarship and practice, where the role of affect
in relation to objects on display and to visitors’ bodies within museum exhibitions
is a major component.30 David Howes deems the trend a “rising tide of sensory
experimentation in contemporary curatorial practice.”31 History museums have
pioneered the use of multisensory experiences to enhance the display of objects
within exhibition spaces. Goals for these experiences may resonate with university
art history instructors; they include sparking critical reflections on the past’s
relationship to the present by increasing visitors’ engagement with the objects, and
connecting visitors with others’ lives through the objects, leading to engagement
with others’ subjective understandings while considering “how these latter were
shaped by socio-historical contexts.”32

30
Jari Martikainen addresses it in his discussions of his hands-on approach to teaching art history
to art students in “Making Pictures as a Method of Teaching Art History,” International Journal of
Education & the Arts 18, no. 19 (2017) and “Making Pictures, Writing about Pictures, Discussing
Pictures and Lecture-Discussion as Teaching Methods in Art History,” Art History Pedagogy &
Practice 2, no. 1 (2017), http://academicworks.cuny.edu/ahpp/vol2/iss1/4. For museum studies,
see Andrea Witcomb, “Understanding the Role of Affect in Producing a Critical Pedagogy for
History Museums,” Museum Management and Curatorship 28, no. 3 (2103): 255–271; Nina
Levent and Alvaro Pascual-Leone, eds., The Multisensory Museum: Cross-Disciplinary
Perspectives on Touch, Sound, Smell, Memory, and Taste (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,
2014); Dianne Mulcahy, “‘Sticky’ Learning: Assembling Bodies, Objects and Affects at the
Museum and Beyond,” in Learning Bodies, ed. Julia Coffey, Shelley Budgeon, and Helen Cahill
(New York: Springer, 2016), 207–222; Sandra Dudley, ed., Museum Materialities: Objects,
Engagements, Interpretations (New York: Routledge, 2013); Elizabeth Wood and Kiersten F.
Latham, The Objects of Experience: Transforming Visitor-Object Encounters in Museums (Walnut
Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013); and David Howes, ed., “Sensory Museology,” special issue,
The Senses and Society 9, no. 3 (2014).
31
Howes, “Introduction to Sensory Museology,” in “Sensory Museology,” 259, and refer to his
bibliography for museums using touch.
32
Witcomb, “Understanding the Role;” and Kirsten Wehner and Martha Sear, “Engaging the
Material World: Object Knowledge and Australian Journeys,” in Museum Materialities, ed.
Sandra Dudley, 143. See also Mulcahy, “‘Sticky Learning’,” and Dudley, “Introduction,” in
Museum Materialities, ed. Sandra Dudley, 1–17.

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 Rose and Hedrick: Multisensory and Active Learning in Teaching Medieval Art

Sound is one of the most common senses added to visual components to

achieve these goals. At the Minnesota History Center, for example, visitors hear a
tornado siren before entering a space designed to recall a mid-twentieth-century
basement, including authentic artifacts. It is part of an exhibition on the relationship
of Minnesota weather to local culture that aims to stimulate the “human experiences
and emotions” of a devastating series of tornadoes that touched down in 1965.33
Sonic and visual effects of the storms include howling wind and hail pelting against
the windows through which a greenish light glows. Archival television footage
plays on the basement’s television when the simulated storms end and the
basement’s electricity is “restored.”34 Heightening historical and national
consciousness through sight and sound is an intent of the Churchill Museum in
London, where, upon approach to the museum from the surrounding Cabinet War
Rooms, visitors hear footsteps and doors shutting. Within the museum, recordings
of Churchill’s voice delivering speeches play when visitors stand in front of
photographs related to the content of the speech.35
Examples of the use of touch are not uncommon in history museum
contexts, including the McCord Museum of Canadian History in Montreal, which
featured “handling session” workshops where Inuit elders shared their culture with
visitors through conversation and physical engagement with objects.36 The National
Museum of Australia also includes a tactile component, with visitors using their
fingers to trace stitching on a replica embroidered map, and to hold love tokens
made by convicts. Beyond sight and touch, this museum incorporates the sense of
smell in augmenting the display of fishermen’s cauldrons with the scent of dried
sea cucumber.37 Smell is used to great effect in the National Archaeological
Museum of Athens’s Countless Aspects of Beauty current exhibition (through May

33
“About the Exhibit,” Minnesota Historical Society, accessed July 24, 2018,
http://www.mnhs.org/exhibits/weather/exhibit.php.
34
The Weather Permitting: Get to the Basement! exhibition is discussed by Wood and Latham,
The Object of Experience, 156–8.
35
Sheila Watson, “Myth, Memory and the Senses in the Churchill Museum,” in Museum
Materialities, ed. Sandra Dudley, 211.
36
Marie-Pierre Gadoua, “Making Sense through Touch: Handling Collections with Inuit Elders at
the McCord Museum,” The Senses and Society 9, no. 3 (2014): 323–341. Historically, museums
have incorporated touch for visually impaired visitors. For examples of these and other museums
using touch, see Nina Levent and D. Lynn McRainey, “Touch and Narrative in Art and History
Museums,” in The Multisensory Museum, eds. Nina Levent and Alvaro Pascual-Leone, 61–84.
37
Kirsten Wehner and Martha Sear, “Engaging the Material World,” 159. There are perfume and
food/drink museums that emphasize scent and a number of natural history and history museums
that use scent in exhibitions where it is effective in conveying to visitors a sense that they are
present in a different place and/or time. Richard J. Stevenson, “The Forgotten Sense: Using
Olfaction in a Museum Context: A Neuroscience Perspective,” in The Multisensory Museum, eds.
Nina Levent and Alvaro Pascual-Leone, 151–165.

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2019), which presents ancient Greek concepts of beauty and aesthetics, including
scented oils which were used by women and men not only for personal adornment
but also as a cultural signifier and to mark social milestones such as birth and
marriage. The museum commissioned a cosmetics company to recreate—with
authentic ingredients and ancient methods—three different perfumes for visitors to
smell.38
Art museums less frequently appeal to senses other than sight, but instances
of their exploring the nonvisual are becoming more frequent. In 2016/2017, the
Detroit Institute of Arts presented Bitter|Sweet: Coffee, Tea & Chocolate, billed as
“the first exhibition at the D.I.A. to engage all five senses.”39 Accompanying the
display of coffee- and tea-related implements and artwork from the early modern
era through the nineteenth century were the smell of coffee beans roasting, the
sounds of Bach’s “Coffee” Cantata, and the opportunity to touch cocoa pods and
taste drinking chocolate made from Aztec and French recipes. Especially relevant
for this article, the Feast for the Senses museum exhibition taught its visitors the
sensory contexts of medieval European sacred and elite material culture by playing
recordings of church bells, music, and ambient garden sounds in the galleries where
medieval objects were displayed, and invited visitors to handle rosary beads in front
of devotional paintings and to smell incense, perfume, and flowers that were
depicted in tapestries.40 Not only was the sensorium addressed in the exhibition’s
content, the display used multisensory means to convey it.

Object-Based Experiential Activities

Classrooms can also become effective places to encourage learning through

activities where multiple senses are engaged. This section will discuss specific
active learning experiences outside and within the classroom, and their pedagogical
rationales. Rose teaches undergraduate students at a Jesuit university of 4,100
undergraduate and 1,000 graduate students in suburban southern New England, and
is fortunate to be near easily accessible museum and religious resources. Most
students are white, middle class, 18–21 years old, and from the northeastern United

38 Helena Smith, “Scents of Antiquity Revived for Exhibition at Athens Museum,” The
Guardian, May 30, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/30/scents-of-antiquity-
revived-for-exhibition-at-athens-museum; Catalogue: Οι αμέτρητες όψεις του Ωραίου (Athens:
National Archaeological Museum, 2018).
39
“Bitter|Sweet: Coffee, Tea & Chocolate,” Detroit Institute of Art, accessed July 21, 2018,
https://www.dia.org/art/exhibitions/bittersweet-coffee-tea-chocolate.
40
Martina Bagnoli, ed., A Feast for the Senses: Art and Experience in Medieval Europe
(Baltimore: The Walters Art Museum, 2016), exhibition catalog; for elements of the visitor
experience, see Jennifer P. Kingsley, review of the exhibition and catalogue, CAA.Reviews,
December 22, 2017, http://dx.doi.org/10.3202/caa.reviews.2017.203.

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 Rose and Hedrick: Multisensory and Active Learning in Teaching Medieval Art

States. The university offers a BA in Art History & Visual Culture. The majority
of students who take art history are fulfilling a core distribution requirement.
Hedrick taught both undergraduate and graduate students at a public university in
upstate New York. While located further from accessible museum resources, the
university sponsored multiple trips per year to medieval art collections in New York
City. Scholarships were available to offset costs for any students not able to pay the
trip fee, which was less than $40. The university averages around 13,000
undergraduate and 3,000 graduate students. The majority of students are white and
18–21 years old. The university offers a BA, MA, and PhD in Art History.
Research shows that active learning through multiple senses can help
students remember and understand material.41 There is a body of art history SoTL
literature that demonstrates examples and benefits, as analyzed by Marie Gasper-
Hulvat in 2017 in a welcome comprehensive overview and analysis. In addition to
often using multiple senses, active learning is differentiated from passive by the use
of student-led activities that incorporate higher-order thinking and metacognition.42
One does not have to completely redesign one’s course to incorporate these
suggestions; courses that are predominantly lecture format can still include active
learning modules. The learning activities described in the following section also
meet the definition of experiential learning.43 “Experiential learning ... has been
identified and endorsed throughout history and remains the strongest and most
enduring of the learning theories.”44 The experiential learning model was first
codified as such by David Kolb and Roger Fry in 1974.45 Kolb and Fry stress the
importance of kinesthetic qualities of learning in addition to visual and auditory,
the combination of which they argue results in better internalization of knowledge.

41
Pawell J. Matusz, Murray Wallace, and Micah M. Murray, “A Multisensory Perspective on
Object Memory,” Neuropsychologia 105 (2017): 243–252; Nina Levent and Alvaro Pascual-Leon,
“Introduction,” and Jamie Ward, “Multisensory Memories: How Richer Experiences Facilitate
Remembering,” in The Multisensory Museum, eds. Nina Levent and Alvaro Pascual-Leone, xii–
xxvi, 273–284. The effectiveness of teaching children using a multisensory method is well known,
for example in the Montessori and Emiglia Romana models, as well as the Orton Gillingham
approach to literacy. Childhood education is beyond the scope of this article, but see Tracy
Thomson’s dissertation for a useful review: “Sensory-Based Arts Education and Engagement in
the Junior Classroom: Exploring Multiple Ways of Knowing and Meaning” (PhD diss., University
of Western Ontario, 2015), Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository, Paper 3286.
42
Marie Gasper-Hulvat, “Active Learning in Art History,” 19.
43
Active learning is used as a subcategory of experiential learning in Scott D. Wurdinger and
Julie Carlson, Teaching for Experiential Learning (Lanham, MD: R & L Education, 2009),
although others present experiential learning as subcategory of active learning.
44
Colin Beard and John P. Wilson, eds., Experiential Learning (London: Kogan Page, 2006), 44,
with review of the literature from John Dewey to Paolo Friere, 19–41.
45
David A. Kolb and Roger E. Fry, Toward an Applied Theory of Experiential Learning
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Alfred P. Sloan School of Management, 1974).

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An effective way for students to gain a fuller picture of medieval art and life
is to leave the classroom to engage with authentic objects and spaces, a form of
experiential, object-based learning that is standard practice in most art history
classes.46 In order to qualify as experiential learning, students should not just listen
to a tour in a museum or other location, but engage with the material through active
discussion, on-site activities, and reflection afterward.47 Rose, in 2009, discussed
how visits to local churches (today we would add synagogues and mosques) can be
effective ways for students to strengthen foundational knowledge of typical plans,
elevations, furnishings, and decoration of medieval sacred buildings, while
physically experiencing the spatial impact of features like domes and transepts.48
In addition to the visual, participants absorb the sounds and smells that imbue the
spaces. When students arrived at the local Greek Orthodox church for a visit, a
Byzantine chant recording was playing through speakers in the narthex, and the
smell of incense permeated the space. This olfactory, auditory, and visual
experience of the architecture plus icons, liturgical implements, and wall paintings
made the readings and discussions more immediate and easier to understand. If an
off-campus class trip is not feasible, religious spaces on campus can also be used.
During one class meeting, Rose’s students met at the campus chapel, compared its
plan and placement of the altar to those of medieval churches, and discussed how a
reliquary affixed to a wall differed from medieval examples that we studied. They
applied readings on relics, reliquaries, and pilgrimage to compare and contrast
elements.
Like architecture, illuminated manuscripts are difficult to teach from
projected images. When displayed on a classroom screen, there is little sense of the
manuscripts’ materiality, including scale and texture of page and pigment.
Manuscript illuminations were not meant to be seen in isolation, they are parts of a
page and a book, with a physical relationship to the text and other images. Teaching
this art form benefits from active and experiential learning techniques that engage
senses. It is worth investigating if your university special collections/archive or
local library has manuscripts—even if they are not medieval—or old illustrated
books. With physical examples, students can see relationships between text and
image, as well as physical features such as the thickness of parchment or cotton rag
compared to modern paper. One student wrote in a reflection, “I was shocked by
the feel of the paper and how it felt so different and stronger compared to the paper
used and printed on today.” Rose’s university has a facsimile of the Book of Kells

46
For scholarship on field trips in college level art history courses, see Gasper-Hulvat, “Active
Learning in Art History,” 6–7.
47
For example, see Pierroux Palmyre, Ingeborg Krange, and Idunn Sem, “Bridging Contexts and
Interpretations: Mobile Blogging on Art Museum Field Trips,” MedieKultur: Journal of Media
and Communication Research 27, no. 50 (2011): 30–47.
48
Rose and Torosyan, “Integrating Big Questions,” 67.

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 Rose and Hedrick: Multisensory and Active Learning in Teaching Medieval Art

and an edition of the contemporary illuminated St. John’s Bible, which students
were allowed to touch with clean hands or gloves. A local public library that has a
Special Collection also allowed students to see, touch, and smell old books. An
early modern printed cookbook, although not art historical, resonated with students
because of its physical qualities, especially the food stains and wear on the spine
and cover from repeatedly being grasped by a cook. During the visit students
reviewed terms related to manuscript production while seeing evidence of their use,
and compared the books to manuscripts that students had read about. Students also
noticed the marginal notations in various books, made by readers over time. As a
student remarked in a reflection, “The library visit humanized the people of the past
and made physical the lessons we learned in class.” Another wrote: “For me, the
best part was being able to try and read and hold the texts. There is a better
connection to what you are looking at if you are able to use more than just your
eyes. I felt as if I was going back in time to when and where the book was made
and experiencing its journey … Overall, my time at the library was very fun and
taught me something I feel I would not have learned if I had never taken this course.
Any time I feel as if I learned something interesting or fascinating about a certain
topic, it sticks with me for a really long time, and I am going to remember this trip
for all it had to show me.”
Rose and Hedrick also include art-making activities that relate to course
content in order to engage students in tactile and spatial qualities of medieval art
and architecture while creating their own versions. These are effective means of
multisensory, experiential learning that allow students to process information in a
different way than listening, viewing, and taking notes.49 Although experiencing
the Greek Orthodox church and campus chapel helped students conceptualize the
medieval spaces described in readings and seen in class lectures, Rose found it a

49
Susan Ward and Jari Martikainen give art-making examples that have been successful in their
classrooms, and link them to increased student motivation to learn as well as meeting course
learning goals, see Ward, “Making Pictures as a Method” and Martikainen, “Making Pictures,
Writing about Pictures.” See also the chapter on art-making assignments for high school art
history students in Michael J. McCarthy, Introducing Art History: A Guide for Teachers (Toronto:
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1978). More examples can be found in the Art History
Teaching Resources blog, such as: Corey Dzenko, “Walking on the Grass: Using Campus as
Source Material,” March 27, 2017, http://arthistoryteachingresources.org/2017/03/walking-on-
the-grass-using-campus-as-source-material/ ; Jennifer Feltman, “Understanding Geometry and
Cathedral Design Through Experiential Learning,” October 11, 2017,
http://arthistoryteachingresources.org/2017/10/understanding-geometry-and-cathedral-design-
through-experiential-learning/; Sherry Freyermuth, “Hands on History: Learning the History of
Typography with a Letterpress Workshop,” May 1, 2017,
http://arthistoryteachingresources.org/2017/05/hands-on-history-learning-the-history-of-
typography-with-a-letterpress-workshop/; and Tiffany Alvarez-Thurman, “Hands-on Learning in
AP Art History,” April 7, 2017, http://arthistoryteachingresources.org/2017/04/hands-on-learning-
in-ap-art-history/.

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challenge to teach the authentic Byzantine cross-in-square plan (a common plan of

middle Byzantine churches) and its associated decorative program from two-
dimensional sources, since available published or online images usually show just
one or two views. The typical Romanesque pilgrimage church plans and elevation
provided similar difficulties. 360° videos are helpful, but are still passive
experiences since one is not surrounded by the space; virtual reality goggles may
solve this problem when they become affordable technology for an entire class.50
In order to comprehend the spatial relationships between the medieval architecture
and its monumental paintings and mosaics, students in groups built cross-in-square
and pilgrimage churches using simple supplies: shoeboxes, cardstock, and plastic
bowls. By dividing the shoebox into appropriate parts such as narthex, nave, choir,
and adding features such as apsidioles made of curved pieces of cardstock,
cylindrical cardstock columns which supported bowl domes or cardstock barrel
vaults, and decorated tympana over the portals (for the Romanesque versions), they
saw how one would move through the church and where the spaces and their
imagery would be in relation to the congregation and the whole building. The
project does not have to be sacred buildings—one semester students also built
typical Norman castles. Rose kept one of the models to refer to when teaching in-
situ mosaics or paintings throughout the rest of the semester.
Art-making projects also engage students in how artists produced
manuscripts while they tap into their own creativity. Videos produced by the Getty
Museum and the St. John’s Seminary on medieval manuscript production show the
manufacture process, from stretching parchment to making ink and writing
calligraphy, and are useful for introducing the medium.51 In one project, students
copied a Hiberno-Saxon interlace pattern from a book that reproduces interlace
motifs from medieval artworks and shows step-by-step how to achieve the
patterns.52 Following the diagrams, first on a sheet of graph paper (monks would
have made their own framework with pinpricks), they marked the points around
which the interlace weaves, and then they drew the pattern in stages. Reflection is
key for experiential learning, and students’ reflective writings showed that they
made connections between the activities and their learning.53 Most students
reported orally and in written reflections that they found this required more

50
For example, Media Center for Art History, “Life of a Cathedral: Notre Dame of Amiens,”
2017, Columbia University, http://projects.mcah.columbia.edu/amiens-arthum/map/panorama-
tour, and the panoramas on http://panoramy.zbooy.pl/360/. We have not yet experimented with
Google Cardboard, but this is a lower cost option of experiencing virtual reality.
51
Getty Museum, “Making Manuscripts,” June 17, 2014, accessed March 13, 2017,
https://youtu.be/nuNfdHNTv9o; and “The Saint John’s Bible,” January 8, 2008, accessed March
13, 2017 https://youtu.be/BK9oCX5lBLQ.
52
Aidan Meehan, Celtic Design: Knotwork (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991).
53
Beard and Wilson, Experiential Learning, 20.

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 Rose and Hedrick: Multisensory and Active Learning in Teaching Medieval Art

concentration than expected, which reinforced art historical scholarship that the
drawing of these patterns may have aided in prayer or been a type of meditation. In
the most recent set of reflections, many students mentioned that the artists must
have had great patience and ability to focus, an aspect of the material that was not
discussed in class and would not have been a point made in readings. One semester,
students were so absorbed in the activity that nobody noticed that the clock showed
class had ended.
Another art-making assignment aimed to help students engage more deeply
with icons. Martikainen argues that creating art promotes not only art history factual
knowledge, but also visual literacy and personal connections to the material.54
Students began by picking a saint (medieval or modern, real or imagined, secular
or sacred) and then wrote a brief “vita.” When describing their saint’s life, students
were asked to refer to primary sources they had read in class and emulate the
strategies and tropes typical of medieval authors. Students described the saint’s
background, what miracles they had done to deserve sainthood, etc. Once students
had settled on a saint—saints ranged from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to a student’s
deceased grandmother to Barack Obama—and written a short version of his/her
life, they then designed and created their own vita icon. Drawing inspiration from
icons they had studied in class, students began by picking a base material (many
used painted canvas to mimic ivory or brown construction paper to mimic wooden
panels) and then moved on to choosing scenes from their saint’s life to depict. Some
students simply drew or painted their vita icon, but a few made multimedia objects,
attaching small sculptures and other materials to a canvas or wooden backing.
Several others also made mosaic icons. As the final part of the assignment, students
were asked to write an “artist’s statement” that placed the icon in an imagined
multisensory environment—students detailed the intended audience of their icon,
how it was used, and where it would have been displayed. The assignment was an
incredible success—students deepened their understanding of medieval
hagiographical practices, more fully engaged with icons they identified as a
prototype or precedent for one of their own making, and thought about the whole
range of meanings afforded by icons through both iconography and symbolism and
also materiality and use.
A similar assignment for a class on medieval court culture asked students
to design a medieval luxury object. Just as students chose their own saint for the
icon assignment, this assignment asked students to choose one of the courts they
studied as a class—from the Theodosians of late antiquity to the courts of French
Burgundy—and design an object for that setting. Students submitted a written piece
outlining their chosen culture, positioning themselves as a particular patron,

54
Martikainen, “Making Pictures, Writing about Pictures,” 13–18 for positive student feedback
from written reflections.

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identifying users/viewers, and detailing the specific political situation in which an

object was intended to be used. From there, they were given free rein to make any
type of object. The range of objects was astounding—one student built a cardboard
model of an imagined Carolingian palace, one used her high school graduation
robes to create late Byzantine coronation regalia, and another carved a bar of soap
to resemble the ivory boxes used in Umayyad Spain. The luxury object assignment
helped students delve more deeply into a particular medieval political environment
and consider the ways that rulers manipulated material culture to establish and
maintain their own power. As with the icons assignment, the finished projects
represented a profound depth of engagement with course material and fulfilled the
foundational knowledge learning goals for these classes of objects.
Resources for historically accurate art-making are Renaissance Faire
artisans or other reenactors such as members of the Society for Creative
Anachronism; these artists are often enthusiastic about sharing their knowledge and
skills of their crafts. A local leatherworker who uses only medieval techniques to
make armguards and drinking horn holders (among other products) brought his
tools and materials to class and allowed students to use the implements as he taught
them how to tool leather. He also brought samples of chain mail made by a
contemporary jeweler. Student curiosity made the question and answer period
lively, and it ranged beyond leather and armor; for example, he had knowledge of
possible methods for medieval tattooing that the professor lacked. Since much
medieval secular art, including dress, does not survive, it was a tangible way to
bring this content into the course. The work, time, and patience necessary to use
premodern technology were made concrete as students used their minds and bodies
to create a pattern on the piece of leather, while learning factual material about
medieval visual culture.
Colin Beard and John Wilson explain experiential learning as involving the
“‘whole person’ through thoughts, feelings and physical activity,” with learning
defined as “insight gained through the conscious or unconscious internalization of
our own or observed experiences, which builds upon our past experiences or
knowledge.”55 Our sensory teaching approach aims to engage the whole student
while providing opportunities for them to make links to the experiences and
creative achievements of humans in the Middle Ages.

Outcomes

Much of our evidence is qualitative in terms of increased student

engagement and learning. We found that the activities, readings, and discussions
on multisensory aspects of medieval art changed many of the students’ impression

55
Beard and Wilson, Experiential Learning, 43.

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 Rose and Hedrick: Multisensory and Active Learning in Teaching Medieval Art

of medieval art in general, providing a more vibrant picture of both medieval art
and medieval art history than the students were expecting. Several students—
particularly those without much exposure to premodern art—had expected
medieval art history to be less theoretically rigorous than other art historical
disciplines, focusing almost exclusively on iconography and style. Course materials
challenged this view. In the opening weeks of Hedrick’s class, students were
particularly taken by Heather Hunter-Crawley’s assertion that premodern material
culture—in this case, early Byzantine liturgical objects—was meant to facilitate an
experience rather than teach a didactic lesson. For students thinking about medieval
art, this basic call to interrogate what an object “does” and “facilitates” rather than
as a text whose meaning could be “read” was transformative. Object-based
experiential activities also helped inspire this same revelation. As one student
reflected after Rose’s class visit to the library Special Collection,

“I liked to hear about the aspects of these books that make

them books and objects that were, at one point, used by a
person day after day. I thought it was interesting to see the
knots that were made at the end of pages so that monks could
easily find a particularly passage, the side notes written in the
margins and blocks of notes that were cut out, and the
splotches of oil left on the pages of the cookbook. All of these
characteristics amplified the human quality of a
book ... Things like bookmarks, margin notes, and food
marks are all imperfections that I can relate to in my own
experiences with books, textbooks, and cookbooks. Even
though now most books are not thought of as a luxury product
as they were in antiquity, their basic use remains the same.
These truly book-like qualities were one of the greatest areas
of interest to me.”

Another student, after attending a Byzantine chant concert with the class, wrote,

“The skill of those chanting, bringing the words to life through

sound is unparalleled. And this exact observation made me
realize just how much a religion can come to life through
aesthetic accomplishments … There is a purpose for every
wavering note that these individuals chanted, much like the
fact that every stroke of the paintbrush by an iconographer is
just as purposeful.”

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The quality of research, analysis, and writing in the final research projects
was better in Rose’s medieval art classes after she began teaching with these
methods, and was very good in general (compared to the general survey course
projects)—the quality showed evidence that students spent more time on the papers,
which indicates that they were interested in the material, notable for a class mostly
filled with students enrolled to fulfill a curriculum distribution requirement. More
students also came to office hours to talk about their projects than she had ever
experienced before. The average score on the final projects in two versions of the
medieval art course increased by 3.7 points (out of 100) from the previous iteration
of the course. Rubrics showed high scores in historical accuracy (used to measure
foundational knowledge and research sources) and application of course material;
over two-thirds of the class earned scores of A in those areas. To answer the
question What aspects of the course contributed most to your learning? in Rose’s
course evaluations, most students cited the field trips and hands-on projects. One
student wrote that the incorporation of hands-on activities “makes learning the
material easier.”
In Hedrick’s classes, too, research papers increased dramatically in quality.
By focusing on how an object or monument engaged the sensorium, students were
able to establish and sustain an argument and make an original contribution to art
history. Papers contained much more analysis and much less summary than is
typical for that level (in fact, one undergraduate student’s paper was so strong that
she has presented it twice at conferences aimed at graduate students or faculty).
Course readings and approaches also positively affected student study of art history
generally. One graduate student—currently in the beginning stages of developing a
dissertation on photography in the 1980s—found that the sensory approach had
influenced her thinking about contemporary art. In particular, she noted that several
readings “expanded [her] thinking about sight as more than vision,” and encouraged
her to analyze looking as a somatic experience rather than one that is primarily
disembodied and analytical. Other evidence includes end-of-semester course
evaluations which positively refer to the field trips and art projects (nine of eleven
students in Rose’s Byzantine seminar specifically mentioned the hands-on art
projects as contributing positively to their learning). In Rose’s medieval art course
(the only one with pre- and post- intervention data), her scores for “excellent
course” and “excellent professor” went up .6 points out of 4 for both categories
from the previous time she taught it, although there were not controls for other
possible factors.
As medievalists, we are pleased that we independently arrived at these
pedagogical ideas at this moment in medieval art history scholarship. Our class
activities and observations corroborate pedagogical research that shows that active
and experiential learning works by affectively engaging students, and most
importantly for us, learning about medieval art in a “sensorium” aligns with the

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 Rose and Hedrick: Multisensory and Active Learning in Teaching Medieval Art

recent theoretical framework that is currently expanding our knowledge of

medieval art’s function and reception. It has been rewarding to see students’
increased interest in, improved engagement with, and learning about the subject.
The alternative would be truly dispiriting.

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Kolb, David A. and Ronald Fry. Toward an Applied Theory of Experiential

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Lauwrens, Jenni. “Welcome to the Revolution: The Sensory Turn and Art
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Levent, Nina and A. Pascual Leone, eds. The Multisensory Museum: Cross-
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———. “Making Pictures, Writing about Pictures, Discussing Pictures and

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Matusz, Pawell J., Murray Wallace, and Micah M. Murray. “A Multisensory

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Appendix: Bibliography of Works for Teaching Multisensory Medieval Art

KNOWLEDGE, LEARNING, EXPERIENCE, SIN: PREMODERN

UNDERSTANDINGS OF THE SENSES

Al-Azmeh, Aziz. “A Rhetoric for the Senses: A Consideration of Muslim

Paradise Narratives.” Journal of Arabic Literature 26 (1995): 215–231.

Casagrande, Carla. “From Vigilance to Temperance: The Senses, the Passions,

and Sin.” Translated by Sara Switzer. In A Feast for the Senses: Art and
Experience in Medieval Europe, edited by Martina Bagnoli, 85–93. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.

Harvey, Susan Ashbrook. “The Christian Body: Ritually Fashioned Experience.”

In Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination,
57–98. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Milhaven, Giles. “A Medieval Lesson on Bodily Knowing: Women’s Experience

and Men’s Thought.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 57
(1989): 341–72.

SIGHT

Camille, Michael. “Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval
Practices of Seeing.” In Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance:
Seeing as Others Saw, edited by Robert S. Nelson, 197–223. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Crawley, Heather Hunter. “Embodying the Divine: Experience of the Sixth-

Century Eucharist.” In Making Senses of the Past: Towards a Sensory
Archaeology, edited by Jo Day, 160–176. Carbondale, IL: Southern
Illinois University Press, 2013.

———. “The Cross of Light: Experiencing Divine Presence in Byzantine Syria.”

In Experiencing Byzantium: Papers from the 44th Spring Symposium of
Byzantine Studies, Newcastle and Durham, April 2011, edited by Claire
Nesbitt and Mark Jackson, 175–94. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013.

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 Rose and Hedrick: Multisensory and Active Learning in Teaching Medieval Art

Frank, Georgia. “The Pilgrim’s Gaze in the Age before Icons.” In Visuality Before
and Beyond the Renaissance, edited by Robert S. Nelson, 98–115.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Gonzalez, Valerie. “The Comares Hall in the Alhambra and James Turrell’s
Space That Sees: A Comparison of Aesthetic Phenomenology.” Muqarnas
20 (2003): 253–78.

Herman, Melissa. “All that Glitters: The Role of Pattern, Reflection, and Visual
Perception in Early Anglo-Saxon Art.” In Sensory Perception in the
Medieval West, edited by Simon C. Thomson and Michael D.J. Bintley,
159–179. Turnhout: Brepols, 2016.

James, Liz. Art and Colour in Byzantine Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

Nelson, Robert. “Descartes’s Cow and Other Domestications of the Visual.” In

Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance, edited by Robert S. Nelson,
98–115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

———. “Empathetic Vision: Looking At and Looking With a Performative

Byzantine Miniature.” Art History 30 (2007): 489–502.

Van Ausdall, Kristin. “Communicating with the Host: Imagery and Eucharistic
Contact in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy.” In Push Me, Pull
You: Imaginative, Emotional, Physical, and Spatial Interaction in Late
Medieval and Early Renaissance Art, edited by Sarah Blick and Laura D.
Gelfand, 447–486. Leiden: Brill, 2011.

TOUCH

Areford, David. “The Passion Measured: A Late-Medieval Diagram of the Body

of Christ.” In The Broken Body: Passion Devotion in Late-Medieval
Culture, edited by Bernhard Ridderbos, Alasdair A. MacDonald, and R.
M. Schlusemann, 211–238. Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1998.

Camille, Michael. “Mimetic Identification and Passion Devotion in the Later

Middle Ages: A Double-Sided Panel by Meister Francke.” In The Broken
Body: Passion Devotion in Late-Medieval Culture, edited by Bernhard
Ridderbos, Alasdair A. MacDonald, and R. M. Schlusemann, 183–210.
Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1998.

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Classen, Constance. “A Place by the Fire” and “A Touchable God.” In The

Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch, 1–46. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2012.

Constas, Nicholas. "Weaving the Body of God: Proclus of Constantinople, the

Theotokos, and the Loom of the Flesh." Journal of Early Christian Studies
3, no. 2 (1995): 169–194.

Pentcheva, Bissera V. “The Performative Icon.” The Art Bulletin 88, no. 4 (2006):
631–655.

SMELL

Bartosiewicz, Laszlo. “‘There’s Something Rotten in the State… Bad Smells in

Antiquity.” European Journal of Archaeology 6, no. 2 (2003): 175–195.

Caseau, Beatrice. “Incense and Fragrances: From House to Church; A Study of

the Introduction of Incense into Early Byzantine Christian Churches.” In
Material Culture and Well-Being in Byzantium (400–1453), edited by M.
Grünbart et al., 75–92. Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der
Wissenschaften, 2007.

Ergin, Nina. “The Fragrance of the Divine: Ottoman Incense Burners in Context.”
The Art Bulletin 96, no. 1 (2014): 70–97.

Howes, David. “Olfaction and Transition.” In The Varieties of Sensory

Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, 128–147.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.

Jenner, Mark. “Follow Your Nose? Smell, Smelling and Their Histories.”
American Historical Review 116 (2011): 335–51.

Pentcheva, Bissera V. “Imprinted Images: Eulogiai, Magic, and Incense.” In The

Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and The Senses in Byzantium, 17–44.
University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010.

Thurkill, Mary. “Odors of Sanctity: Distinctions of the Holy in Early Christianity

and Islam.” Comparative Islamic Studies 3 (2007): 136.

Weddle, Candace. “The Sensory Experience of Blood Sacrifice in the Roman

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 Rose and Hedrick: Multisensory and Active Learning in Teaching Medieval Art

Imperial Cult.” In Making Senses of the Past: Towards a Sensory

Archaeology, edited by Jo Day, 137–159. Carbondale, IL: Southern
Illinois University Press, 2013.

HEARING

Camille, Michael. “Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Implications of Medieval

Literacy and Illiteracy.” Art History 8 (1985): 26–49.

Dillon, Emma. “Sensing Sound.” In A Feast for the Senses: Art and Experience in
Medieval Europe, edited by Martina Bagnoli, 95–114. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2016.

Ergin, Nina. “The Soundscapes of Sixteenth-Century Istanbul Mosques:

Architecture and Qur’an Recital.” Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians 67, no. 2 (2008): 204–221.

Howard, Deborah and Laura Moretti. Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice:
Architecture, Music, Acoustics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

James, Liz. “‘And Shall These Mute Stones Speak’: Text as Art.” In Art and Text
in Byzantine Culture, edited by Liz James, 188–89. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Papalexandrou, Amy. “Echoes of Orality in the Monumental Inscriptions of

Byzantium.” In Art and Text in Byzantine Culture, edited by Liz James,
161–187. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Pentcheva, Bissera V. “Icons of Sound: Hagia Sophia and the Byzantine Choros.”
In The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and The Senses in Byzantium, 45–56.
University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010.

TASTE

Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987.

Carruthers, Mary. “Sweetness.” Speculum 81 (2006): 999–1013.

Fulton, Rachel. “‘Taste and See for the Lord is Sweet’ (Ps. 33.9): The Flavor of
God in the Monastic West.” Journal of Religion 86 (2006): 169–204.

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Maguire, Henry and Eunice Dauterman Maguire. “The Marvels at the Court.” In
Other Icons: Art and Power in Byzantine Secular Culture, 29–57.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Normore, Christina. “Introduction” and “Between the Dishes.” In A Feast for the
Eyes: Art, Performance, and the Late Medieval Banquet, 1–44. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 2015.

MULTISENSORY

Camille, Michael. “Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval
Practices of Seeing.” In Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance:
Seeing as Others Saw, edited by Robert S. Nelson, 197–223. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Cohen, Adam S. “A Multisensory Haggadah.” In Les cinq sens au Moyen Âge,

edited by Eric Palazzo, 305–331. Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2016.

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