Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Culture ed. by Miranda Anderson and Michael Wheeler (review)

Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Culture is the second book of the Edinburgh History of Distributed Cognition series, which 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. This comprehensive and highly ambitious collection coedited by Miranda Anderson and Michael Wheeler explores the notion that mind is spread out across brain, body, and world in the medieval and Renaissance periods. It argues that the various theories of distributed cognition offer an opportunity to integrate the humanities and the sciences through an account that combines biologically and culturally situated aspects of the mind, and can helpfully illuminate and revitalize our reading of medieval and Renaissance works. It also illuminates the ways in which the notions and practices of distributed cognition are historically and culturally inflected and highlights the cognitive significance of material, linguistic, and other sociocultural developments.

Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Culture encompasses a series introduction, a period-specific introduction, and fourteen essays covering the fields of law, history, drama, literature, art, music, philosophy, science, and medicine. The series introduction explains in detail what distributed cognition is and how it is related to the humanities. The period-specific introduction summarizes the previous cognitive approaches to medieval and Renaissance studies and reviews the existing studies by referring to the topics addressed in this volume. Drawing on existing medieval and Renaissance scholarship, the fourteen chapters consider the cognitive dimensions of their topics, and each one provides complex and compelling new insights on the topic it tackles. The breadth of applicability indicates the fertile potential of distributed cognitive approaches. In what follows, then, I will sketch out some key ideas scattered among the divergent essays in order to illuminate what a future field of cognitive medieval and Renaissance studies may entail and encompass.

Distributed cognition, which covers the intertwined group of theories that are also together called "4E cognition" (namely, embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended), considers all cultural artifacts, tools, physical bodies, and the environment as essential parts of our cognitive process. So one of the central arguments in this collection is that human beings strive to create physical, social, epistemic, and cultural resources and environments in order to endow ourselves with enhanced cognitive capacities. Language—as well as its materialized form, books—is a fundamental tool humans use to facilitate their cognitive properties. The cognitive importance of written language is presented in Pieter Present's reading of Robert Hooke and Thomas Sprat's The History of the Royal Society of London, in which the authors expressed the idea of "writing as a way for the soul to reason on the paper" (p. 289). The same idea resurfaces in Werner Schäfke's chapter, in which the medieval Icelandic law book Gragas is supposed to scaffold the jurisprudential cognition through its unique textual organization of legal norms. According to Guillemette Bolens, literary works—in her case, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales—are developed by mankind with language "to train our knowledge of the versatility of the real and bolster the power of our imagination" (p. 85). As Hannah Burrows illustrates, Skaldic poetry (a type of Old Norse poetry) with its complex form and characteristics not only scaffolds various cognitive processes, including composition, memorization, and interpretation, but also functions as a "mindaltering" substance that offers Norseman new ways of thinking about the world.

Besides language, the plays are another important artifact supporting and enhancing the cognitive process of the participants. Clare Wright suggests the medieval plays are less a kind of recreational activity than a particular combination of place, time, culture, and it is the embodied engagement of the participants with these and with each other that allows plays to cultivate a socially distributed cognition. In Wright's case, The Play of the Crucifixion can be understood as...