Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Culture

This collection brings together fourteen essays by international specialists in medieval and Renaissance culture and provides a general and a period-specific introduction to distributed cognition and the cognitive humanities. The essays revitalise our reading of medieval and Renaissance works in the fields of law, history, drama, literature, art, music, philosophy, science and medicine, by bringing to bear recent insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind on the ways in which cognition is distributed across brain, body and world.
As many of the texts and practices discussed here have influenced later Western European society and culture, this book reveals vital stages in the historical development of our attempts to comprehend and optimise the distributed nature of cognition.