Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages
In "Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages", Michelle Karnes revises the history of medieval imagination with a detailed analysis of its role in the period's meditations and theories of cognition. Karnes here understands imagination in its technical, philosophical sense, taking her cue from Bonaventure, the thirteenth-century scholastic theologian and philosopher who provided the first sustained account of how the philosophical imagination could be transformed into a devotional one. Karnes examines Bonaventure's meditational works, the "Meditationes vitae Christi", the "Stimulis amoris", "Piers Plowman", and Nicholas "Love's Myrrour", among others, and argues that the cognitive importance that imagination enjoyed in scholastic philosophy informed its importance in medieval meditations on the life of Christ. Emphasizing the cognitive significance of both imagination and the meditations that relied on it, she revises a long-standing association of imagination with the Middle Ages. In her account, imagination was not simply an object of suspicion but also a crucial intellectual, spiritual, and literary resource that exercised considerable authority.
About the Author
Michelle Karnes is associate professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.
Reviews
"A learned and well-written book about the philosophy of imagination and the late-medieval practice of devotional meditation. Karnes's argument is powerful and convincing, and makes a valuable addition to a lively field in current medieval studies" – Nicholas Watson, Harvard University
"Karnes's brilliantly counterintuitive argument asserts that the writing out of the role of imagination in late-medieval English meditation does not indicate the weakness of imagination, but rather its potency. This illuminating survey traces its importance in scholastic philosophy and earlier meditative writing to demonstrate that affective theology and the work of reason or mind are not incompatible. This study will be valuable in reconsiderations of the influence of philosophy on other kinds of writing and thinking throughout the Middle Ages" – D. Vance Smith, Princeton University
"Michelle Karnes has given us a book of deep learning, lucidity, and intelligence. It reveals the learned origins and the intellectual cogency of meditative forms long thought simplifying and popularizing, and explains why minds of the first rank cultivated them. Never before has medieval devotional literature seemed so smart as Karnes shows it to be. In a single graceful arc, 'Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages' sweeps away a conventional account of late-medieval religious writing and supplies what we need to build a better one" – Steven Justice, University of California, Berkeley
