Victoria Blud and Juliana Dresvina position their edited volume, Cognitive Science and Medieval Studies: An Introduction, in a broader conversation about the value of the humanities. In the current climate of higher education in the United Kingdom, the answers arising from this conversation are of pressing importance for the future of medieval studies. As Blud and Dresvina write in their introduction, “At a time when education policies pit STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] and humanities subjects against one another in the name of employability and social value, the advantages of bringing the two together increase exponentially” (2). One potential case advanced by contributors for what could be more broadly termed the neurohumanities and more specifically neuromedievalism (see pages 3, 6, 59, 145) is thus the idea of consilience (see pages 6, 39–41, 74), which, as Ralph W. Hood Jr defines it, is “the search for a unified theory of knowledge uniting the sciences and the humanities” (47); or, in broader terms, as Blud and Dresvina establish in their introduction, their “reciprocal benefit” (3).
In his essay, José Filipe Silva tests medieval models of mind against the modularity model, which, as Silva explains, views the structure of the mind as being “carved up, at least partially, into distinct operating mechanisms, like that responsible for vision” (23). Concluding that medieval faculties, in fact, “can be conceived of as ‘modules’” (in the particular sense developed by Jerry Fodor) (25), Silva exemplifies one benefit of consilience borne out by the collection as a whole: what he terms the “exegetical” value (35) of cognitive science for medieval theories and texts. Wendy J. Turner on the “theory of parallel diagnosing” mental illness (99) and Blud on 4E cognition likewise clearly demonstrate the usefulness of cognitive science as an explanatory and comparative tool not only for providing ways of translating the terms of medieval models but also for prompting new areas of enquiry into them. Blud thus shows, for example, medieval discourse and 4E cognition share an understanding of cognition as enmeshed and embodied; but the paradigm offered by contemporary neuroscience also encourages Blud to think further, in new and exciting ways, about medieval cognition as “extended” (169–74).
Other essays take up cognitive science to support interpretations of medieval texts and artefacts. In the only essay dedicated to Old English material, Antonina Harbus uses neuroscientific insights about the processing of emotion “to consider how a modern reader can engage emotionally with a text from a temporally remote culture” (183). Godelinde Gertrude Perk, in proposing “the form of [Julian of Norwich's] A Revelation of Love uniquely recalls” the technique of knitting in the round (145), explores how knitting and its cognitive effects can be used to conceptualize and understand the cognitive processes at play in medieval mysticism, in Julian's book, but also in our own academic writing. Offering a “cognitive reading” of a scene depicted on a fourteenth-century gothic ivory mirror case, Nadia Pawelchak uses cognitive neuroscience (including the idea of mirror neurons critiqued by Matthew Rampley [65–67]) “as a framework for investigating how medieval people perceived the world around them and as means to explain the biological processes behind cognition” (199).
Consilience, however, does not only have pedagogical or hermeneutic potential. Collectively, the contributors demonstrate its benefit for cross-period thinking and investigation. Thus, for example, Hood takes up William James's common core theory (in very basic terms, the theory that all mystical experiences comprise a common set of components) as a means of explaining and understanding medieval mystical experience; and Dresvina, understanding religion “as a sort of adaptation,” advances the use of attachment theory as a means to understanding not only the “heightened, obsessive religiosity” (122) of the Middle Ages but also our “personal and cultural differences, even today” (135–36). Simulating the “affordances” (“an object's ‘intrinsic properties that facilitate our interaction with it’” [217, quoting Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain – How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions (2008), 34]) of a medieval spoon, spinning whorl, and dance (the carole), Jeff Rider's essay is distinctively tuned to how the Middle Ages might benefit us cognitively. Physical and imaginative engagement with historical artifacts, Rider contends, can extend and reshape our own “‘vocabulary of motor acts,’ ‘mechanical knowledge’ and repertoire of motor skills” (217)—and, presumably, thereby also our understanding of the past.
Asking the broad question, “how can any study of the brain and the nervous system be drawn into explanations about how and why things have changed” (83), Daniel Lord Smail offers readers thought-provoking reflection on why work that bridges across periodized boundaries (particularly those erected between the modern and the premodern) matters. Understanding the nervous system as an ecosystem, Smail argues, in his essay on the neurobiology of stress in the Middle Ages, that stress (which we can “plausibly infer” in “situations involving violence, humiliation and poverty” [85]), “allows us to write a human history framed in the context of an ongoing dialectic between the stress-response system on the one hand and human institutions, practices and patterns of behaviour on the other” (85). As a result, Smail is able to think outside of the teleological, “grand narrative structures” (92) produced by historians: “Like any deep historical narrative (and unlike conventional historical narratives), the dialectical history of stress does not have a beginning or an end. Put differently, it is not a history defined by the telos—civilisation; the state; the patriarchal condition; a peaceful utopia—toward which it is heading” (92).
The contributors to Cognitive Science and Medieval Studies do not make the case conclusively for a turn to “neuromedievalism” (3), but they do show its often playful and experimental possibilities and its role in a crucial “ongoing dialectic” (85) about the relation of the past and present, and of the sciences and humanities. Articulating the strongest notes of reservation about consilience, Rampley writes on “the considerable difficulties” arising from “attempts to apply insights and methods from brain science to the understanding of art and culture” (59). He also articulates what implicitly emerges in many discussions in the volume: the limits to what science alone can explain and what humanities, even without science, can. Thus, Rampley observes: “The rediscovery of individual works as well as the recovery of the entire oeuvre of specific artists and writers, as well as disputes about the canon, indeed the critique of the very idea of the canon, for example, have all been motivated by debates about the value of art and literature. On these issues neuroaesthetics and neurohumanities are silent because their empirical foundations do not enable them to do anything else” (74). Works like Cognitive Science and Medieval Studies that continue to show the distinctiveness of the humanities alongside the benefits of consilience would indeed seem crucial in continuing to make the case for the importance of medieval studies.
