Submissions are now being sought for a themed issue of the Open Arts Journal, for publication in 2014, entitled:

“Touch Me, Touch Me Not: Re-evaluating the Senses, Gender, and Performativity in Early Modernity”.

The issue will be edited by Erin E. Benay (Case Western Reserve University) and Lisa M. Rafanelli (Manhattanville College).

In recent years, numerous conference sessions and symposia and several excellent anthologies have addressed the role of the senses in the genesis and reception of Renaissance art. Much of the important work to have emerged from these conversations concerns the revaluing of the visual reception of art in the period and has suggested the importance of touch, hearing, and even smell and taste in the multi-sensory experience of early modern art. Building on this rich dialogue, this volume aims to explore the way the senses were evoked in devotional contexts, where questions of the validity of sensory experience were particularly contentious.

To augment the scholarship published in recent anthologies (edited by Bacci and Melcher, Sanger and Kulbrandstad Walker, and de Boer and Göttler) we seek new essays that privilege issues of gender and redress the supremacy of sight often assumed of the ocularcentric Renaissance. Such papers might suggest the importance of touch, hearing, smell and taste in the somaesthetic experience of early modern beholders. As Geraldine Johnson has so eloquently proposed, by revisioning Michael Baxandall’s famous “period eye,” we might, in fact, arrive at a more aptly described “period body.”

The Open Arts Journal is a peer-reviewed publication; for more information please visit the website www.openartsjournal.org

Please submit a title, 400-word abstract, and brief CV to eeb50@case.edu and Lisa.Rafanelli@mville.edu no later than July 30, 2013.