IAS Reading Group: Evident Tongues, Evident Bodies: Language, Sense and Proof

This reading group explores how early-modern writers connected linguistic encounters – through translation, foreign tongues, unreadable scripts, religious chants, magical spells, or scientific language – with sensory encounters of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling in the production of evidence, tracing how these ideas also resonate across earlier and later periods. 
        
It examines the ways in which language and the senses work together to collect evidence: how words, sounds, and sensations become sites of truth, persuasion, or belief. Participants are invited to consider the ways in which scientists, theologians, magicians, colonial travellers, rhetoricians, and poets have documented the relationship between speech and perception, and how they might have imagined the senses as instruments for knowing the world.    

This group brings together scholars and researchers from diverse fields and periods to discuss how verbal and sensory forms of proof shape what we take as credible, knowable, or real.

To join the mailing list, or if you have any questions, email Rana Banna (r.banna@ucl.ac.uk) and Mary Newman Newman (mary.newman.14@ucl.ac.uk)

Image credit: An Allegory of the Senses, Gerard de Lairesse, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons