Publisher's Synopsis
All the human senses become engaged in ritualising sacred texts. These essays focus especially on ritualising the iconic dimension of texts through the senses of sight, touch, kiss, and taste, both directly and in the imagination. Ritualised display of books engages the sense of sight very differently than does reading. Touching gets associated with reading scriptures, but touching also enables using the scripture as an amulet. Eating and consuming texts is a ubiquitous analogy for internalising the contents of texts by reading and memorisation. The idea of textual consumption reflects a widespread tendency to equate humans and written texts by their interiority and exteriority: books and people both have material bodies, yet both seem to contain immaterial ideas.
