Entangled Histories of the Proximal Senses (1350-1650): A Mediterranean History of (Subjective) Knowledge

The proximal senses—taste and touch—were linked historically to the body, femininity, and subjectivity.

This both fed adverse socio-cultural, religious, and gender stereotypes and allowed the voices of women, subaltern subjects, and Mediterranean people to be dismissed as irrelevant to knowledge-making.

It also influenced modern scholarship, which has given undue weight to sight and the observation practices of seventeenth-century Northern European men as signals of the advent of modern science.PROXISENSES challenges this narrative, arguing that other forms, eras, and practitioners of experimental practices also contributed much to the production of knowledge about the natural world.

Building on histories of the senses, food, knowledge, and the Mediterranean, it breaks new ground with three key questions, each tied to a research objective (RO).

RO1 Practices: What was the epistemic value of the proximal senses before the alleged Scientific Revolution (i.e., 1350–1650)?

RO2 People: To what extent did manual workers (e.g., fruit sellers, farmers, fishmongers, miners, winemakers) contribute to a better understanding of plants, minerals, and animals?

RO3 Knowledge: What impact did a millennium of cross-cultural encounters in the Mediterranean have on the construction of sensory knowledge?

To address these issues, PROXISENSES uses three food subprojects to investigate touch and taste across the Mediterranean.

Each food represents a main category used to classify the natural world: salt (minerals), grapes (plants), and fish (animals).

Explored through diverse, scattered primary sources using digital and archival methodologies, the subprojects offer both transversal joint food histories and detailed microhistories.

By unearthing previously invisible knowledge-makers, PROXISENSES contributes to the urgent need to decolonise histories of science by offering a transformative vision of the genesis of empirical practices that are central to our view of natural sciences today.