Cognitive Sciences and Medieval Studies

An Introduction

Juliana Dresvina, Victoria Blud

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786836762
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

With the rapid development of the cognitive sciences and their importance to how we contemplate questions about the mind and society, recent research in the humanities has been characterised by a 'cognitive turn'. For their part, the humanities play an important role in forming popular ideas of the human mind and in analysing the way cognitive, psychological and emotional phenomena are experienced in time and space. This collection aims to inspire medievalists and other scholars within the humanities to engage with the tools and investigative methodologies deriving from cognitive sciences. Contributors explore topics including medieval and modern philosophy of mind, the psychology of religion, the history of psychological medicine and the re-emergence of the body in cognition. What is the value of mapping how neurons fire when engaging with literature and art? How can we understand psychological stress as a historically specific phenomenon? What can medieval mystics teach us about contemplation and cognition?

Introduction: Cognitive Sciences and Medieval Studies

Notes

1 David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2011), idem, The Brain (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2015); Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop (New York: Basic Books, 2007); Gina Rippon, The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience that Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain (London: Vintage, 2019); Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2012); Wendy S. Jones, Jane on the Brain: Exploring the Science of Social Intelligence with Jane Austen (New York: Pegasus Books, 2017).

2 The date of a landmark research presentation at MIT. See Howard Gardner, The Mind’s New Science (New York: Basic Books, 1987), p. 28.

3 On the major areas of study and debates in the field, see, for instance, William Bechtel and George Graham (eds), A Companion to Cognitive Science (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 107–337.

4 See, for example, the Wellcome-funded Hearing the Voice project on hallucination at Durham University (http://hearingthevoice.org); a study of how people relate to and interpret unusual experiences conducted by the UNI QUE research group (Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/ioppn/depts/psychology/research/researchgroupings/the-uniqueresearch-group); the Religion, Experience, and Mind (REM) Lab Group (University of California: https://remlab.religion.ucsb.edu); The Eye’s Mind project at the University of Exeter (http://sites.exeter.ac.uk/eyesmind/); and the AHRC History of Distributed Cognition Project (http://www.hdc.ed.ac.uk), to name a few.

5 Marilyn Strathern, ‘Useful Knowledge’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 139 (2006), 73–109 (p. 78).

6 For a detailed account of these debates, see Maxwell Bennett, Daniel Dennett, Peter Hacker, John Searle and Daniel Robinson, Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). John Bickle argues that philosophers need to branch out even further from the relatively familiar theoretical level of cognitive neuroscience and look to the more challenging neuroscientific research in molecular biology and cellular physics. See Philosophy and Neuroscience: A Ruthlessly Reductive Account (Norwell, MA: Springer, 2003).

7 For a broad survey and overview of these developments, see Charissa N. Terranova and Meredith Tromble (eds), The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2017).

8 John Canaday, The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), p. 3.

9 In addition to the works by medievalists below, recent examples in literary studies include Barri J. Gold, Thermopoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Sarah C. Alexander, Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable (London: Taylor & Francis, 2015); Courtney Weiss Smith, Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2016); Michael Tondre, The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2018); Karin Kukkonen, 4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction: How the Novel Found its Feet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

10 See Donna J. Haraway, ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, Socialist Review, 80 (1985), 65–108; When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

11 Karen Barad, ‘Nature’s queer performativity’, Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 1–2 (2012), 25–53 (p. 29). See also Barad, ‘Queer causation and the ethics of mattering’, in Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird (eds), Queering the non/human (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 311–38.

12 See, for example, Suparna Choudhury and Jan Slaby (eds), Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); Cristian Tileagă and Jovan Byford (eds), Psychology and History: Interdisciplinary Explorations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

13 Mark Turner, Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

14 Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2006); Getting Inside Your Head: What Popular Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), p. xi. Zunshine has also edited the Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) and the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

15 Suzanne Nalbantian, Paul M. Matthews; James L. McClelland, The Memory Process: Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Suzanne Nalbantian, Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Paul M. Matthews and Jeff McQuain, The Bard on the Brain: Understanding the Mind Through the Art of Shakespeare and the Science of Brain Imaging (New York: Dana, 2003); Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Patrick McNamara (ed.), Where God and Science Meet: How Brain and Evolutionary Studies Alter Our Understanding of Religion, 3 vols (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006).

16 See Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists (New York: Routledge, 2003); Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Cognitive Science, and Identity (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2009); What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

17 See especially ‘Distributing Cognition in the Globe’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 56/2 (2005), 135–55; Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare’s Theatre: Thinking with the Body (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). In a similar vein, Mary Thomas Crane explored Shakespeare’s plays through the lens of embodied cognition and cognitive linguistics in Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

18 Jane Chance and Anthony Passaro (eds), postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 3/3 (2012). See especially Jane Chance’s introduction, ‘Cognitive alterities: From cultural studies to neuroscience and back again’, 247–61.

19 On cognition and emotions, see Sino Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004); Martin Pickavé and Lisa Shapiro (eds), Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 2012); Frank Brandsma, Carolyne Larrington and Corinne Saunders (eds), Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature: Body, Mind, Voice (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015); Victoria Blud, ‘Emotional Bodies: Cognitive Neuroscience and Mediaeval Studies’, Literat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Cognitive Sciences and Medieval Studies
• I Questions of Method
• II Case Studies: Histories of Neuroscience, Psychology and Mental Illness
• III Case Studies: Reading Texts and Minds
• IV Case Studies: Approaching Art and Artefacts
• Afterword: The Medieval Brain and Modern Neuroscience
• Notes