IMC 2024: Sessions
Session 1616: Cognitive Studies and the Middle Ages, II
Thursday 4 July 2024, 11:15-12:45
| Sponsor: | Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Research, University of Winchester |
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| Organisers: | Eric Lacey, Department of English, Creative Writing & American Studies, University of Winchester Catalin Taranu, New Europe College, Bucharest |
| Moderator/Chair: | Catalin Taranu, New Europe College, Bucharest |
| Paper 1616-a | Safeguards of Memory, Deposits of Feeling: Emotional and Cognitive Engagement in Late Medieval Devotional Micro-Sculpture (Language: English) Index terms: Art History - Sculpture and Lay Piety |
| Paper 1616-b | Desiring Devotion: Rethinking Sexuality and Self-Recovery in The Book of Margery Kempe (Language: English) Index terms: Gender Studies, Language and Literature - Middle English and Sexuality |
| Abstract | Cognitive approaches have been increasingly popular among medievalists in recent years – from emotions, sensory perception, memory, conflict, audience involvement, embodied knowledge, metaphor theory, and the relationship to animals and the natural world, cognitive science has informed readings of medieval cultural products and society in a myriad of ways. Yet the manner in which we use the results and theories of a field that is already heterogeneous and often divided against itself merits still deeper reflection. At the same time, cognitive approaches have typically faced a contested reputation and epistemological status in the humanities, ranging from claims that cognitive studies are the only possible methodological explanation for the foundation of human behaviour to rejecting cognitive studies as positivist and universalist. How do we medievalists navigate these issues and wield cognitive approaches to the various disciplines of medieval studies? In a time of manifold crisis, the time has come for a reckoning (krisis in its original Ancient Greek meaning of ‘reckoning’, ‘judgement’, ‘turning point’) for cognitive studies among medievalists. This strand of papers seeks to explore the impact and use of cognitive studies across the various disciplines of medieval studies. |