CECS annual Copley Lecture

'The Sense of Touch and the Shaping of the Woman Artist in the Eighteenth Century'

Speaker: Ros Ballaster, Mansfield College, University of Oxford

How did eighteenth-century science and aesthetics understand the sense of touch? Not only in relation to and by comparison with the other senses, but also in terms of its capacity to ‘make sense’ of objects, the world, the feeling subject’s cognition and emotions? This paper will explore theories and representations of touch, noting its insistent association not only with the female body but with the female body’s power as affect (women’s feelings touch us emotionally) and its power to illustrate affect (women are more susceptible to being touched by emotion). We will explore two cases of ‘touch’ in female art and its representation. First, the rhetoric of touch in and in response to Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (1740). On 28 June, Samuel Richardson tells Johannes Sinistra, referring to his…