IMC 2023: Sessions

Session 508: Taste and Disgust in Late Antiquity, I: Art and Sensation

Tuesday 4 July 2023, 09.00-10.30

Sponsor:	Postgraduate & Early-Career Late Antiquity Network
Organiser:	Ella Kirsh, Department of Classics, Brown University
Moderator/Chair:	Henry Anderson, Department of Classics & Ancient History, University of Exeter
Paper 508-a	Beyond Taste: The Integration of Speech into the Sensorium in the Post-Roman West (Language: English) John Merrington, All Souls College, University of Oxford Index terms: Learning (The Classical Inheritance), Literacy and Orality, Mentalities, Religious Life
Paper 508-b	Hygiene, Shame, and Disgust in Early Christian Bathing Culture (Language: English) Liza Davis, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World, Brown University Index terms: Art History - Decorative Arts, Biblical Studies, Daily Life
Paper 508-c	Reccopolis in the 6th and 21st Centuries: A Taste for Empire, Late Antique and Modern (Language: English) Paul Aste, Department of History, Brown University Index terms: Archaeology - Sites, Byzantine Studies, Historiography - Modern Scholarship, Medievalism and Antiquarianism
Abstract	This panel works outwards along three expanding axes to explore how taste shaped late antique conceptions of soul, household, and empire. The first paper (Merrington) is situated within a single individual and explores how post-Roman authors creatively integrated the Aristotelian categorisation of speech as a form of taste into the larger scheme of the 'sin-prone sensorium'. The second (Davis) looks at shifting domestic tastes, as the spread of Christianity affected ideas about purification, hygiene, and domestic decoration, while the third (Aste) expands the panel's horizons to imitatio imperii as an operating concept behind the creation of Reccopolis, a Byzantine-style city in Visigothic Spain.