A large body of scholarship links medieval Passion meditations with women, laypeople, affective piety, and the vernacular. Texts like pseudo-Bonaventure's Meditations on the Life of Christ have attracted so much attention lately that one suspects medievalists derive vicarious pleasure from all that bleeding, swooning, and weeping. But in Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages, Michelle Karnes offers an austere corrective to this tradition. She resolutely declines to see Passion meditations as “gendered female” or meant chiefly for laity, and she refuses to assign any political stance to the vernacular as such. Most strikingly, she links the devotional use of imagination with intellect, not affect. Grounding her study in the Aristotelian tradition, she shows that for one line of medieval thinkers, culminating in Bonaventure, the imagination played a key role in all cognition, especially in the knowledge of God, that made it an ideal means to attain intimacy with Christ.

Chapter 1, “Aristotelian Imagination,” outlines the faculty's place in Aristotle's De anima and its commentators: Avicenna, Averroes, Albertus Magnus, and Aquinas. Mediating between sense and intellect, imagination provides the latter with phantasms or species that enable sense perception to complete itself in accurate knowledge. This theory admits numerous variants turning on a contested distinction between potential intellect and active intellect. For Aquinas, however, the key point is that imagination's phantasms are only a means by which the intellect acquires knowledge; the object of knowledge is the real world. Enabling cognition, rather than fantasy, is imagination's most important work.

Bonaventure, the subject of chapter 2, developed the loftiest theory of imagination. Karnes shows that the Franciscan combined an Aristotelian understanding of imagination's cognitive role with an Augustinian doctrine of illumination. For Augustine, a Neoplatonist, Christ as Logos is both the ultimate form of creation and the means to know it. All true knowledge is knowledge of the forms, but all forms existing in creatures are anchored in Christ, the Form of forms. Thus, real knowledge of anything is in some measure knowledge of Christ. Bonaventure, with Aristotle's help, takes this idea further. Every human mind is an image of the Trinity, but Christ, the perfect image, is both sensible (as man) and intelligible (as God). He is thus “uniquely qualified to assist the mind in its progression from sensory to intellectual cognition” (75)—the proper work of imagination. In a dense account of the Itinerarium mentis in Deum, Karnes analyzes the foundations of Bonaventure's cognitive mysticism. Symbolically, the normative move from sense to intellect that occurs in all knowing is “a mini-journey from Christ's humanity to his divinity” (76). So it is possible, because of Christ's epistemological role, to fuse the everyday process of cognition with the devotional ascent from his humanity to the eternal Word. This is what makes imaginative meditations on the Gospel so powerful.

Bonaventure's own meditations, the Lignum vitae and the Vitis mystica, were hugely influential. Gospel meditation is for him a movement from visualizing the life of Christ to participating in it—by no means an exercise solely for beginners. “One who places herself in the presence of the biblical events will, it seems almost inevitably, end up acting within them” (133). To perform such meditations is to climb the cross, embrace Christ intimately, and ascend from his humanity to his divinity, reaping rewards of salvation in eternity and mystical union even now. Because imagination serves the intellect, however, this process is cognitive as well as affective. Though the authors of later meditations did not share Bonaventure's interest in cognitive theory, they follow him in assigning a potent role to imagination. In chapter 4 Karnes explores the major Latin texts: Suso's Horologium Sapientiae, James of Milan's Stimulus amoris, Ludolph of Saxony's Vita Christi, and the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi. These closely related works share key perspectives. Almost anyone, religious or lay, should do Gospel meditation, for it fulfills Paul's command to share in Christ's sufferings. Moreover, imagining scenes from his life in vivid detail ushers the meditant into his real presence. Since Christ is never truly absent and his Passion especially belongs to a timeless present, imagination allows the believer access, transcending barriers of time and space.

Karnes's last two chapters treat Middle English texts. In chapter 5 she considers the problematic figure of Ymaginatif in Piers Plowman. Received wisdom holds that imagination helps the protagonist, Will, turn away from unfruitful intellect toward loving affect, advancing his quest for salvation. Karnes argues instead that Ymaginatif humbles and purifies Will's cognitive faculties, teaching him not to reject Clergie (learning), but to perform the intense Gospel meditation that concludes the poem, meeting Christ as God precisely in his human suffering. Langlandians will doubtless disagree about this reading as they do about everything else in Piers. Finally, chapter 6 examines “Imagination in Translation,” Nicholas Love's Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ” (a translation of pseudo-Bonaventure) and the anonymous Prickynge of Love (a translation of Stimulus amoris). Here Karnes persuasively shows how both Middle English texts blunt the spiritual ambitions of their originals. Self-consciously prepared for “simple” folks, the vernacular works assume their audience to be incapable of the higher forms of meditation and suppress passages that direct readers to contemplate Christ's divinity. Countering a view of English devotional texts as more daring than Latin, Karnes asserts that “vernacular religious literature often seems unequal to, and perhaps uninterested in, the political work that it is asked to perform” (212). Yet Margery Kempe, its most famous reader, accepts no limitations on her sublime devotional life.

Imagination is a pellucid but difficult book. Tightly argued and philosophically sophisticated, it addresses readers well-versed in the field. For that select audience, Karnes can afford to make her polemical points gently. Understated though they are, her approach offers a necessary complement especially to Sarah McNamer's fine study, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).