The history of the senses is experiencing a boom across a range of disci-plines, geographies, and time periods. Beyond Sight: Engaging the Senses in Iberian Literatures and Cultures 1200–1750, edited by Ryan D. Giles and Steven Wagschal, contributes to this dynamic conversation, offering a broad look at the senses in premodern Iberia and the New World. The vol-ume’s breadth in scope, with its range of intriguing essays, makes an im-portant contribution to both premodern Iberian literary and cultural studies as well as to sensorial studies more broadly.
The collection begins with Ryan D. Giles’s “The Breath of Lazarus in the Mocedades de Rodrigo.” He studies a confounding episode in which the young Cid encounters a leper and, in spite of the disgust of his companions, helps him to cross a river. Giles unlocks the passage’s meaning through the use of the olfactory and its association with the saintly, which...
