Sensology and Enargeia

Abstract

Abstract Using sensology to examine feelings produced by the reception of intensely vivid descriptions that early rhetoricians termed the technique of enargeia allows us a degree of specificity about collective responses to the reception of literature within sensory communities, and it provides a channel from sensation to perception that no longer privileges the visual. Focusing on the multisensual in enargeia demonstrates literature’s unique ability to guide the senses in the representation of reality and to create the reader’s intensified presence within that reality. The interconnection between affects, emotions, and the senses can be illustrated in the late fourteenth-century Piers the Plowman’s Crede, which articulates the political charge of appealing to sensory formations in literature. The Lollard networks that read this text participated in the misery and wisdom of its ploughman, forming a sensory community through the presentation of sight and touch in the enargeia of his initial entrance into the poem.