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Peter of Limoges,
Optics, and the
Science of the

Richard G. Newhauser
O
(M
Professor Richard G. ABSTRACT Peter of Limoges's t\/toral
Newhauser of Arizona Treatise on the Eye, composed in the
§ State University,
specializes in Middle environment of the university in Paris in
English literature and 1275/6-89, is a work that recuperates, and
intellectual history. His seeks to control, sensory perception for
monographs include
00
LO Sin and The Eariy ethicai goais. The treatise moves from the
History of Greed. He scientific observations of Perspectivist
is editor of The Seven
optics that Peter acquired from Roger Bacon
Deadly Sins and In
C\l
the Garden of Evil, and Aihacen (Ibn al-Haytham) to the moral
d
co-editor of Virtue interpretations of these facets of optics.
and Ethics in the By focusing on the science of sensation,
Twelfth Century, he is
currently editing Peter the treatise helped make thinking about
o
of Limoges's The Moral the senses themselves part of the common
Treatise on the Eye. cultural work of the pulpit. Peter foregrounds
8 Richard.Newhauser@asu.edu
vision, but he understands the importance of
multisensory experience as well, in particular
in conceptions of the pleasure and danger in
sensory perception itself.

KEYWORDS: optics, ethics, muitisensory, curiosity,

epistemology
 Peter of Limoges, Optics, and the Science of the Senses

Sensoriai Distrust
I The distrust of the senses in earlier Christianity is a well-
I known part of normative, moral-theological discourse on
J sensation in the Middle Ages, The way God sees it, human
beings have so distorted their senses as to irrevocably wound
their ability to perceive in an unprejudiced way. As the divinity says
somewhat peevishly to Noah in the late fourteenth-century poem
Cleanness before unleashing the flood.

For I see well it is true that every human being's senses

Are tossed away for evil along with their innermost thoughts,

(Anderson 1977: 25)^

God, of course, is in good company here among fhe Platonists

and others who turned their backs on the senses in the classical,
epistemological tradition which identified truth as something deep
wifhin the individual, from which material sensation could only be a
distraction, Democritus, for example, in the words of the late-antique
poet Claudian, rejected fhe senses as tools for valid information
gathering, for:

This philosopher condemns the senses and denies that the

truth
Can be perceived by sight,

(Claudius Claudianus [1922] 1990: 344)^

The history of curiosity as a sin is an important branch of this

tradition, significantly informed by Augustine of Hippo for whom
one type of curiosity is the aimless use of the senses, that is to
say, when sensation becomes an end in itself, Augustine's reading
of Plotinus's attack on Gnosticism shaped his own reaction to
how the Manichaeans diverted his search for philosophia info a
preoccupation with mere material reality, and this led him to consider
that earfhy human beings, the impertect descendants of Adam,
are particularly vulnerable to an erroneous dependence on physical
vision and fhe senses generally. When people succumb to the lure
of sensation, Augustine wrote, they make themselves subjects to
things that God created originally to serve humanity. Enslaved by
sensible impressions, human beings consider things below them
fo be admirable and desirable (Augustine of Hippo 1845: 1328),
Since physical vision was most analogous to seeing with fhe mind's
eye, Augustine oonsidered sight fhe most excellent of the bodily
senses (Vance 2008: 17), But for Augustine and fhe large number
of commentators he influenced throughout the Middle Ages and
beyond, visio also remained an all-purpose and enduring symbol,
a metonymy for all the external senses (Augustine of Hippo 1845:
1327), The metonymical importance Augustine attached fo sight
Richard G. Newhauser

is, among other things, an expression of a linguistic factor: physical

vision stands at the top of the hierarchy of polysemy among verbs of
perception, in which verbs denoting sight can be used to express all
other sense modalities, whereas this is not true for verbs of hearing,
touch, taste, and smell (Viberg 1983).
But in its reception, Augustinian thought on the sinful curiosity of
the senses became more differentiated: in the monastic tradition by
the early twelfth century, the coenobitic institution's loss of control
over the type and quality of sensory input defines the contours of
one kind of curiosity as a vice. The second half of the analysis of
this sin in the Liber de humanis moribus, a proto-Scholastic text that
reports the words of Anselm of Oanterbury (d. 1109), differentiates
twenty-eight types of sinful curiosity that are exclusively concerned
with matters of perception located in the dining hall or, even more
outside the purview of the monastic authorities, in the marketplace.
Ouriosity as a vice is distinguished in this way in the combination
and number of senses involved when a monk is too eager to see
what dishes are being served: or tastes the food on the table only to
know whether it tastes good or not: or sees, touches, and smells the
spices for sale in the market simply to know what each one is like
(Southern and Schmitt 1969: 47-50). For Anselm, the unrestrained
context of commercial activity presented in both its pleasures and
moral dangers a stark challenge to monastic authority, and it is
important to see that this challenge expresses itself most completely
as multisensory temptation.
As Hans Gumbrecht has reminded us, the view of a humanity
ennobled insofar as it rises above sensory perception presupposed
a cultural construction of sensory data that existed in a state of
"proverbial tension" with the Aristotelian engagement with the
senses (Gumbrecht 2008: 3). The result is an essential paradox of
the medieval senses in which epistemology is based on sensory
perception while at the same time Christian metaphysics demands
a denunciation of the very senses that act as the agents of cognition
(Küpper 2008: 124, Spiegel 2008). But to notice this paradox is
not yet to answer how a distrust in sensation that privileges the
intellectual over the sensual, theory over practice, could begin to
turn disturbances in perception that seem to question the credibility
of sensory impressions altogether into one of the grounds of ethioal
thought. C M . Woolgar has demonstrated how sensory deprivation
can be used to delineate the characteristics medieval English society
recognized in the senses (Woolgar 2006: 7-8). In an analogous
manner, early scientific investigations of the physiology of sensation
provide a view of one way in which the relativized value of perception
was made a part of ethios. Some of these texts argue that
disturbances in the normal pattern of observation by the senses, and
particularly optical illusions, teach various lessons. In such a work
as Peter of Limoges's Morai Treatise on the Eye, however, one can
see how distortions that appear to question the reliability of sensory
 Peter of Limoges, Optics, and the Science of the Senses^

perception demand both scientific and moral grounding in a type of

unified discourse before the sensual can be made ethically useful.

Peter of Limoges and Perspectivist Optics '

Peter's treatise, a medieval bestseller, was written at the Sorbonne
between 1275/76 and 1289 (Newhauser 1991: 99-100). This was
a period of expanded interest in Perspectivist optics that were being
absorbed into the Latin West through the translation from Arabic
of the Optics of Ibn al-Haytham, known in Latin as Alhacen, and
theologians' interest in natural philosophy and the recovered works
of Aristotle. More specifically, Peter's text is dated to the period of
reaction to Aristotle's work that culminated in the Condemnations
in Paris of those teaching some of its tenets, but it cannot be
argued that 1277 marks the birth date of modern experimental
science, as Pierre Duhem claimed, by freeing natural philosophy
from the hegemony of Aristotelianism. There was no orthodoxy of
Aristotelianism of any variety in the late thirteenth century, nor were
the Parisian condemnations followed by an immediate interest in
experimentation, nor were they aimed at some of the criteria of
experimental science which Duhem himself stressed as crucial to
the foundations of the scientific revolution (Duhem 1906-13: 2: 412;
Lindberg 1992: 238-44). Peter of Limoges's work is a document
in the development of scientific thought in the West, but this is not
to say that he conceived of anything like what we imagine as the
scientific method of reproducible experimentation.
As Bernard Hauréau first demonstrated, the author of the Moral
Treatise on the Eye is that Peter of Limoges who was born in the first
half of the thirteenth century in Donzenac in the diocese of Limoges
and who died on November 2, 1306 (Hauréau 1873: 460-3;
Spettmann 1923: 317-22). He was a member of the Sorbonne who
was involved with both the arts and the theology faculties, achieved
both the baccalaureate and the magister in theology (Bériou 1978:
108 and n.13), served as a canon of Évreux and was widely known
as an astronomer (Delisle 1874: 168; Thorndike 1945-6: 3-6).^
His treatise on the eye was transmitted extensively, first through
the pec/'a-system recently developed at the university in Paris and
elsewhere, and then in monastic, fraternal, and secular ecclesiastical
environments. The work is still extant in over 220 manuscripts, with
evidence of at least forty-four further copies that have been lost or
were destroyed. Peter's treatise was printed three times at the end
of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries, four times
in the middle of the seventeenth century and is available in an Italian
translation by Theofilo Romano printed in 1496. Since it has not yet
been critically edited, however, the full range of the work's influence
still remains to be assessed today.
The study of optics had had a firm place in Parisian studies since
the 1220s, and was closely connected to scholars, like Robert
Grosseteste, who were also theologians. Nevertheless, the last third
 Richard G. Newhauser

of the thirteenth century was a period of significant change in the field

of optics because it was in this period that the work of Alhacen had
its greatest impact in the West (Lindberg [1978] 1983: I; Lindberg
1976: 58-86). Of the important innovations that Alhacen's work
brought to optical science, one can note, for example, that before
about 1260 it was most common to imagine the act of seeing,
following Plato, Euclid, and Ptolemy as a process of "extramission"
which was set in motion by a visual fire streaming out of the eye. But
Alhacen, following in and adapting the tradition of Aristotle and his
interpreters, argued against this hypothesis with his version of the
"intromission" theory, according to which sight occurs only when rays
of light enter the eye perpendicular to the retina. Roger Bacon closely
followed the Perspectivist teachings of Alhacen, though not without
retaining a portion of the extramissionist position, and out of this
interest grew Bacon's own work entitled Perspectiva and a number
of other treatises he composed in Paris in and after the 1260s.
The Moral Treatise on the Eye is indebted for most of its under-
standing of the mechanics of vision to the Perspectivist tradition,
either directly from Alhacen or, more often, through the mediation
of Roger Bacon's work. Even beyond this, its very project of using
biblical and scientific texts on vision as an index to divine wisdom
reflects, and does so at times verbatim, the brief, final section
of Bacon's Perspectiva, in which he moves, as part of a larger
project, from describing optics as secular knowledge to including it
in the study of theology (Newhauser 2001: 628-703). What Bacon
formulated for learned use as the theoretical foundation for his
proposed reformation of all of Christendom finds its more thoroughly
assimilated, popular-moralizing transposition in Peter's text, a work
that makes the findings of natural science fit for the pulpit and draws
attention to the senses in homiletic discourse. It is clear that this
popularization reinforced the credibility of Perspectivism in a wider
swath of the public than would have been able to engage with
the science of Roger Bacon or Alhacen, and this in fact may have
had the supplementary effect of justifying further optical research
by providing it moral cover, as it were, making it simply another
extension of ecclesiastical orthodoxy. In any case, Peter is explicit
about how the science of vision will support ethics:

Thus, as I am about to say a few words on the eye - since

the edification of souls is contained in it - , I want first of all to
.'I' compose a brief section dealing with the matter scientifically
(§ and, second, after this to treat it morally, insofar as "he who
•^ formed the eye" [Ps. 93: 9], "whose eyes are turned to the
I pauper" [Ps. 10:5], will consider it worthwhile to illuminate the
w blind eye of my reason. (Peter of Limoges 1475[?]: Prologue)''

A morality based on the scientific observation of nature describes

Peter's method in much of the treatise. First he builds a foundation
 Peter of Limoges, Optics, and the Science ot the Senses

made up of information gained from the new teachings on optics,

and then from this vantage point he extracts the ethical implications
important for his text, to the point of aiiegorizing the scientific ex-
pianations for vision themselves (Denery II 2005: 78), in this way
he can both adopt reiativeiy new findings of naturai science for his
day and at the same time avoid the charge of mere vain curiosity, of
spending time as a theoiogian on something other than theology,
an accusation that wouid have had particularly reai consequences
at the university in Paris foiiowing the Condemnations of 1277, The
transition from what he reports scientialiter to what is interpreted
moraliter yieids a chain of anaiogous reasoning that educates the
viewer in a series of iessons on how to see, that is to say, on how
to transform sensation into perception, or, the science of vision
into pastoral theoiogy. Chapter 11, for exampie, is devoted to what
university students must iearn from the conditions necessary for
vision to occur, in the third section, Peter borrows from Roger Bacon
to note that "a proportionate amount of distance is required for sight.
For if a visibie object is piaced directly on the eye, or if it is very distant
from the eye, it wiii not be seen," Peter's moral application of this
optical condition foliows immediateiy: "In similar fashion, if a schoiar
is very distant from anything to be iearned because of hatred, or if
he undertakes to iearn it with an excessive amount of iove, he does
not see it nor does he judge it correotly. For iove and hate pervert
judgment" (Peter of Limoges 1475[?]: 11,3).^ Interpreting vision in
the context of the university, then, supports the cuiturai work of
constructing the ideai of the intellectual as an objective observer,
abie to overcome the messiness of the passions. Here, too, the
iong-heid notion of sight as a cooi and distanced sense served the
purpose of seif-preservation in the context of teaching theoiogy at
the Sorbonne in the iate thirteenth century.

Ethics and the Senses

For the absorption of technicaiiy scientific treatises into theoiogical
discourse, the procedure tacitiy agreed on in Western culture was
to describe the universe as exactly as possible with the heip of the
emerging Greek and Arabic texts of science and naturai philosophy,
but then to put this new information at the disposal of theoiogy.
The function of Peter's treatise in the project of educating the eye
to see moraily in a context beyond the university is ciearest where
he explains opticai iiiusions, and it is here that the issue of what
appears to question the credibiiity of vision as an important eiement
among the information-gathering tools in the human sensorium is
foregrounded. The way in which a rod sticking out of water appears
to be broken; how things under water seem to the eye larger than
they are in reaiity; that an image observed in a mirror is less vivid
than an object seen directiy, or that the left and right sides of an
object appear transposed in a mirror; the "moon iiiusion," whereby a
celestiai body appears iarger when seen near the horizon than when
Richard G, Newhauser

if is viewed af a higher angle of incidence - all of these phenomena

disturb the normal activity of sensory perception as a picture of
fhe world. Explaining them was a standard feature of Perspeotivist
optics, but if is Peter of Limoges's service to make them ethically
useful to preachers and their congregations throughout Europe,
The physical explanations can be particularly detailed here, as when
Peter accounts for what is now commonly understood as the way
light refraction makes an object sficking out of water appear to be
broken. In Peter's words:

an object that we look af in water appears fo the eye to be

closer than it is, measured by fhe actual distance of its location,
and thus the part of the rod in the water does nof appear fo our
sight as a confinuous and straight exfension of fhe other part,
but seems closer fo fhe eye ifself, and so fhe rod appears fo
be broken, (Peter of Limoges 1475[?]: 6,4)''

And fhe way Pefer morally completes fhis scientific explanafion

testifies fo the growing casuistry of penifenfial theology at fhe end of
fhe thirteenth century:

If happens occasionally in fhe same way if someone who is

truly an upright and God-fearing person should ever, and for
whatever reason, make use of fhe pleasures of this world,
which are close fo the eyes of worldly people. Although he
does nof immerse himself complefely in fhe sfream of these
kinds of pleasures, but only up to a point, since presumably
he does not act this way because of the impudence of his
mind, but because of fhe enjoymenf his body finds necessary,
nonetheless he somefimes offends many others who see fhis,
and he is judged by common opinion fo be broken spiritually
and to have turned aside from moral rectitude, (Pefer of
Limoges 1475[?]: 6,4)'

Precisely by focusing aftenfion on the need fo inferpref fhe science

of sensory perception ethically, Peter's fexf helped make fhinking
about the senses themselves part of the common cultural work of
fhe pulpif.
The disturbance in fhe normal reliabilify of sensory dafa envisioned
in Pefer's fext is not a statement of philosophical skepticism, but
it highlighfs the reality of an inferprefive sfage in fhe process of
perception because, as optical illusions bring info sfark relief, by
ifself seeing is not believing. In modernity, science and religion may
find fhemselves in agreement on fhe supremacy of vision among the
senses so that seeing is closely allied with believing (Smifh 2007: 25),
buf for a medieval aufhor like Pefer of Limoges - a polymafh in bofh
science and fheology - vision is very much fraught with uncertainty.
The theological mechanism of confrol over perception fhaf is exerted
 Peter of Limoges, Optics, and the Science of the Senses

in Peter's work is reified physiologically. Vision is not completed in

the eyes, he notes, for if that were the case two different species
of an objeot reaching the eyes would result in two separate images
(species being the technical terni' in Latin for the form of an object
that was thought to multiply itself from the visual object to the eye in
the act of vision). Instead, there is a singular organ in whioh vision is
completed, namely the common nerve, located on the surface of the
brain, where the optic nerves meet coming from the anterior portion
of the brain. Here is the origin of what was called the visual power:
"Since, then, this power is singular at its source, and the powers of
the eyes form a continuum with it, for that reason one object can
appear as a single thing, although it is seen by two eyes" (Peter of
Limoges 1475[?]: 5).^ The way the common nerve lies under the
surface of a human being's exterior is made into a lesson for how
one should not judge by first impressions, but it does not lie far
afield to see a further implication here, namely that the singularity
of authorized judgment in perception is a type of internaiization of
ecclesiastical control over the process of interpreting vision. Peter
grounds the ethics of the sense of sight in the physiology of vision
- he makes the internal sense into a censor (Biernoff 2002: 122-4;
Clark 1977) - in the same way as he justifies the need for an ethical
authority in perception by all of the senses.
One can see, in other words, that the medieval oontradiotion
between an epistemology that always proceeded from sensory
perception to cognition and a Christian metaphysics that spurned
the senses did not have to lead to an impasse (cf. Küpper 2008:
139). If the means of peroeption are also the agents potentially
undermining cognition, then the conneotion of perception and the
will can achieve coherence, namely in a process of reforming the
interpretation of sensory data. The paradox that Küpper points to,
and the ambiguity of sensation itself, demanded an ethical response:
they served as the foundation for the moral comprehension of the
sensorium in the Middle Ages, one in which the connection of the
senses and volition is understood effectively as a pedagogical one.
This moral context for the senses is an essential element of the
medieval understanding of the sensory world (Woolgar 2006:16-18)
that stands in stark contrast to modern concepts of sensation. It
is articulated in a large number of homiletic admonitions to guard
the senses, in the presentation of the external senses as one of the
catechetical pieces important for inculcating the faith, and in the use
of the senses in the sacrament of penance. Peter of Limoges takes .f"
his place in this educational agenda in expressing the edification ^
of the senses in a unified discourse that finds common ground «s
between theology and optics. In this way, it is related to efforts «
underway elsewhere at the same time to instructing the senses on
the foundation of a "cardiosensory" integration in whioh peroeption
was also understood as part of a unified physiologioal and spiritual
process (Webb 2008).
Richard G. Newhauser

Voiuntarist Optics
As much as the Moral Treatise on the Eye is indebted to Bacon's
Perspectiva and Alhacen's De aspectibus, Peter also adds to their
construction of sensory perception in a number of important ways.
First of all, he carries further Bacon's view that vision is a give and
take between the viewer and the object, in a way that looks forward
to a recognition of the agency of the perceiver in an epistemologicai
process that moves beyond mere biology in defining what is meant
by sensory perception. As he notes at the beginning of Chapter 4,
"As Ptolemy proves in his book On Appearances, not only is the
intromission of the form of the visible object required for vision, but
also the extramission and cooperation of one's own species and
power" (Peter of Limoges 1475[?]: 4).^ It is typical for a medieval
author to claim an authority on whom to base his ideas, but in
fact Ptolemy is an exponent of the extramission theory of vision,
arguing that a visual flux emanates from the eye. When the flux
touches an object, vision occurs. Sight, then, is closely related to
touch in its operation for Ptolemy, and an element of the sense of
touch in understanding vision remained with the Perspectivists,
as well (Ptolemy 1989: 17; Ptolemy 1996: 74-5). Something like
the agency Peter attributes to the viewer is implied in the work
of earlier Perspectivists, insofar as Perspectivist optics stresses
the importance of the location of the eye when viewing an object
and the medium through which it is seen (Nichols 2008: 286-307).
But Peter emphasizes far more than is found in the work of other
Perspectivists the active participation of the viewer in the process of
perception. Partially, what he has in mind is the way an observer has
to concentrate on a particular object in order to grasp it when faced
with an array of possible objects of vision, and one can identify here
the pre-history of conceptions like that by the eighteenth-century
naturalist, Gharles Bonnet, who considered mental abstraction
nothing more than a focusing of attention on one detail of an object
to the exclusion of others, an idea that has been analyzed as part of
the "cult of attention" in the Enlightenment (Daston 2008: 107).
More important, as Peter explains in Chapter 11, the application of
the visual faculty is one of the conditions required for vision to occur
at all. The importance of intention in completing sight at all times is
not stated explicitly by either Roger Bacon or Alhacen. Bacon, to be
sure, maintains that "vision must occur through its species extended
to the visible object"'" from the eye (Bacon 1996:130), which makes
it clear that the physical activity of the viewer is an element in the
completion of vision. And for Bacon the "common, estimative, and
discriminative senses play an active part in making the world appear
to us as it does, by combining, discriminating, or otherwise sorting
and filtering (thus 'evaluating') what has been received" by the sense
organs (Tachau 2006: 351). But it is precisely because Peter of
Limoges is educating his audience in how to see ethically that what
one might call a "voiuntarist optics" (in an extended sense of the
 Peter of Limoges, Optics, and the Science of the Senses

philosophical term "voluntarism") is a firm part of his conception of

vision. Seeing, in other words, can indeed be believing, but only with
the involvement of the well-educated will. ,
It is the fragility of the sense of sight, the way in which it can
easily succumb to deception, that justifies the need for education in
visual perception in particular. Later theologians often repeated the
warning that the eyes can be fooled; Ignatius of Loyola has served
as a good example of this understanding of fragile sight (Smith
2007: 29, Synnott 1991: 65-9). Peter emphasizes this matter not
only in dealing with optical illusions, but elsewhere in his work as
well. In Chapter 12.4, for example, he examines how Isaac was
misled by Jacob in the latter's claim to the birthright of the firstborn
(Gen. 27: 1).The issue is part of a larger argument about how the
clergy has become impaired in the historical development of the
Church, symbolized by Isaac's frail vision in his old age. But it is
important for Peter that while the other external senses might remain
acute, weakness of the sense of sight can lead to misperception.
Thus, Isaac ate the savory food Jacob had prepared for him and
could clearly distinguish its flavor, so his sense of taste was not
deceived; "neither was his sense of touch, which very clearly felt the
hairiness of Jacob's neck and hands; nor his ears, for he said. The
voice is the voice of Jacob' (Gen. 27:22); nor his sense of smell,
since 'he smelled the fragrance of Jacob's garments' (Gen. 27:27).
Only his sight failed him" (Peterof Limoges 1475[?]: 12.4).^'

Intersensoriality and the Lure of the Senses

Although the Moral Treatise on the Eye deals centrally with vision,
in the passage just quoted and elsewhere it does not ignore the
other four, external, senses (and such internal matters as seeing
with the eye of the mind, or heart, etc.). Unlike Bacon's work,
however, Peter also recognizes and makes an important part of his
discussion multisensory experiences. The interplay of the senses
- their intersensoriality (Smith 2007: 125-9) - is a general part of
his consideration of perception: for example, sight and hearing are
the senses involved in learning, he notes, reflecting the system of
lecturing and reading at the university in Paris (Chapter 11.2);^^ ^^^
in Chapter 9 he notes that sight and taste are the senses that lead
to displays of excessive expenditure, following here the statement by
Seneca that, "No longer are people content with plundering by their
teeth and stomach and mouth; they are also gluttonous with their
eyes" (Seneca 1996:134).'^ But the way in which sight and taste are .f"
involved in opulent exhibitions of wealth is also part of Peter's critique ^
of the rich that runs through the treatise. »a
In an examination of optics one would naturally expect an ^
ocularcentric discourse, and thus Peter's careful references to the ^
other external senses might appear all the more surprising. But his
rationale for attention to other senses is not really a devaluation of
sight in favor of hearing, taste, smell, and touch. Two reasons may
 Richard G. Newhauser

heip account for why Peter aiso focuses on the other senses in his
treatise. First, Perspectivist iiterature had the effect of making the
veracity of sight contingent: the point of view from which anything
was seen couid change what was reported about that object, and
this made having faith in vision more difficult, even for the trained eye.
Casting suspicion on an instinctive beiief in the reporting vaiue of the
eyes oniy supported the Perspectivist agenda, of course, by making
its understanding of optics the only vaiid expianation for the vagaries
of vision that Perspectivism itseif emphasized. Yet, caliing attention
to these ambiguities of sight can aiso be seen to have had the effect
of reinforcing the importance of the ocular in the sensorium since it
made it all the more urgent to get vision right. If it did not resuit in
reinforcing sight as the nobiest of the senses, as has been argued
for the iHelienic treatment of the ambiguities of vision (Jay 1993: 29),
it made the functional vaiue of the eyes in epistemoiogy aii the more
crucial. And this reinforced the second reason for Peter's attention
to other senses in a book on optics, nameiy the metonymical value
of seeing, in a program that aimed to educate the senses, the
muitisensory could be summarized in ways in which the reader was
taught to reinterpret sight. But this required some consistency in
references to the other senses, and Peter provides these aiiusions
on a regular basis in his treatise.
Given Peter's project to educate his audience in how to perceive,
his most extensive use of muitisensory experience comes with the
analysis of the temptation to commit the corporeai sins of giuttony
and iust, Peter inciudes an entire chapter on how aii seven deadly
sins affect vision, though it was more common to characterize the
heptad of sins according to the five senses. This iatter tendency
became so common, and the "correspondence between the senses
and the sins appears so straightforward, that at the moment of
confession the five senses easiiy became a means of ciassifying the
sins" (Casagrande 2002: 33). In Peter's work, however, the banquet
haii yieids the kind of "muitisensory conceptualization of piace" that
Stephen Feid wrote about some years ago (2005:182). As the site of
exuberant conviviaiity, the banquet haii passes through Peter's morai
anaiysis to emerge as the iocus of succumbing to the fiesh in aii its
sensory implications. Explaining why the book of Proverbs warns
against iooking at the enticing coior of wine (Prov. 23:31), Peter
notes that the verse censures:

.•ffi the voraciousness of modern peopie for whose giuttony taste

(§ aione does not suffice, but they want ail of their senses to
°* become inebriated by one chaiice. For sight is pleased in the
m ciearness of the wine, touch in its coolness, taste in its fiavor,
(% the nose in its odor, and since there is nothing in wine that
couid piease the sense of hearing, they add song, the lyre,
and the timbrei, isaiah 5: "The iyre and iute and timbrei and
fiute and wine at your banquets" (isa. 5:12), (Peter of Limoges
 Peter of Limoges, Optics, and the Science of the Senses

As a way of indicafing fhe effect of succumbing fo sensual bland-

ishments, no neaf hierarchy of the senses emerges from the seffing
of fhe banquet, as if was fo do in fhe Renaissance convention of fhe
"banquef of sense" (Kermode [1961] 1971; Vinge 1975: 105-11):
sight comes firsf in Pefer's enumeration, buf fouch is nof af fhe end
of fhe lisf as fhe lowesf of fhe senses. All five exfernal senses form a
fangled knof of sensorial pleasure, Sfill, Pefer employs fhe image of
fhe banquef fo much the same effecf if would be puf lafer. His social
orifique of the moderns of his day is meanf to characterize those
who have turned fheir backs on fhe eucharisfic lesson of Corinfhians
10 (and Hercules' rejection of Circe's cup), people who have already
sunk "into bestiality, preferring fhe creafure fo fhe Creafor" (Kermode
[1961] 1971: 87),15
In spife of himself, a liveliness can be felf in Pefer's fhinking abouf
corporeal sins. This liveliness is nof fhe revelafion of a disguised
infent fo praise sensual pleasures fhaf ofhen/vise musf lie hidden
under fhe cover of denouncing fhe senses so as to conform fo fhe
orthodox posifion of sensory denigration (see Küpper 2008: 123),
If poinfs rafher fo a cenfral efhical ambiguify of medieval sensory
experience which required Pefer's emphasis on the importance of
moral inferpref af ion in the evaluation of sensory data in the first place.
As Pierre Bourdieu described if, between fhe explicif efhical positions
of orthodoxy and heferodoxy lie fhe often unarticulafed, more or less
unconscious assumptions fhaf make up a sociefy's nafuralizafion
of arbifrary decisions abouf legitimizing or delegifimizing behavior,
which he fermed doxa (Bourdieu 1977:164), For fhe moral fradifion
in which Pefer sifuafes himself, sensual delight is consfanfly on
fhe verge of being scandalized. The body as the sife of anxiefy
abouf fhe pleasures and moral dangers of sensory experience is
somefhing articulafed in abrupfly counferpoinfed sfafemenfs when
Peter speaks of fhe way women lead men to sexual sins through all
of fheir senses. Among fhe examples Pefer gives of female sexualify,
he nof es fhaf

affer a certain whore had losf one eye due to a disease and a
priest fold her fhis had happened fo her fhrough God's fitfing
vengeance because of her sin, she said, "I prefer fo be confent
with one eye rafher fhan wifh one man," (Pefer of Limoges
1475[?]: 8,7)16

Pefer is often openly and bluntly misogynisfic, so if is no surprise

thaf women, unless idealized as the Virgin Mary, are the source
of corporeal and sensual fempfation in his treatise. Nor is if sur-
prising fhat a woman confronfs a priest in fhe confrasf of fhe
heterodox and orfhodox positions. Between them is fhe doxa,
when fhinking sensually and efhically, that amounts to slippage
between understanding the senses as valid epistemological fools
and insfruments of legifimafe pleasure (as they are in an exemplum
 Richard G. Newhauser

in Chapter 14 of a cleric who is willing to sacrifice his eyesight to

see the Virgin) and, as the portals of sin and depravity (as they are in
many other passages in the treatise). And this moment of ambiguity
helps make understandable why it is that multisensual incidents
such as a banquet result in the condemnation of great temptation
at the same time as they wind up being descriptions of a vividly
beguiling sensual experience.

Notes
1. "For I se wel j^at hit is sothe |Dat alle segge^ wytteg / To vn j^ryfte
arn alle [Drawen with poj,X of her hertteg"
2. "corporis hie [= Democritus] damnât sensus verumque videri /
pernegat."
3. Peter's university dossier is found in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale
MS. lat. 16390, 9r-14v.
4. "Dicturus igitur pauca de oculo - prout ibi continetur animarum
edifioatio - primo de ipso sciencialiter, secundo post hee
moraliter, breuem volo sermonem faoere, prout 'ille, qui finxit
ooulum,' 'cuius oculi respiciunt in pauperem,' rationis mee
cecutientem oculum dignabitur illustrare."
5. "ad Visum requiritur proportio distantie. Nam si visibile supra
oculum ponitur, vel si nimis ab oculo distat, non videtur. Modo
consimili si soolaris ab aliqua scientia nimis distet per odium, vel
si accédât nimium per amorem inordinatum, non videt eam nee
rectum de ea iudicium habet. Nam amor et odium peruertunt
iudicium."
6. "res, quam in aqua conspicimus, propinquior apparet oculo
quam sit secundum veram distantiam sui situs. Et ideo pars
baculi existens in aqua non apparet visui in continuum et
directum partis alterius, sed ipsi oculo apparet propinquior, et
ideo videtur esse fractus."
7. "Sic contingit interdum, quod aliquis, qui est secundum verit-
atem vir rectus et timens Deum, si fortassis ob causam aliquam
aliquando vtatur delicijs huius mundi, que mundanorum oculis
sunt propinque, quamuis non totaliter se immergat fluxui
deliciarum huiusmodi sed solum ex parte, quia fortassis hoc
non facit propter mentis petulantiam sed propter corporis
recreationem necessariam, nichilominus quandoque scandal-
isât plurimos hoc videntes, et vulgo iudicatur spiritualiter esse
fractus et a morum rectitudine obliquasse."
.s 8. "quia tune virtus fontalis est vna, ad quam continuantur virtutes
(^ oculorum, ideo potest vna res apparere vna, quamuis videatur a
"^ duobus oculis."
I 9. "Item sicut probat Ptholomeus in Libro de aspectibus, ad
OT visionem non solum exigitur, ut fiat intus suscipiendo visibilis
similitudinem, sed etiam extramittendo et cooperando per
propriam speciem et virtutem."
10. "oportet Visum fieri per suam speciem factam ad visibile."
 Peter of Limoges, Optics, and the Science of the Senses

11. "nec tactus qui pilositatem colli et manuum bene sensit, nee
auris, nam ait: 'Vox quidem, vox lacob,' nec odoratus, quia
'vestimentorum flagrantiam sensit.' Solus autem visus defecit."
12. It can still be argued "that higher education caters virtually
exclusively to the senses of sight and hearing" (Howes 2008:
445).
13. "lam non sunt homines ad rapinam dentibus et uentre et ore
contenti; oculis quoque gulosi sunt."
14. "ingluuiem modernorum, quibus non tantum sapor sufficit
guie, sed volunt vt omnes sensus eodem inebrientur calice.
Delectatur enim visus in claritate, tactus in frigiditate, gustus in
sapore, nasus in odore, et quia non est in vino quod delectet
auditum, assumunt canticum liram et tympanum, Ysaie v: 'Lira
et cythara et tympanum et tybia et vinum in conuiuijs vestris.'"
15. I am grateful to David Howes for suggesting the connection of
Peter's text with the tradition of the "banquet of sense."
16. "Guedam meretrix, cum ex morbo vnum oculum amisisset et
ei sacerdos diceret quod istud propter peccatum suum digna
Dei vindicta contigisset: 'Malo,' inquit, 'contenta esse vno oculo
quam vno viro.'"

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