100 books like Lines of Thought

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!

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.    

This choice might surprise you: it’s a famous book in medieval studies circles but not the sort of thing a historian of philosophy would usually pick up. But its exploration of the role of the body in writings by female medieval authors is foundational for understanding what is sometimes called “affective mysticism.” That topic expands our sense of what medieval philosophy could be. Other scholars whose work is worth checking out on this topic include Amy Hollywood and Christina Van Dyke.

This is an engaging and wide-ranging survey of the topic written by one of the leading scholars of philosophy in medieval Latin Christendom. Marenbon actually wrote some earlier general introductions which were also very good. But I recommend this one because he casts a broader net, by looking at medieval philosophy not only in Christian Europe but in the Islamic world too.

A prejudice people have about medieval philosophy is that it is all about theology, and theology isn’t philosophy (or isn’t philosophically interesting). There are two answers to be given here: first, medieval philosophers thought about lots of things apart from theology, like logic, physics, ethics, and so on. But also, when they did theology the results could be philosophically fascinating! In this case, discussions of the Trinity turn out to involve explorations of such topics as the nature of relations and the philosophy of mind (because one idea was to understand the Trinity as being akin to interrelations between aspects of human psychology). Other topics worth looking at to show how philosophically rewarding theology could be would be the eucharist and angels.

This book is perhaps aimed more at specialist scholars but I wanted to suggest it nonetheless because it does such a good job of getting across three important points about medieval philosophy. First, it is not about theology but physics so shows the thematic range of medieval philosophy. Second, it is mostly about works by philosophers who are anonymous: Trifogli talks about commentaries on Aristotle with no names attached to them. It turns out there are many, many such works and they tend to be overlooked even though they are innovative, simply because we have no name to put to the ideas. Third, it’s clear throughout the book that these commentators were responding to philosophers from the Islamic world, especially Ibn Rushd (Averroes). So it illustrates the relevance of cross-cultural contacts for medieval thought.

One of the foremost twentieth-century historians of medieval philosophy, Étienne Gilson took a lifelong interest in Dante, publishing Dante et la philosophie in 1939 (the translation Dante the Philosopher was published in 1946). The book is Gilson’s magisterial attempt to situate Dante’s thought in relation to the competing intellectual currents of his time.

What makes the book particularly fascinating for me is that it is also an anti-thesis, a reaction against another (arguably even better) book, the Dominican Pierre Mandonnet’s Dante le théologien, published in 1935 (a new edition with English translation, Dante the Theologian, will be published shortly). In reading Gilson’s volume, we enter into key debates not only about Dante’s thought but, also, about the very nature of Catholic philosophy and theology. 

The classic 13th century medieval Jewish philosophic text that proposes a sophisticated—for that time—metaphysical model of spiritual experience; in this case, prophecy as articulated in the Hebrew Bible. The intellectual scaffolding for my attempt to resurrect a metaphysics of prophecy in my 2014 book "DMT and the Soul of Prophecy."