This volume both makes an intervention in sensory studies and proposes vibrant new avenues for continued research in the field. The eight essays take as their focus early modern Europe from 1500 to 1700. Together they argue for increased attention to the agency of individuals and small groups in the making of sensory knowledge. The authors in the collection rethink scholarly understandings of the relationship between people's use of the senses and larger cultural paradigms: authors emphasize intentionality and individual contexts, resisting readings of the human subject as passively imprinted by cultural forces. Marlene L. Eberhart and Jacob M. Baum, writing in the introduction, encourage an awareness as to how the production of sensory knowledge in the period resulted in “an entangled web of micro-cultural dynamics playing out across an archipelago of contexts that dotted the early modern European world” (2). The chapters that follow illuminate these dynamics with a careful exploration of the local, issues of practice, and individual experience in early modern Europe.

The chapters largely center on visual and textual objects, and they bring into discussion a range of genres, including the fictional, personal narrative, and religious texts. Case studies are closely focused in scope: the authors share an investment in micro-historical accounts of sensory experience. As the collection's title suggests, chapters examine different forms of expertise, and this often translates to a focus on artistry and/or artisanal labor. Eberhart's essay on the Italian painter Dosso Dossi, for example, explores how the artist's representation of Apollo with the stringed instrument lira da braccio evokes a combination of sensory experiences, including visual and auditory memory. Gary K. Waite also brings a close attention to craft in his treatment of David Joris, the Dutch painter and writer. Waite demonstrates how Joris's training as a visual artist shaped and contributed to his radical beliefs as a Protestant reformer. And Philip Hahn's chapter discusses artisanal labor in global contexts with a consideration as to how early modern German artisans communicated new sensory experiences following their travels to Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean (among other locales).

One of the most valuable aspects of this collection is how it advocates for new directions in sensory studies. The volume is formatted to encourage continued conversation: an afterword stages a virtual roundtable between authors, where they speak to points of connection that emerge in the preceding essays. The collection's emphasis on the individual, for example, reads as particularly important in the context of disability studies. Questions of disability come to the foreground in Corinne Noirot's chapter that examines a series of descriptions of the ear in French poetry and discusses representations of deafness in the work of Joachim Du Bellay. Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen also engages with topics of disability in his chapter on early modern understandings of pain as a sensory experience that at once was deeply private and facilitated identification with communal figures of suffering.

The afterword here is particularly rewarding: scholars, including not only Dijkhuizen but also Jacob M. Baum, Holly Dugan, and Andrew Kettler, enter into conversation around “sensory ability and disability in the early modern era” (242). The latter scholars do not speak directly to disability in their chapters. Baum examines the tactility of the eucharist, whether formulated as “paste” or “true bread” in the writings of Abraham Scultetus; Dugan, with a focus on Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, analyzes how theater can rework individual sensory perception into collective notions of racialized difference; and Kettler performs a close reading of Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World and her interpretation of “sensory others” that brings into conversation histories of science (179). The roundtable discussion reframes the collection by articulating the importance of the intersection of sensory studies with those of disability. In doing so, the afterword brings a new urgency to the volume's argument around the individual: the conversation persuasively indicates how sensory experience is highly individualized, that a failure to recognize this can reproduce harm, and that, as Andrew Kettler writes, “the normative body—often the white, patriarchal, and literate male body—was not the most common sensory figure in any time” (243).

This collection is impressive in its breadth. Readers will find a new understanding not only of early modern Europe but also of the senses as a category. The chapters’ varied areas of focus communicate the tremendous scope of early modern sensory studies—past, present, and future—and are energizing in their proposal of new directions to the field.