Leaving an Impression: Connecting the Medieval Period to the Present Day through Affective Touch

The project works with several targeted demographics for whom physical and emotional touch can be complex and aims to use haptic interaction with words and images as a way of experiencing and communicating difficult emotions. Through working directly with service users and the families and professionals supporting them, the project seeks to develop a therapeutic tool that supports emotional and physical health through the somatic expression of emotional experiences. The first stage of this project focussed on people living with HIV. For each workshop, participants were asked to send images and texts which are important to them; these were printed for the workshop, and participants were invited to touch them with ink on their fingers, creating a visual record of their emotions about the image or text they have shared.

The first phase of this project was funded by a Small Impact Grant from the University of St Andrews’ Impact and Innovation Fund. The second phase, which we are now entering, is funded by a Large Impact Grant from the same fund. 

The project aims to see whether touch and haptic interaction can be used as alternative ways of communicating emotions. As the project develops, the team will work increasingly with people with distinct barriers preventing them from expressing their feelings verbally. 

Since the publication of Kathryn Rudy’s seminal Touching Parchment: How Medieval Users Rubbed, Handled, and Kissed their Manuscripts (Volumes 1 (2023) and 2 (2024)), medieval scholars have started to pay increasing amounts of critical attention to the fingerprints, marks, and abrasions left on medieval manuscripts. Martha's recent work suggests that early audiences used deliberate haptic interaction with words and images as a way of documenting their emotional response to a text. The marks left on the manuscript thus both tell their own narrative and transform the text for the next reader who opens the manuscript, thus shaping their perception and understanding of the narrative.  transform the cognitive space into which a new audience member steps into when they encounter the text. 

This project extends this recent scholarship to explore the benefits this model of ‘reading through feeling’ (Baldon 2024) can offer to a contemporary audience. Rather than focussing on the impact that physical interaction with a text or object can have on that object, ‘Leaving an Impression’ explores the psychological and therapeutic benefits of targeted haptic interaction with a range of different stimuli for the person doing the touching. In this context, physical gestures and types of touch are understood as a language through which individuals both explore and communicate emotions that they might find difficult to put into words. 

The team ran several workshops for people living with HIV in Scotland in collaboration with the Terrence Higgins Trust. Participants working at and supported by the Trust were asked to contribute words or images that meant something to them (speaking either to their diagnosis or sense of identity) which were printed onto textured paper. The workshop opened with a conversation about what touch meant to each individual. There were discussions on examples of medieval miniatures that contained some kind of deliberate haptic interaction, and the kind of emotions that each communicated. Participants then ‘practiced’ applying different touches to a range of stimuli that instigated both negative and more loving emotions, before using the same techniques to leave a touch (or touches) on their chosen media. The session closed with a conversation about what each person wanted to communicate with their touch and how the activity had made them feel. Later, the images were displayed in an exhibition entitled ‘inter/pose’ held in St Andrews in June 2024, which was open to the general public. At the end of the exhibition, members of the Trust who had taken part in the workshops came to St Andrews to discuss the comments that visitors had left in visitors’ books for them and to reflect on the exercise. 

The impact that the activity had on some of the workshop participants, as well as members of the public who attended the exhibition, was profound. This was only possible because of the strong positive relationships that peer workers at The Terrence Higgins Trust have with their service users. All of the activities were designed in collaboration with staff members at the Trust, and their guidance was invaluable towards designing activities that would foster open conversations about difficult topics. 

In some ways, the impact that the activities had on some of the participants was much more profound than the team had anticipated. Different individuals noted that touching an image or words that mean something to you can feel both personal and complicated, while several people addressed the therapeutic feeling that they had experienced. Other individuals mentioned how the activity allowed for a release of emotions, while one participant said that they realised as they were taking part in the activity that their feelings had changed significantly over time. 

In addition, the images had a similarly profound impact on members of the audience. Comments left in the visitors’ book noted the courage, honesty, and power of the pieces created, and many noted that the words and images would ‘stay with them’.  

The team are still in the early stages of developing ‘Leaving an Impression’. Over the next year, the breadth and scope of the project will be expanded to a wider range of demographics for which touch can be complicated. Different workshop activities will be designed for each group (in collaboration with professionals working directly with them) to be followed by an exhibition of the materials created in local venues. The flexible structure of the activities allows each set of workshops to be designed in collaboration with support workers who already have strong positive relationships with the participants and an understanding of what might work best.