"Why Medieval Literature Does Not Need the Concept of Social Minds: Exemplarity and Collective Experience." Narrative 23.2 (2015): 140-53.

NARRATIVE, Vol 23, No. 2 (May 2015)Copyright 2015 by !e Ohio State University

Eva von Contzen

Why Medieval Literature Does Not Need the Concept of Social Minds: Exemplarity and Collective Experience

Medieval examples of characters in interaction with other characters, o"en in groups, are ubiquitous. !is is hardly surprising, and neither is the fact that these groups can act collectively as groups. However, to describe such phenomena in terms of “social minds” as described by Alan Palmer (details below) is problematic: the concept is misleading when applied to representations of collective experience in medieval lit-erature, because medieval culture had a di#erent understanding of the self than the one that underlies Palmer’s argument. Palmer takes for granted the idea of the post-Enlightenment self characterized by the privileging of interior consciousness. !e concept of social minds is the logical extension of this idea: the novel shows a belief and interest in groups having a consciousness like the self. Medieval culture, however, had an action-oriented rather than a mind-oriented conception of self. Consequently, representations of collectivity turn out to be di#erent from their counterparts in the age of the novel. !e medieval evidence, I propose, may be better described in terms of exemplarity as a special case of collective experientiality, where experientiality is tied much more to acting than to thinking (and its cognitive bedfellows). Collectiv-ity is contained in and expressed through the exemplary individual’s actions, which invite emulation on the part of the audience.

Eva von Contzen is assistant professor at the chair of Old and Middle English Language, Literature, and Culture at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. She completed her PhD on narrative forms and functions in medieval saints’ lives in 2012. From 2013–2014, she was awarded a junior fellowship at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS). Since 2014, she is the principal investigator of an interdisciplin-ary network devoted to “Medieval narratology,” funded by the German Research Foundation. She has published on the intersections of sanctity and literature in the Middle Ages, medieval narrative, historical narratology, and the reception of classical literature. She can be reached at [email protected].

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Action-Oriented Medieval Characters

Let me brie!y call to mind a number of aspects that are central to Palmer’s concept of intermental thought. At the onset of his analysis, there is the distinction, or rath-er the continuum, between the “internalist” and the “externalist” perspective on the mind: “An internalist perspective on the mind stresses those aspects that are inner, introspective, private, solitary, individual, psychological, mysterious, and detached. An externalist perspective on the mind stresses those aspects that are outer, active, public, social, behavioral, evident, embodied, and engaged” (Social Minds 39). Palmer criticizes that traditional narrative theory has favored the internalist perspective (fo-cus on private minds, questions of personal identity, introspection, interior mono-logue, etc.) and argues for a greater inclusion of the externalist perspective, examples of which include the analysis of social minds, continuing consciousness, and aspec-tuality (40). With respect to the novel, Palmer maintains that “"ctional narrative is, in essence, the presentation of mental functioning” (9) and that readers make sense of a novel because they are able to follow a character’s mind throughout the text. In Palmer’s words, “novel reading is mind reading” (21). #e processes of the mind make up the plot: the plot does not consist simply of causal connections between events, but of connections that are causal because of the characters’ experiences that are shaped by these events (“Social Minds” 202). Palmer demonstrates how, in the novel, social minds can function as a prime generator for the plot. #is is most pervasively shown by the townspeople in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch. Even a short passage such as the following illustrates Palmer’s point:

#e Doctor [Sprague] was more than suspected of having no religion, but somehow Middlemarch tolerated this de"ciency in him as if he had been a Lord Chancellor; indeed it is probable that his professional weight was the more believed in, the world-old association of cleverness with the evil principle being still potent in the minds even of lady-patients who had the strictest ideas of frilling and sentiment. It was perhaps this negation in the Doctor which made his neighbours call him hard-headed and dry-witted; conditions of texture which were also held favourable to the storing of judg-ments connected with drugs. At all events, it is certain that if any medical man had come to Middlemarch with the reputation of having very de"nite religious views, of being given to prayer, and of otherwise showing an active piety, there would have been a general presumption against his medical skill. (Eliot 125; quoted in “Large Intermental Units” 85–86, Palmer’s emphasis)

Palmer demonstrates that here the “Middlemarch mind” is created by means of explicit references to an actual group (in this case, “Middlemarch” and “his neigh-bours”), the use of the passive voice (“was more than suspected”), presupposition (“the reputation”), as well as another presupposition and a reference to a hypotheti-cal group of critics in order to make a particular rhetorical point (“there would have been a general presumption against his medical skill”). #e passage brings to the fore

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the heavy cognitive emphasis of the novel: ideas and judgments circulate based on at-tributions, they are ascribed to an individual by a group, and even as a counterfactual they function as a means for characterizing both the doctor and the Middlemarch community.

Medieval narrative, however, does not work according to these parameters. In particular, the view that narrative sense-making is based on following a character or a group’s mental involvement is highly problematic for the medieval context, in which narrative representations of experience are not mind- or subject-based, but action-based. In medieval narrative action is not, as in Palmer’s argument, a key to internal processes: medieval stories emphasize the experiential as something outside of the character’s mind: the events of the plot happen to the character, either by chance or by divine purpose, but they remain action patterns and are not internalized or transformed into mental states that change, or in!uence, or have a clearly discernible cognitive e"ect on the character who undergoes the experience. At the same time, medieval character is outward and externally visible, for instance in clothing, symbol-ic accessories and attributes, conventionalized patterns of behavior, which rely on a common stock of o#entimes symbolic gestures and facial expressions.1 $e following passage from the romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight may serve as an example. A#er the marvelous Green Knight has made his entrance at King Arthur’s Christmas feast in Camelot, the attendant folk react as if in one mind with a mixture of fear and awe and do not dare to respond to the Green Knight’s question who !e gouernour of !is gyng (“the ruler of this company”; ll. 225) is:

Al studied !at !er stod and stalked hym nerreWyth al þe wonder of þe worlde what he worch schulde.For fele sellyez had !ay sen bot such neuer are;Forþi for fantoum and fayryȝe !e folk þere hit demed.Þerfore to answare watz arȝe mony aþel frekeAnd al stouned at his steuen and ston-stil setenIn a swoghe sylence þurȝ þe sale riche.As al were slypped vpon slepe so slaked hor lotez In hyȝe—I deme hit not al for douteBot sum for cortaysye—Bot let hym þat al schulde louteCast vnto þat wyȝe. (Waldron and Andrew 216, ll. 237–49)

Everyone who was standing there stared and cautiously approached him, with all the wonder on earth as to what he would do. For they had seen many marvels but never such a one before; and so the people there con-sidered it illusion and magic. $erefore many a noble knight was afraid to answer, and all were astounded by his voice and sat stone-still in a deathly si-lence throughout the (ne hall. $eir voices died away as if they had all fallen asleep suddenly—I judge it not wholly for fear but partly for courtesy—but allowed him to whom all were duty bound to defer to address the man. (An-drew and Waldron 90)

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!e passage describes the guests’ reaction as a group: they stare at the green knight, wonder about him, are afraid, and fall silent. !ese acts are not cognitive (only in the sense that being afraid and wondering are acts of the mind, but not in the sense of mental attribution, presupposition, or the characterization of a group conscious-ness). Rather, they are descriptions of actions and patterns of behavior: as a group, the knights react in a similar way. !is reaction, however, does not entail a joint mental component. !e narrator’s intervention, which follows immediately a"er the account of the guests’ reaction, is the only explicit explanation of the group’s cognitive pro-cesses: the narrator adds that some members of the audience keep quiet not so much out of fear (for doute) but out of courtesy (for cortaysye) because they wait for their king’s reply. But even this remark cannot be taken in support of any the notion of in-termental cognition as it is clearly ironic, criticizing the knights’ fearful hesitance, and ultimately serves to lead over to Arthur’s response.

What emerges from a comparison of the two passages is that Palmer’s concept of mind(s) is incongruous with the medieval evidence. In fact, we are facing two dif-ferent kinds of “minds,” confusingly con#ated by the ostensible universality of the term mind. What Palmer calls “externalist” perspective is, in fact, still an “internal-ist” one as he presupposes that through the external perspective it becomes possible to “read minds,” i.e. to be given insight into characters’ mental or intermental activ-ity. Such a view, however, re#ects a particular—modern—understanding of human psychology and the concept of self. Extending the perspective from the internal to the external signs of collective mental functioning shi"s the attention to a di$erent set of evidence for largely the same, or very similar, psychological processes at work whenever human beings are represented in groups. Of course the concept of “social minds” involves a relocation of these processes—from one subject to many—so that it becomes di%cult, indeed impossible, to discern one source of origin and authority. Yet what is being expressed collectively is a set of shared internal processes (thoughts, beliefs, opinions, etc.) made visible from the outside. Medieval literature, by contrast, is indeed “externalist” in that it privileges what is outer, evident, and active as an end in itself.

Medieval “Minds” in/as Action

Bearing the di$erences between Palmer’s “minds” and the medieval preference for ac-tion in mind, we can now turn to selected examples of how characters are represented collectively in medieval narratives. From the very start it is important to recognize that not any description of collective behavior constitutes an intermental unit. Such a unit, according to Palmer, is characterized by shared thinking and socially distrib-uted cognition (“Social Minds” 213). Examining a range of medieval texts, we &nd a number of cases which may be regarded as instances of “social minds.” Upon closer inspection, however, we shall see that the representation of joint consciousness plays a minor role only and is fully in the service of action. A case in point is the representa-tion of joint speech: it is common practice that in contexts in which groups speak out, their opinions are summarized and given as if being issued from one source instead

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of many. In !e Life of St. Katherine of Alexandria by John Capgrave (1392–1464), for instance, the three hundred and ten wise men hired to challenge Katherine’s wisdom have to admit their failure in view of Katherine’s divinely bestowed knowledge that surpasses their own:

“O good god,” seyden these clerkys than, “!is mayde hath lerned more "ing in hir lyue!an we supposed, for more "an we, she kan. we wunder hov she may oure argumentis dryve#or hir conclusyon, for in yeeris fyvekun we not lerne "at sche hath dooth in oon.”—!us seyde these wysemen be rowe euerychon. (Horstmann 42, I ll.

414–20)

“O good God,” these clerks then said, “!is maiden has learned more things in her life than we thought, for she knows more than we do. We wonder how she may use our arguments to her conclusion, for in $ve years we can-not learn what she has done in one.” !us said these wise men one by one in turn.2

Monika Fludernik suggests that this passage may be taken as an instance of “social minds” (“!rough a Glass” 90–92). Indeed here the philosophers’ shared opinion is expressed collectively. Yet it is questionable to what degree the example is really in-dicative of a joint consciousness. We may well be concerned rather with a summary of the opinio communis. I would describe this and similar instances as rhetorical devices of condensation, employed for pragmatic reasons, and not as intermental activity. Instead of distributing the same message over several speakers, the poet condenses the words to a speech in unison. Especially against the oral-aural backdrop of med-ieval reading practices, it makes good sense not to introduce too many speakers and voices. What is important, rather, is the speakers’ opinion: they provide a foil against which the saint’s holiness stands out all the more remarkably. !is is also true for the following example, taken from Lydgate’s “Legend of St. Margaret.” Here, the people who witness Margaret’s torture comment on her su#ering and urge her to give in to the pagan judge:

Allas the while! thei that stode beside, Full sore wepten of compassyoun;Allas! for doole! thei myght vnnethe abide To sene hir blode so renne and rayle doun So importable was hir passyounFor Cristes feithe, that the peple abraideAnd of pite thus to hir thei saide:

“O Margareta, allas, whan we take hede Hou thou whilom were faireste vn-to see,

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But now, allas! thi body is al rede, Steyned with blode, whereof we han pite, Allas! allas! hou myght it euere beTo sene a mayde yonge, fresshe, and tendre of ageMighty to endure of tourment suche arage?” (MacCracken 182, ll. 232–45)

Alas! !ose that stood beside her wept full sorely out of compassion. Alas! For sorrow they may hardly remain to see her blood running and "owing down. So unbearable was her passion for Christ’s faith that the people broke their silence and said to her out of pity: “O Margareta, alas, when we take heed how you once were the fairest to look at, but now, alas! Your body is all red, stained with blood, of which we have pity—alas! Alas! How can it ever be that we see a maiden, young, untouched, and tender of age, strong enough to endure the torment of such a rage?”

It is true that the people speak collectively, but this is done for practical purposes (the listeners) and to provide a backdrop for Margaret and her steadfastness. It hardly allows for drawing further conclusions about the people in the saint’s audience and the workings of their minds. Rather, these collective audience-responses serve quite a di#erent purpose: they guide, even anticipate, the medieval readers’ and listeners’ reaction to the events in the narrative. !e communal voice of “the people” can be imagined as a point in the text which is particularly open to the audience who can participate, a#ectively, in the story. !rough the anonymous observers in the text, the audience is invited to give voice to Margaret’s su#ering and to urge her to give up her resistance, or, like the philosophers, express their amazement in view of Katherine’s impressive knowledge.3

Another strategy of representing collectivity in medieval narrative involves com-menting on the action. In the stanzaic Guy of Warwick, a popular romance, the hero, Guy, has secretly le$ England in order to prove himself worthy as a knight for his beloved. His mentor Herhaud, a$er having searched in vain for Guy all over Europe, returns to Warwick with the message þat he no miȝt #nde him nouȝt / In non skinnes lond (“that he could not %nd him anywhere”; Zupitza 43, ll. 8–9). People react with profound distress:

Mani a moder child &at dayWepe & gan say, “waileway,”Wel sore wringand her hond. (43, ll. 10–12)

Many a mother’s child that day wept and said, “Alas and woe!,” sorely wring-ing their hands.

!e collective representation of mani a moder child functions as a powerful illustra-tion of the e#ects Guy’s absence causes. By performing a traditional act of mourning (wailing and wringing hands), the people emphasize both the high reputation Guy holds in his homeland in general as well as the great distress among his friends at

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Warwick in particular. !eir behavior is symbolic and implemented in the stanza to stress Guy’s compatriots’ woe.

My "nal example of potential cases of “social minds” is taken from the beginning of the Alliterative Morte Arthure. While King Arthur, the Knights of the Roundtable, and a large company of guest celebrate their recent success in military campaigns, a delegation from Rome appears and accuses Arthur and his knights of having oc-cupied Roman land. A#er the legate has "nished his announcement, the following happens:

!e kynge blyschit one the beryne with his brode eghne, !at fulle brymly for breth brynte as the gledys;Keste colours as kynge with crouelle lates,Luked as a lyone, and on his lyppe bytes!!e Romaynes for radnesse ruschte to the erthe,"ore ferdnesse of hys face, as they fey were;Cowchide as kenetez be-fore the kynge seluyne,Be-cause of his contenaunce confusede theme semede! (Brock 4–5, ll.

116–23)

!e king looked at the man with his eyes wide open, which burnt very "ercely like hot coals because of his anger, turned pale as the king with cruel glances looked like a lion and bit on his lips! !e Romans rushed to the earth out of terror, out of fear of his face, as they were fated to die; crouched like dogs in front of the king. !ey seemed confused because of his countenance!

Arthur is burning with anger, and his enraged look has an immediate e%ect upon the Roman delegation. !ey fear for their lives, going to the ground like dogs that are fully submitted to their owner’s authority. Here we may indeed identify a rendi-tion of action-cum-mind. Even though limited to the situation and aligned with the action, the Romans are depicted as a “social mind” (and, incidentally, also engage in mind-reading: based on their interpretation of Arthur’s expression, which is in-dicative of his thinking at that moment, they react to his facial expression of power and rage). Yet the narrator immediately provides an explanatory line that ensures the audience’s understanding of the Romans’ behavior (“!ey seemed confused because of his countenance!”). !e narrator’s explicitness points towards the speci"c assump-tions that underlie medieval narrative practices: since action takes precedence, the audience is not expected—and not required—to make inferences about the charac-ters’ mind-sets and distributed cognition. !is is why instances in which one can arguably identify collective experience are highly localized, i.e. they are relevant only for the situation in which they occur, and o%set by narratorial commentary. What is more, the representation of collective experience is o#en used as a foil for the—singu-lar—protagonists. To show a group’s shared thoughts and reactions in a given context is signi"cant only because the group re&ects a sentiment that can either be contrasted with, or reinforces, the hero’s behavior. Put di%erently, medieval “social minds” are in service of and subject to individual action. As modern readers, we tend to put em-

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phasis on “individual,” but the focus is on “action,” performed by one character. !is brings me to the crucial question of how collectivity is interrelated with the concept of exemplarity.

Collectivity and Exemplarity

In view of the strong emphasis put on action patterns and the stable characters that form part of larger structures, it is small wonder that the medieval “social minds” we have encountered are construed quite di"erently from those in the novel. In fact, the idea of a self in the modern sense—and hence Palmer’s understanding of “mind”—is highly contested by medieval authors. At the same time, the paradigm of action over consciousness does not mean that collective experience is marginalized. On the con-trary, collectivity plays a central role: social minds are evoked in the sense that very o#en the audience is conceptualized in collective terms. A good example of this can be found in Ancrene Wisse. Written in the $rst half of the thirteenth century, Ancrene Wisse is a guide for anchoresses, i.e. women o#en of noble background who withdrew from the world and engaged in a spiritual life in the footsteps of the early desert fa-thers like St. Anthony. !e author stresses that all anchoresses live in the very same manner, following the same rules all over England:

For þi ȝe gað wel forð ant spedeð in ow er wei, for euch is wiðward oþer ín an manere of li(ade. as þah ȝe weren an cuuent of lundene ant of oxnefort. of schreobsburi, oðer of chester. þear as alle beoð an wið an imeane manere. ant wið uten singularite. þet isanful frommardschipe. lah þíng i religiun. for hit to warpeð annesse ant manere imeane, þet ah to beon in ordre. (Tolkien f. 69a, ll. 18–24)

!erefore you go on well and succeed on your way, for everyone goes along with the others in one manner of living, as though you were a community of London or of Oxford, of Shrewsbury or of Chester, where all are one with a common manner without singularity—that is, individual di"erence—a base thing in religion, for it shatters unity and the common manner which ought to exist in an order. (White 119)

Singularite, which is further explained as anful frommardschipe (“individual di"er-ence, willfulness”), is in fact a vice, a special kind of the deadly sin of pride. !e an-choresses are advised in drastic terms to abstain from such a dangerous manner of conduct:

ȝef ei is imong ow þe geað i singularite. ant ne folheð nawt þe cuuent. ah went ut of þe (oc þet is as in a cloistre. þet iesu is heh príur ouer. went ut as a teowi schep ant meapeð hire ane in to breres teilac. in to wulues muð toward te þrote of helle. ȝef ei swuch is imong ow, godd turne híre in to (oc. wende

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hire in to cuuent. ant leue ow þe beoð þrín. swa halden ow þrín, þet godd þe hehe priur neome ow on ende þeonne up, in to þe cloistre of heo uene. (Tolkien f. 69b, ll. 3–11)

If there is any among you who takes a singular way and does not follow the community, but turns aside from the #ock, which is as if in a cloister that Je-sus is high prior over, turns aside like a restive sheep and wanders o$ on her own into a bramble thicket, into a wolf ’s mouth, on the way to the throat of hell—if any such is among you, God turn her back into the #ock, direct her into the community and grant that you who are in it may so hold yourselves in it that God, the high prior, may at the end take you from there up into the cloister of heaven. (White 119)

%e Christian #ock is norm: individuality is not only measured against, but suspend-ed in the community of anchoresses. Even in such a practical context4 and within the restrictions of the Christian imagery, the individual is described not in cognitive or mental parameters, but in terms of her behavior and actions: singularity means “turn-ing aside” and “wandering o$.” A similar diction is used in the early-&'eenth century didactic treatise Jacob’s Well, in which all Christians are advised not to fall into the trap of syngulerte:

þe cornere of pride in presumpcyoun is vj. fote of wose in brede. þe &rste fote is syngulerte; þat is, whan a man folwyth his owyn wytt for pompe, & wytt noȝt do as wysere don, but euere is selfwylly. (Brandeis 60, XI, ll. 13–15)

%e corner of pride in presumption has six feet of slime in breadth. %e &rst foot is singularity, that is, when a man follows his own wit for pomp, and does not know how to behave as wiser men do, but is ever self-willing.

Singularity is conceptualized as a speci&c way of acting and behaving, not as a mental disposition.

In addition, Jacob’s Well provides its audience with long lists of how to cleanse the dirty pit of one’s body. %ese lists are indicative of the predominant medieval way of ascribing membership: by allocating everything its &xed place within the order of the world and its various sub-orders. In the third and fourth chapters of the sermon, we &nd !e articles of !e gret curse—a list of sins that, in the author’s allegorical phras-ing, has corrupted the pit of the body. %e sins are categorized in terms of the people who commit them, ranging from slanderers, disturbers, and murderers to those who dishonor nuns, those who use false measures, those who do not believe in the sac-raments, pirates, and those who enrich themselves at the expense of others.5 Group membership is crucial even when it comes to sinning: it is not the individual that counts but his or her place in the overall system. Medieval encyclopedias are perhaps the most obvious example of these systems and categorizations that permeate every aspect of medieval life: from the macro- to the microcosm of the world to the social hierarchies. In literary texts, this fundamental sense of belonging somewhere rather

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than belonging !rst and foremost to a self !nds its expression, structurally, in the em-phasis put on action and action patterns shaped by the larger orders and categories, and, functionally, in the concept of exemplarity.

Etymologically, to be an example means to be “taken out” of something (Lat. exemptum > eximere); an exemplary person is someone who stands out among his or her peers and serves as a model or illustration. "e concept of exemplarity implies that a character who functions as a model is both very much alike the group or cat-egory to which she belongs and at the same time di#erent because outstanding. "e exemplary mode that underlies the vast majority of medieval writing is intimately connected with the practice of reading for moral and ethical advancement. In other words, reading, especially reading examples, is essentially a social action that relo-cates the source of experientiality to the reader. In Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, Monika Fludernik notes, with respect to a passage from William Caxton’s “St. Erken-wold,” that the saint is not emotionally involved, but the audience is, that is, the audi-ence who witness the miracle in the storyworld (97).6 According to Fludernik, this displacement of a human internal perspective to that of the external observers is one of the reasons why saints’ lives never became novels (98). I would go one step further and argue that the source, or responsibility, for the experience is relocated between and betwixt the storyworld to the real-world audience. To be exemplary is not of importance for the world of romance or hagiography in which a character moves—it only becomes meaningful once it is recognized and interpreted as such by the audi-ence. "e singular experience of the hero as well as the singular depiction of a group’s reaction can then become communal and collective in that it is read as a pars pro toto.

Medieval practices of reading strongly support this view, as Mary Carruthers points out: “the medieval understanding of the complete process of reading does not observe in the same way the basic distinction we make between ‘what I read in a book’ and ‘my experience’” (211). In fact, “‘what I read in a book’ is ‘my experience,’ and I make it mine by incorporating it (and we should understand the word ‘incorporate’ quite literally) in my memory” (ibid.). In contrast, as F. Elizabeth Hart demonstrates, in the sixteenth century, the innovation of printing led to new cognitive abilities, which brought about a shi$ both in reading and in representing characters in the storyworld. "is shi$, she argues, is characterized by “a reading-based conscious-ness” (105) that facilitated the representation of characters as complex psychological “minds” that can be read. In the medieval period, then, experience and experiential-ity are transferred, beyond the text, to the audience. "is is why we o$en encoun-ter what A. C. Spearing has termed “subjectless subjectivity” in medieval narratives, that is, a !rst person that does not imply a self (Textual 33).7 "e implications for an understanding of medieval collective experientiality thus involve the inversion of experientiality in the novel. "e concept of exemplarity, which hinges on one single experience, unshared in the narrative world, becomes collective through the act of reading: the audience interprets the hero’s singularity as representative—of a group, a community, of appropriate or inappropriate behavior, and so forth—and at the same time turns it into an experience shared by all because it can be incorporated into the readers’ and listeners’ memory. What is more, the texts themselves invite such an ex-emplary, communal reading in that they enable their audience to assume the position

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of certain groups within the text. As we have seen in the examples of the speeches made collectively by the observers of Margaret’s martyrdom and the scholars in Cap-grave’s Katherine, the audience’s a!ective response is anticipated and e!ectively chan-neled through the narrative structure.

Conclusion

Even though in medieval texts representations of that which is outer, public, social, and engaged come "rst, they do not allow for drawing conclusions about an individu-al’s mind-set. #e medieval predilection for action rarely necessitates the depiction of mental states (let alone the attribution of mental states). Collective representation is a means of signaling group membership, a character’s place in the social order, which ties in with the "xed patterns of behavior be"tting a particular status. #e medieval subject is decentered (Vitz 2). Characters undergo a range of experiences through-out most medieval genres, but even when these experiences seem to be deliberately chosen by the protagonist (a hero setting out on a quest, a saint opposing a Roman o$cial), they underlie other forces that are larger than the individual’s choices and decisions: the expectations and restrictions of the chivalric code, the codes and man-ners requested for members of a particular social class, age, and gender, the divine promise of being accepted in the community of the saints, the ever-present in%uence of God who purposefully created the world, rhetorical traditions, literary traditions, and not least the impact of authorities, whether ecclesiastical, classical, literary, or po-litical. #e concept of self and hence also the concept of an extended mind based on the model of a single mind is incongruous.

I hope to have shown that a diachronic perspective can raise our awareness for the idiosyncrasies of narrative concepts and categorizations: practices of narrating and reading do undergo shi&s and changes, which help us to further conceptual-ize the development of literary forms and literary history. #e alterity of medieval social minds obviously raises the question whether, and to what extent, we are con-cerned with a precursor of “social minds” as we "nd them in the novel. In a sense the paradoxical practice of expressing collectivity by means of exemplarity has become inverted in the novel. If we can really describe the novel as the inversion of the med-ieval practice by relocating exteriority (privileging interiority) and redistributing ex-perience (creating “social minds” out of various individual minds), we need to start looking for cues both intra- and extratextually in order to explain the motivations for this shi&. It would be too simplistic to locate the turning point in the Enlightenment alone: other crucial factors include the changes in reading practices from oral-aural to silent reading; the change from manuscript culture to printing; the changes brought about by the Reformation, which saw the decline of such highly exemplary genres as the saint’s legend; and the growing impact of humanism. #ese larger cultural up-heavals all played their part in changing the conceptualization, and ultimately the representation, of “minds” acting and thinking individually as well as collectively in narrative texts.

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!e medieval “mind,” as we have seen, is clearly not the kind of mind that un-derlies Palmer’s model and cognitive narrative theory in general. !e cognitive turn made us believe, perhaps too rashly, that the workings of the mind as basic human abilities are universal and, crucially, ahistorical. Yet with respect to social minds, as far as character depiction and the representation of joint thinking are concerned, this clearly seems not to be the case. In the Middle Ages, narrative texts favor action be-fore consciousness and exemplarity before collectivity—and this is why medieval lit-erature does not need the concept of social minds.

Endnotes

1. Cf. Morse 174. To provide a prominent example, in Geo"rey Chaucer’s “General Prologue” to the Canterbury Tales (late 14th c.), the pilgrims are described in great detail, seen through the eyes of the naïve narrator. Extreme cases are the highly stereotypic and stylized descriptions of saints. Following the practice of the Golden Legend, compiled by Jacopo de Voragine in the thirteenth century, o#en the saint’s qualities precede his or her legend in the form of an etymological intro-duction. In the prologue to his “Legend of St. Margaret,” John Lydgate (c. 1371–1449) describes the saint as a precyous gemme amonge these stones alle (“a precious stone among all the stones”; ll.  31). Since her name means “pearl,” Margaret is compared to the whiteness, smallness, and virtue of her etymological model. !e adjectives and nouns Lydgate employs to describe Margaret are conventional and belong to the common stock of the hagiographic description of virgin saints: Margaret is white by virginyte (“white because of her virginity”), smal . . . by humylite (“small . . . because of her humility”), glorious, thurgh deth victoryous (“in her death victorious”), and, %nally, “crowned” with the martyr’s laurel in heaven (see ll. 36–42 in MacCracken). It is crucial to note that typically the reader is provided with the character’s attributes right from the start. Well before Lydgate proceeds to the details of how Margaret became a saint, the readers are equipped with a short-hand of the character in question.

2. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Middle English are my own.

3. In this context it does not pose a problem that the audience in the storyworld are pagans and urge Margaret to renounce her faith (which the real-world audience clearly do not agree with). !e a"ective response is triggered by the violence a&icted to the saint that is almost too much to bear; in that respect, the two audiences’ reactions concur.

4. I use the term “practical” rather than “factual” as the distinction between %ctional and factual narration is notoriously slippery in the medieval period. Hagiography, for instance, was consid-ered to be true because it was based on truth claims made by the church and validated by divine authority, even though many of its elements and topoi are identical with those of romances. Like-wise, handbooks for priests or scienti%c works o#en contained narrative episodes and exempla, and exemplary tales and allegories may be “%ctional” in their contents, yet due to their impact on the audience o#en acquire “factual” implications.

5. See Ch. III, 13, ll. 5–10 and IV, ll. 22–30.

6. Fludernik also demonstrates that the representation of consciousness gains in importance in the later medieval romances (Towards 115–20). However, Fludernik is here not concerned with the representation of collective or shared experience.

7. See also Spearing’s 2012 Medieval Autographies for further examples of his argument.

152 Eva von Contzen

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