Noli me Tangere: The Enigma of Touch in Middle English Religious Literature and Art for and About Women

Abstract

According to Aristotle, touch “is the primary sensation that belongs to all animals,” a basic principle reiterated by Thomas Aquinas when he writes, “Touch is the basis of sensitivity as a whole.”¹ In analyzing the senses, Aristotle describes for each sense a corresponding medium, a sensible object, and an organ. One might assume that the organ of the sense of touch would be the skin; Aristotle concludes instead that skin is not the organ of touch, but its medium, a distinction that allows Aristotle, according to Daniel Heller-Roazen, to develop an understanding of touch as a highly complex sense, one ultimately closely linked to and as elusive as thought itself.² Probing the meaning of touch led Aristotle and those who follow him to describe a further sense called the common sense, one that, as Aquinas writes, “also perceives sensory intentions, for example, when someone sees that he is seeing.”³ As Robert Pasnau points out, such “awareness of our own mental states” forms the basis of our modern attempts to define consciousness.⁴