I’m a historian of the early Middle Ages. There are all sorts of unexpected differences and similarities between modern and medieval life, and things get especially interesting when it comes to thinkingabout thinking. Our understanding of how our minds work has obviously changed—and so have the ways that we actually use them. Medieval thinkers in Europe and the Mediterranean world struggled with concentration and memory and information overload, just like we do. But they were savvier in dealing with those problems, and these books invite you into the wonderful world of their cognitive practices. You’ll probably find yourself experimenting with many of these techniques along the way!
I wrote
The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction
Everything that Mary Carruthers has written is terrific — but thisis 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!
Mary Carruthers's classic study of the training and uses of memory for a variety of purposes in European cultures during the Middle Ages has fundamentally changed the way scholars understand medieval culture. This fully revised and updated second edition considers afresh all the material and conclusions of the first. While responding to new directions in research inspired by the original, this new edition devotes much more attention to the role of trained memory in composition, whether of literature, music, architecture, or manuscript books. The new edition will reignite the debate on memory in medieval studies and, like the first, will…
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?
We think with objects-we conduct our lives surrounded by external devices that help us recall information, calculate, plan, design, make decisions, articulate ideas, and organize the chaos that fills our heads. Medieval scholars learned to think with their pages in a peculiar way: drawing hundreds of tree diagrams. Lines of Thought is the first book to investigate this prevalent but poorly studied notational habit, analyzing the practice from linguistic and cognitive perspectives and studying its application across theology, philosophy, law, and medicine.
These diagrams not only allow a glimpse into the thinking practices of the past but also constitute a…
Tourists and local residents of St. Augustine will enjoy reading about the secret wonders of their ancient city that are right under their noses. Of course, that includes a few stray corpses and ghosts!
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 alsoas 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.
Through her investigation of the mnemonic role of images in vernacular preaching and in mystical texts, Lina Bolzoni moves beyond the traditional art-historical approach to late Mediaeval and Renaissance art which tends to concentrate on style and iconography. She shows how these images were viewed at the time of their creation, and offers new ways of reconstructing their meaning. By bringing her knowledge of rhetoric and the art of memory to bear on the visual arts she opens up new perspectives for the study of religious art and literature of the Renaissance, and shows how these images actually functioned within…
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.
Asceticism is founded on the possibility that human beings can profoundly transform themselves through training and discipline. In particular, asceticism in the Eastern monastic tradition is based on the assumption that individuals are not slaves to the habitual and automatic but can be improved by ascetic practice and, with the cooperation of divine grace, transform their entire character and cultivate special powers and skills. Asceticism of the Mind explores the strategies that enabled Christian ascetics in the Egyptian, Gazan, and Sinaitic monastic traditions of late antiquity to cultivate a new form of existence. At the book's center is a particular…
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
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.
In antiquity and the Middle Ages, memory was a craft, and certain actions and tools were thought to be necessary for its creation and recollection. Until now, however, many of the most important visual and textual sources on the topic have remained untranslated or otherwise difficult to consult. Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski bring together the texts and visual images from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries that are central to an understanding of memory and memory technique. These sources are now made available for a wider audience of students of medieval and early modern history and culture and…
We might think of early monks as master concentrators, but in fact a life of mindfulness did not come to them easily. The Wandering Minddemonstrates that their attempts to stretch concentrate on God were all-consuming, and their battles against distraction were never-ending. Delving into the experiences of early Christian monks living in the Middle East, around the Mediterranean, and throughout Europe from 300 to 900 CE, the book explores a wide range of techniques that the monks developed (and argued about) in their lifelong quest to master their minds. Blending history and psychology, the book is a witty, illuminating account of human fallibility and ingenuity that bridges a distant era and our own.
Reduce stress, ease anxiety, and increase inner peace—one day at a time—with a year of easy-to-follow mindfulness meditation techniques. Certified mindfulness teacher, bestselling author, ultramarathoner, wife, and dog-mom Nita Sweeney shares mindfulness meditation practices to help anyone break free from worry and self-judgment.
Everybody knows that all animals—bats, bears, sharks, ponies, and people—start out as a single cell: the fertilized egg. But how does something no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence give rise to the remarkable complexity of each of these creatures?
