IMC 2024: Sessions
Session 1716: Cognitive Studies and the Middle Ages, III
Thursday 4 July 2024, 14:15-15:45
| Sponsor: | Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Research, University of Winchester |
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| Organisers: | Hannah Victoria Johnson, Centre de Linguistique en Sorbonne (CeLiSo), Sorbonne Université, Paris Catalin Taranu, New Europe College, Bucharest |
| Moderator/Chair: | Alaric Hall, Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds |
| Paper 1716-a | The Geometry of Mind in Old Irish (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Celtic and Mentalities |
| Paper 1716-b | Extended Mind, Extended Emotion: Making the History of Emotions without Subjectivity (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Comparative, Language and Literature - Old English and Mentalities |
| Paper 1716-c | Virgins or Widows; Romance or Lesson?: Understanding Generic Hybridity in the Middle Dutch Madelgijs through Conceptual Blending Theory (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Dutch and Literacy and Orality |
| 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. |