Introduction: What and Where is Touch?
Alex Purves
1. Hands Know the Truth: Touch in Euryclea’s Recognition of Odysseus
Silvia Montiglio
2. Touching, Proximity, and the Aesthetics of Pain in Sophocles
Nancy Worman
3. Aristotle and the Priority of Touch
Rebecca Steiner Goldner
4. The Duality of Touch
David Sedley
5. Getting to Grips with Classical Art: Rethinking the Haptics of Graeco-Roman Visual Culture
Verity Platt and Michael Squire
6. In the Body of the Beholder: Herder’s Aesthetics and Classical Sculpture
Helen Slaney
7. The Contaminating Touch in the Roman World
Jack Lennon
8. The Touch of Poetry in the Carmina Priapea
Elizabeth Young
9. In Touch, In Love: Apuleius on the Aesthetic Impasse of a Platonic Psyche
Giulia Sissa
10. Noli me tangere: the Theology of Touch
Catherine Conybeare
11. Losing Touch: Impaired Sensation in Greek Medical Writings
Rebecca Flemming
Biography
Alex Purves is Professor of Classics at the University of California Los Angeles, USA. She is the author of Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative (2010) and co-editor, with Shane Butler, of Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses (2013), published in this "Senses in Antiquity" series. Her most recent book, Homer and the Poetics of Gesture, is forthcoming.
"Purves' volume provides a powerful corrective to sight as the preeminent sense in Classical scholarship. As each essay demonstrates, touch blurs the boundaries between subjective and objective experience in providing what Purves calls a "feeling for the past." This volume is required reading for scholars interested in the relationship between perception, cognition, and affect in interpreting ancient texts and artifacts."
- Karen Bassi, University of California Santa Cruz, USA
"Touch and the Ancient Senses provides a useful introduction to this changing area of the field ... this study is often fascinating and it contains many seeds for further discussion ... an elegant overall structure, with Aristotle’s problem as a thread running from the first sentence of Alex Purves’ introduction to the last sentence of the final chapter. This is an appropriate frame for a topic that puzzled philosophers and physicians throughout antiquity."
- Kenneth Silverman, University of Florida, USA, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2018
