Medieval Thought Experiments: Poetry, Hypothesis, and Experience in the European Middle Ages (Disputatio) (Disputatio, 31)

An interdisciplinary collection examining the interface of literature and philosophy in the High Middle Ages. Throughout the Middle Ages, fictional frameworks could be used as imaginative spaces in which to test or play with ideas without asserting their truth. The aim of this volume is to consider how intellectual problems were approached - if not necessarily resolved - through the kinds of hypothetical enquiry found in poetry and in other texts that employ fictional or imaginative strategies. Scholars working across the spectrum of medieval languages and academic disciplines consider why a writer might choose a fictional or hypothetical frame to discuss theoretical questions, how a work?s truth content is affected and shaped by its fictive nature, or what kinds of affective or intellectual work its reading demands. By reading literary, philosophical, and spiritual texts from England, France, and Italy alongside each other, this collection offers a new interdisciplinary approach to the history of medieval thought Acknowledgements vii Introduction: Textual Experiments, Thinking with Fiction / Jonathan Morton 1 Thought Experiments with Unbelief in the Long Middle Ages / John Marenbon 21 Can Thought Experiments Backfire? Avicenna’s Flying Man, Self-Knowledge, and the Experience of Allegory in Deguileville’s 'Pèlerinage de vie humaine' / Marco Nievergelt 41 Piers Plowman and God’s Thought Experiment / Mishtooni Bose 71 The Conception of the World in 'Placides e Timéo' / Alice Lamy 99 'As I kan now remembre': Memory and Making in 'The House of Fame' / Jane Griffiths 121 Affective Meditation in Hand Mnemonics and Devotional Texts, from 'Amor Dei' to Fear of Judgement / Julia Bourke 141 Bonaventure’s Thought Experiment: The Use of 'Synderesis' in the 'Itinerarium mentis in Deum', the Ineffability Topos, and Francis’s Stigmata / Gustav Zamore 173 The Art of Rambling: Errant Thoughts and Entangled Passions in Petrarch’s 'The Ascent of Mont Ventoux' ('Familiares' IV, 1) and RVF 129 / Francesca Southerden 197 Desire for the Good: Jean de Meun, Boethius, and the 'homme devisé en deuz' / Philip Knox 223 Interpretation all the Way Down: Fabliaux and Medieval Exegesis / Gabrielle Lyons 251 Queer Arts of Failure in Alan of Lille and Hue of Rotelande / Daniel Reeve 273 'Ethice Subponitur'? The Imaginative Syllogism and the Idea of the Poetic / Vincent Gillespie 297 Index 329