Hearing Otherwise: AI-Assisted Analysis of Sensory Rhetoric in Early Modern Protestant Sermons

Early modern scholars have long assumed that Protestant preaching turned away from the sensory richness of Catholic worship. But what if the evidence tells a different story — and we simply lacked the tools to read it? This paper presents our use of RAG Scholar, an AI platform developed in partnership with the University of Florida, to investigate sensory vocabulary in English sermons (1560–1660). RAG Scholar pioneers Vector Scholarship: rather than retrieving only exact matches, it decodes the full associative field of a term — searching for "hearing," for example, surfaces not only its variants but also music, thunder, voice, trumpet, etc., capturing how sensory language functioned in context. Applying this to printed and manuscript sermons, we show how RAG Scholar has enabled us to map denomination-specific sensory rhetorics from Anglicans to Calvinists to Puritans, complicating received narratives and opening lines of inquiry that close reading alone could never sustain.