Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Culture

Miranda Anderson is an Anniversary Fellow at the University of Stirling and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on cognitive approaches to literature and culture. She is the author of The Renaissance Extended Mind (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Michael Wheeler is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Stirling. He is the author of Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step (MIT, 2005). He is co-editor of Heidegger and Cognitive Science (Palgrave, 2012) and The Mechanical Mind in History (MIT, 2008).

This original book should command the attention of scholars far beyond the set who subscribe to the ‘distributed cognition’ philosophy. It stimulates questions about analogous ideas of a dynamic mind-brain-body-world relation in the medieval and Renaissance periods – in philosophy, literature, drama, and medicine – and about ways in which thinking was constrained and enabled by tools.

• 1. Series Introduction: Distributed Cognition and the HumanitiesMiranda Anderson, Michael Wheeler and Mark Sprevak2. Introduction: Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance StudiesMiranda Anderson3. Medieval Icelandic Legal Treatises as Tools for External Scaffolding of Legal Cognition Werner Schäfke 4. Horse-Riding Storytellers and Distributed Cognition in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Guillemette Bolens 5. Cognitive Ecology and the Idea of Nation in Late-Medieval Scotland: The Flyting of William Dunbar and Walter KennedyElizabeth Elliott6. The Mead of Poetry: Old Norse Poetry as a Mind-Altering SubstanceHannah Burrows7. Enculturated, Embodied, Social: Medieval Drama and Cognitive IntegrationClare Wright8. Ben Jonson and the Limits of Distributed CognitionRaphael Lyne9. Masked Interaction: The Case for an Enactive View of Commedia dellArte (and the Italian Renaissance)Jan Söffner10. Thinking with the Hand: The Practice of Drawing in Renaissance ItalyCynthia Houng11. The Medieval (Music) Book: A Multimodal Cognitive ArtefactKate Maxwell 12. Distributed Cognition, Improvisation and the Performing Arts in Early Modern EuropeEvelyn Tribble and Julie E. Cumming13. Pierced with Passion: Brains, Bodies and Worlds in Early Modern TextsDaniel T. Lochman14. Metaphors They Lived By: The Language of Early Modern IntersubjectivityHannah Chapelle Wojciehowski15. Le Sigh: Enactive and Psychoanalytic Insights into Medieval and Renaissance Paralanguage L. O. Aranye Fradenburg 16. ‘The Adding of Artificial Organs to the Natural’: Extended and Distributed Cognition in Robert Hooke’s MethodologyPieter PresentNotes on ContributorsBibliography