Cognitive Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, a brief report from the New Chaucer Society

As most readers of the HASTAC blogs already know, there is an increasing number of literary scholars applying the findings of cognitive science to their readings. This is true in medieval studies, as well. Having recently returned from the New Chaucer Society congress (http://chaucer.wustl.edu/Congress2010/), which this year was in gorgeous Siena (gratuitous pictures included), I thought I'd give a short report on some of the ways scholars used cognitive science to interpret medieval literature in exciting ways. Jane Chance (http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~jchance/) organized two sessions on "Cognitive Alterities", a topic we will see again in November when the first Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group descends upon Austin (http://www.siue.edu/babel/BABEL_Biennial_Meeting_AustinTX.htm). There was also a "Sense and Cognition" session organized by Charles Archer. In one of the sessons I attended, the presenters were Peggy A. Knapp, "Thinking about Thinking, Then and Now"; Ashby Kinch, "The Neuroplastic Aesthetics of Chaucer's House of Fame"; and Lara Farina, "Feelers: Touch, Cognition, and Identity".

Knapp's paper discussed how memory, embodiment, and imagination inform consciousness, with an emphasis on the works of Daniel Dennett and Antonio Damasio. Her interest in the continuities between medieval thought and contemporary theories about how the mind works led her to examine the parallels between Damasio's discussions of memory as a storehouse of images that is the basis of thought and the medieval monastic use of mnemonic devices and interpreted images. Knapp continued by considering Mary Carruthers's books (The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory and Medieval Culture and The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200) on medieval memory systems in this cognitive framework. Knapp also suggested that Margery Kempe, everyone's favorite weeping mystic, either thought (via meditation on images) with strong emotion or, pace Damasio, suffered some brain injury that led to her regular hysterics.

Next was Ashby Kinch, who argued that Chaucer's House of Fame demonstrates Chaucer's interest in reading as a cognitive experience and the material conditions of reading, and that it is an allegory of the poetic process. This latter point is not new, but Kinch made clear the correspondences between the house of tidings in the poem and the mental process of selective attention, the complexity of mental labor done during reading, and the many elements of preconscious thought. Further, he suggested that the mysterious "man of gret auctorite" (a man of great authority) who arrives just as the poem ends represents the executive function that chooses among other cognitive processes.

Finally, Lara Farina focused on the history of the senses by asking how we can understand sensory alterity. She turned to the works of Oliver Sacks and V.S. Ramachandran on sensation while noting that the division into five senses is a cultural construction. She also pointed out our common privileging of the visual above other senses, but asked "if rather than strictly a cultural phenomenon, what if this elevation of sight in fact results from the layout of our brains?" After setting out her theoretical concerns, she discussed Christina of Markyate, a twelfth-century recluse reported to have clairvoyant visions while enclosed in a cramped stone cell, silent and ill. Farina examined the relationship between this episode and disability studies while highlighting the importance of touch as a link to others.

These quick summaries do no justice to the rich arguments these scholars made or the conversations they prompted. This session was, futher, only one of several treating cognition and the Middle Ages. But, I hope I've shown that cognitive literary studies is not only gaining traction in medieval studies, but that the diversity (and sometimes downright weirdness) of medieval texts and their frequent concerns with memory, embodiment, cognition, sensory inputs, and consciousness offer broad and fertile grounds for the application of contemporary cognitive scientific theories. To me, one of the most exciting aspects of this approach comes from the longstanding medieval interest in thought and embodied experience. Teasing out the continuities and divergences between ideas about modern and medieval cognition tells us more not only about medieval conceptions of consciousness, but about our own as well. One final notice: postmedieval (http://www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/index.html), a new scholarly journal, has a special issue planned for 2012 on Cognitive Alterities that Jane Chance and Antony Passaro (a graduate student at the UT Health Science Center at Houston) will be co-editing. Dont miss it.