Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Culture

Renaissance Culture
D istributed C
ntiquity Edited by A
THE EDINBURGH HISTORY OF DISTRIBUTED COGNITION
Cover image: © János Kass, etching made for the illustration of Madách Imre’s Az ember tragédiája (Tragedy of Man), Egypt Cover design: Bekah Mackenzie and Stuart Dalziel
Edited by Miranda Anderson and Michael Wheeler
Distr ibuted Cognit ion in Medieval and Renaissance Culture
The Edinburgh History of Distributed Cognition Series Editors: Miranda Anderson and Douglas Cairns
Scholars from across the disciplinary spectrum track the notions of distributed cognition in a wide range of historical, cultural and literary contexts from
antiquity through to the twentieth century.
Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity Edited by Miranda Anderson, Douglas Cairns and Mark Sprevak
Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Culture Edited by Miranda Anderson and Michael Wheeler
Distributed Cognition in Enlightenment and Romantic Culture Edited by Miranda Anderson, George Rousseau and Michael Wheeler
Distributed Cognition in Victorian Culture and Modernism Edited by Miranda Anderson, Peter Garratt and Mark Sprevak
Visit the series website at edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ehdc
Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Culture
Edited by Miranda Anderson and Michael Wheeler
Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting- edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com
© editorial matter and organisation Miranda Anderson and Michael Wheeler, 2019 © the chapters their several authors, 2019
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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4744 3813 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 3815 5 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 3816 2 (epub)
The right of Miranda Anderson and Michael Wheeler to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
Contents
List of Illustrations vii Series Preface ix
1. Distributed Cognition and the Humanities 1 Miranda Anderson, Michael Wheeler and Mark Sprevak
2. Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 18 Miranda Anderson
3. Medieval Icelandic Legal Treatises as Tools for External Scaffolding of Legal Cognition 44
Werner Schäfke
4. Horse- Riding Storytellers and Distributed Cognition in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales 66
Guillemette Bolens
5. Cognitive Ecology and the Idea of Nation in Late- Medieval Scotland: The Flyting of William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy 86
Elizabeth Elliott
6. The Mead of Poetry: Old Norse Poetry as a Mind- Altering Substance 99 Hannah Burrows
7. Enculturated, Embodied, Social: Medieval Drama and Cognitive Integration 120
Clare Wright
8. Ben Jonson and the Limits of Distributed Cognition 138 Raphael Lyne
9. Masked Interaction: The Case for an Enactive View of Commedia dell’Arte (and the Italian Renaissance) 153
Jan Söffner
vi contents
10. Thinking with the Hand: The Practice of Drawing in Renaissance Italy 171 Cynthia Houng
11. The Medieval (Music) Book: A Multimodal Cognitive Artefact 190 Kate Maxwell
12. Distributed Cognition, Improvisation and the Performing Arts in Early Modern Europe 205
Julie E. Cumming and Evelyn Tribble
13. Pierced with Passion: Brains, Bodies and Worlds in Early Modern Texts 229 Daniel T. Lochman
14. Metaphors They Lived By: The Language of Early Modern Intersubjectivity 250
Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski
15. ‘Le Sigh’: Enactive and Psychoanalytic Insights into Medieval and Renaissance Paralanguage 269
L. O. Aranye Fradenburg Joy
16. ‘The adding of artificial organs to the natural’: Extended and Distributed Cognition in Robert Hooke’s Methodology 286
Pieter Present
List of I l lus trat ions
Figure 7.1 York pageant route. © Meg Twycross 2012. 127 Figure 12.1 Franchino Gaffori, Practica musicae utriusque cantus, title page
(Venice: Agostino Zanni, 1512). 211 Figure 12.2 Josquin Des Prez, first opening of Inviolata, integra, et casta es
Maria, from Liber selectarum cantionum (Augsburg: Grimm & Wyrsung, 1520; RISM 15204), fols. 121v–122r. 212
Figure 12.3 Josquin Des Prez, Inviolata, integra, et casta es Maria, in modern score format. 215
Figure 12.4 Silvestro dal Fontego Ganassi, Opera Intitulata Fontegara, title page (Venice: the author, 1535). 220
Figure 12.5 Jan Berthout, Collocutions familieres de Jean Berthout contenants trois belles & profitables dialogues des propos de tables, title page (Antwerp: Hieronymus Verdussen, 1623). 221
Figure 12.6 Jan Berthout, Collocutions familieres, pp. 17–18. Ghent University Library. 222
Figure 12.7 Josquin Des Prez, Virgo prudentissima, tenor partbook, no. 24 in Tertia pars magni operis musici (Nürnberg: Berg & Neuber, 1559; RISM 15592). 226
Figure 12.8 Josquin Des Prez, Virgo prudentissima, discantus partbook, no. 24 in Tertia pars magni operis musici (RISM 15592). 227
Plate 1 The Crucifixion and the Death of Christ, the Company of Butchers in partnership with the Parish Church of St Chad on the Knavesmire. Image © T. Haddad, July 2014.
Plate 2 The Crucifixion and the Last Judgement diptych, Jan van Eyck, c. 1430. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Plate 3 Mask of Arlecchino: recent reconstruction. Private collection. Plate 4 Federico Zuccaro, Taddeo Leaving Home, c. 1595. Digital image
courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program. Plate 5 Federico Zuccaro, Taddeo Decorating the Facade of the Palazzo Mattei,
c. 1595. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.
viii l i st of illustrations
Plate 6 Livre de Fauvel, Paris, BnF, fr. 146, fols. 10v–11r. © Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
Plate 7 Vittore Carpaccio, The Martyrdom of Ten Thousand, c. 1514. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Series Preface
This book, like the series of which it is part, explores the notion that the mind is spread out across brain, body and world, for which we have adopted ‘distributed cognition’ as the most comprehensive term. Distributed cognition primarily draws evidence from philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, linguistics and neurosci- ence. Distributed cognition covers an intertwined group of theories, which include enactivism and embodied, embedded and extended cognition, and which are also together known as ‘4E cognition’. An overview and explanation of the various strands of distributed cognition are provided in the general introduction.
Distributed cognition can be used as a methodology through which to pursue study of the humanities and is also evident in past practices and thought. Our series considers a wide range of works from classical antiquity to modernism in order to explore ways in which the humanities benefits from thinking of cognition as distributed via objects, language and social, technological and natural resources and environments, and to examine earlier notions that cognition is distributed. Theories of distributed cognition are transformative in terms of how we under- stand human nature and the humanities: they enable a different way of perceiving our interactions in the world, highlighting the significant role of texts and other cultural artefacts as part of a biologically based and environmentally grounded account of the mind. Theories of distributed cognition offer an opportunity to integrate the humanities and the sciences through an account that combines bio- logically and culturally situated aspects of the mind. The series illuminates the ways in which past ideas and practices of distributed cognition are historically and cul- turally inflected and highlights the cognitive significance of material, linguistic and other sociocultural developments. This evidence has the potential to feed back into cognitive science and philosophy of mind, casting new light on current definitions and debates.
Each volume provides a general and a period-specific introduction. The general introduction, which is replicated across all four volumes, aims to orientate read- ers unfamiliar with this area of research. It provides an overview of the different approaches within distributed cognition and discussion of the value of a distributed cognitive approach to the humanities. The period-specific introductions provide a
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more detailed analysis of work in the cognitive humanities in the period covered by the volume, before going on to reflect on how the essays in the volume advance understanding in the humanities via distributed cognition.
The project from which this series emerged provided participants with an online seminar series by philosophers working on various aspects of distributed cogni- tion. These seminars are publicly available on the project’s website (http://www. hdc.ed.ac.uk/seminars). The seminars aim to help researchers in the humanities think about how ideas in distributed cognition could inform, and be informed by, their work. Four workshops were held in the summer of 2015 at the University of Edinburgh and were attended by nearly all the volume contributors. The work- shops brought participants together to collaborate in ways that contributed not just to the making of this series but to the development of this approach to the humanities. From the springboard of the seminar series, through the gathering together of scholars from across a range of disciplines and by ongoing interaction with the editorial team during the production of the final essays, the aim has been to provide a set of rigorous analyses of historical notions of distributed cognition.
The series is deliberately exploratory: the areas covered by the essays are indica- tive of the benefits of the general approach of using distributed cognition to inform cultural interpretations. The first four volumes of the series concentrate primarily on Western Europe; however, we envisage further future volumes that will expand the scope of the series. If distributed cognition is understood as we contend, then this understanding has the potential to be valuable across the humanities as part of a new type of intellectual history. The four volumes are arranged chronologi- cally and each of the volumes is edited by a period specialist (Cairns, Anderson, Rousseau, Garratt), a philosopher (Wheeler or Sprevak), and Anderson, whose central involvement in all four volumes ensured overall consistency in approach and style. At the very moment when modern-day technological innovations reveal the extent to which cognition is not just all in the head, this series demonstrates that, just as humans have always relied on bodily and external resources, we have always developed theories, models and metaphors to make sense of the ways in which thought is dependent on being in the world.
Acknowledgements
This series emerged from the project ‘A History of Distributed Cognition’ (2014– 18), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), whom we should like to thank most warmly for their support. The idea for the project first came about in 2010. Miranda Anderson realised that the resonances she was exploring between recent ideas on distributed cognition and Renaissance notions of the mind were not just a matter of a correlation between two points in time, but reflected an important aspect of the mind in history that has been neglected, one that, fittingly, might be best explored through a collaborative project. Our interdis- ciplinary team has worked closely together developing the project, the monograph series and this general approach to the humanities: ours has been an intellectual
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endeavour akin to Hutchins’s description of a ship’s crew successfully navigating by means of collective computation (1995). With Douglas Cairns as Principal Investigator and the core project team of Miranda Anderson, Mark Sprevak and Michael Wheeler, we have collaborated closely both between ourselves and with other scholars. For volumes 3 and 4 respectively, the editorial team were joined by period specialists George Rousseau and Peter Garratt, who helped shape these volumes. Boleslaw Czarnecki, research assistant on the project during 2016–17, helped liaise with contributors and with the organisation of public engagement activities during this time. We were fortunate to have had two excellent audi- tors, in the shape of Terence Cave and Tim Crane, who used their years of accumulated experience and wisdom to help monitor our progress. Our advisory board offered expertise from across a wide spectrum of academic disciplines: Andy Clark, Giovanna Colombetti, Christopher Gill, David Konstan, Karin Kukkonen, Duncan Pritchard, Andrew Michael Roberts and Patricia Waugh. We are very grateful to the philosophers who came on board to provide us with the online seminars and joined us in online discussion: Andy Clark, Giovanna Colombetti, Shaun Gallagher, John Sutton, Deb Tollefsen, Dave Ward, Dan Zahavi, as well as our own Michael Wheeler. The editors would also like to thank those scholars (John Bintliff, Mary Crane and Gary Dickson) who made valuable contributions to the second project workshop but whose papers could not for various reasons be included in the final volume.
The editorial team is especially grateful to Duncan Pritchard and Eidyn, the University of Edinburgh’s Philosophy Research Centre, for their support of a pilot of this project in 2012–13. The Balzan Project, ‘Literature as an Object of Knowledge’, led by Terence Cave, also kindly supported the project, pro- viding funds for the images on our website. The project has benefited from the involvement of many of the participants from the Balzan Project in our workshops and volumes including Guillemette Bolens, Terence Cave, Mary Crane, Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, Karin Kukkonen, Raphael Lyne, Emily Troscianko, and our own Miranda Anderson. Meanwhile, the AHRC-funded Cognitive Futures in the Humanities Network (2012–14), co-led by Peter Garratt, with Michael Wheeler as a founding steering-committee member, has also fostered further productive interactions and cross-fertilisation.
We warmly thank the National Gallery of Scotland for helping us to source and secure our website images. The National Museum of Scotland (NMS) was our sup- portive project partner, and NMS staff met with the team to discuss and assist with the development of public engagement activities. These activities included a series of recorded public lectures, during which museum curators and academics pro- vided their perspective on the cognitive implications of museum artefacts. Malcolm Knight, the multitalented man behind the Scottish Mask and Puppet Centre, illustrated the cognitive dimensions of masks and puppets and provided much entertainment during one of the NMS lectures. NMS also provided us with their classrooms for our school workshops. Lisa Hannah Thompson was an invaluable contributor to the development of our ideas on how best to shape the material and
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the programme for children in order to connect in fun and effective ways. Miranda Anderson would like to thank the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh, where she was based while working on this volume. Finally, we are grateful to our copy-editor, Cathy Falconer, for her con- sistently sharp-eyed attention to detail and to Edinburgh University Press for their support throughout the process.
Editorial Notes
Contributors have been allowed to follow their own preferences with regard to the use of original spelling and capitalisation in primary texts. The editors have sought to impose consistency within rather than between chapters.
1
Miranda Anderson, Michael Wheeler and Mark Sprevak1
Consider counting on your fingers; or solving a challenging mathematical problem using pen and paper (or Napier’s bones, or a slide-rule); or the way in which we routinely offload the psychological task of remembering phone numbers on to our ubiquitous mobile phones; or a brainstorming scenario in which new creative ideas emerge from a process of collective group interaction; or the manner in which the intelligent feat of ship navigation is realised through a pattern of embodied, information-communicating social exchanges between crew members who, indi- vidually, perform purely local information-processing tasks (such as bearing taking) using specialised technology. All of these examples of brain-body-world collabora- tion are, potentially at least, instances of the phenomenon that, illuminated from a historical perspective, is the topic of this volume. That phenomenon is distributed cognition.
So what, precisely, is distributed cognition? The term itself is standardly traced to the pioneering work of the cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins (see, canonically, Hutchins 1995, from where the example of ship navigation is taken). However, in using this introduction to sketch the conceptual background for the chapters that follow, we shall adopt an understanding of distributed cognition that arguably diverges somewhat from Hutchins’s own (for one thing, we make no demand that the target elements, whether located inside or outside the brain, should be understood as representational media; see e.g. Hutchins 1995: 373). Here we are aiming for a general and inclusive notion of cognition alongside a general and inclusive notion of what it means for cognition to be distributed. Thus the term ‘cognition’ should be understood liberally, as it routinely is in the day-to-day business of cognitive science, as picking out the domain of the psycho- logical, where that domain encompasses phenomena that we often identify using
1 We warmly thank Douglas Cairns for his assistance with this chapter. The authors would also like to thank the participants in a workshop at the University of Edinburgh in June 2017 who provided feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter: Felix Budelmann, Peter Garratt, Christopher Gill, Elspeth Jajdelska, Karin Kukkonen, Adam Lively, Andrew Michael Roberts, George Rousseau, William Short, Jan Söffner, Eleanore Widger and Clare Wright.
2 miranda anderson, michael wheeler and mark sprevak
terms such as mind, thought, reasoning, perception, imagination, intelligence, emotion and experience (this list is not exhaustive), and includes various conscious, unconscious-but-potentially-conscious, and strictly non-conscious states and pro- cesses. Given this broad conception of what cognition is, cognition may be said to be distributed when it is, in some way, spread out over the brain, the non-neural body and (in many paradigm cases) an environment consisting of objects, tools, other artefacts, texts, individuals, groups and/or social/institutional structures. Advocates of distributed cognition argue that a great many examples of the kinds of cognitive phenomena identified above (reasoning, perception, emotion, etc.) are spread out in this way.
To see why the notion of distributed cognition has attracted so much attention, here’s a way of thinking about how the contemporary discourses stationed in and around cognitive science arrived at what might justifiably, in the present context, be called the received (non-distributed) view of mind. Although the very brief his- tory lesson that follows involves the odd caricature, it is surely broadly accurate. According to the much-maligned substance dualists (the most famous of whom is arguably Descartes), mind is a non-physical entity that is metaphysically distinct from the material world. Here the material world includes not only the external tools and artefacts that human beings design, build and use, but also the thinker’s own organic body. On this model, the minds of other people become peculiarly inaccessible, and indeed one’s indirect knowledge of those minds, such as it is, seems to result from a precarious analogy with the correlations between thought and action in one’s own case. For this reason, plus a whole battery of others – some scientific, some philosophical – substance dualism is now officially unpopular in most of the relevant academic circles. Indeed, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, mind has been placed firmly back in the material and social world. Or rather, it has been placed firmly in a particular segment of that world, namely the brain.
As apparently demonstrated by all those ‘pictures of the brain thinking’ that we regularly receive from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans and the like, the received view is now that the brain is where the cognitive action is. This neuro-centric orthodoxy is not an irrational position. Indeed, there is no doubt that many a good thing has come out of research programmes in psychology, neurosci- ence and elsewhere which embrace it. Nevertheless, the contemporary distributed cognition perspective is usefully depicted as a reaction against neuro-centrism’s (allegedly) distorting influence. To be clear, no advocate of distributed cognition believes that the brain is somehow unimportant. Rather, (part of) the proposal is that to understand properly what the brain does, we need to take proper account of the subtle, complex and often surprising ways in which that venerable organ is…