The best books about medieval brainiacs

Everything that Mary Carruthers has written is terrific — but this is the book that first showed me how unusual, and how sophisticated, medieval approaches to the mind could be.

The arts of memory that flourished in the high Middle Ages were designed for much more than rote memorization: they helped people internalize what they perceived, then transform that material into something new.

Carruthers presents these techniques so infectiously that you’ll want to try them yourself. It’s not just the practices themselves that are riveting, though. Carruthers also shows how they shaped medieval media culture and how they contributed to the ethical development of the people who practiced them.

The arts of memory weren’t parlor tricks; they were modes of understanding and evaluating the world. Amazing!

Lines of Thought reveals the hidden magic of a seemingly simply notetaking device: the horizontal tree diagram, which became especially popular among university students and scholars starting in the thirteenth century.

Upon first glance, you might not be all that impressed by the device: it’s just a combination of vertical lists with horizontal sentence structures! But as Even-Ezra shows, these diagrams accomplished much more than a mere highlighter could.

They turned passive readers into active analysts, distilled long and complex texts into clear and concise schemas, and conveyed new ideas about the material that would have been impossible to communicate through the written text alone.

As a bonus, the book is interlaced with its own horizontal tree diagrams. And who doesn’t love a meta-format?

The medieval images that survive today might seem like simplistic or bizarre pictures now. But medieval viewers saw them differently. They treated images as tools for understanding, analyzing, and remembering complex ideas about the world.

Bolzoni works to crack that “code” through the case of late medieval Italy: she illustrates how viewers’ relationships to images changed the more they learned, how preachers communicated with their congregations in ways that listeners would visualize and internalize, and how certain images—like six-winged angels or trees of life—served as effective conduits of information but also as platforms for layered conceptual associations that got increasingly sophisticated the more that authors and audiences thought about them.

This beautiful, fascinating book is well worth seeking out from a library or used bookseller.

Early Christian monks in the eastern Mediterranean chalked up many of their mental struggles to demonic interference—and yet their approaches to the problem of attention share some striking similarities to modern psychology.

Graiver makes the case that monks’ talk of demons was not a superstitious diagnosis but a pragmatic one: it helped monks try to strike a balance between monitoring their thoughts and thinking too hard about them, deal with unwanted thoughts before they became all-consuming, and figure how to keep it together when their thoughts were all over the place.

I love that this book takes early monks and modern psychologists equally seriously. And even if you don’t start blaming your problems on demons after reading it, you will still have learned a lot about the promises and perils of attention management.

Carruthers and Ziolkowski pulled together several terrific texts (translated from Latin into English) to showcase medieval thinking about cognitive mechanisms and practices.

I love teaching with this book: the texts are succinct, charming, and sometimes very strange, and the introductions help you understand how the techniques actually work. Scholarship can pique our interest in medieval history, but it’s the primary sources that keep us coming back for more.