Synopses & Reviews
A companion to Mary Carruthers' earlier study of memory in medieval culture, The Book of Memory, this book, The Craft of Thought, examines medieval monastic meditation as a discipline for making thoughts, and discusses its influence on literature, art, and architecture, deriving examples from a variety of late antique and medieval sources, with excursions into modern architectural memorials. The study emphasizes meditation as an act of literary composition or invention, the techniques of which notably involved both words and making mental "pictures" for thinking and composing.
Review
"...I can attest that this is a careful, thorough, and profound essay on its subject..." Film and Philosophy"a wide-ranging text..illuminating for scholars of classical and medieval history, art history, and literature, as well as the more obvious disciplines of theology and rhetoric." Envoi"It is impossible to do justice to this richly textured book in only a few paragraphs...Carruthers's prose is reminiscent of the concepts she disucsses; enlivened by puns, alliterations,...and vividly colorful descriptions of her examples, it never ceases to hold the reader's attention and to present difficult ideas with remarkable lucidity... a tremendously important, first-rate work to be read carefully by all scholars of medieval religion, art, and literature, one that opens up a new vista on the fundamental human activity...of creative thought." Speculum"Read [The Craft of Thought] for its copious citations of medieval texts, for its take on the medieval mind." Jocelyn Penny Small, Bryn Mawr Review"...the book is worth reading." Jocelyn Penny Small, The Medieval Review"This book is a successor to Carruthers's...The Book of Memory and is another wide-ranging study relating the spiritual, literary, and artistic practices of medieval culture to an unbroken meditative tradition extending back to patristic and late classical culture. MC deals with the ways mental images serve the cognitive life of the soul as, together with the body, it relates not to itself or to a world of things or people, but to God. This is not a book about the history of psychological theory, nor is it the work of an art historian; however, as its copious bibliography shows, it does benefit from the resourcefulness of recent scholarship in these fields devoted to Late Antique and Early Christian cultures. Mc's book explores a core of medieval culture whose premises and practices were broadly pervasive, and so scholars in many different fields will benefit from it." Eugene Vance, The Medieval Review"[Carruthers'] new book is one of the most compelling and original contributors to the history of medieval art to appear in many years..." Modern Philology
Review
"... a wide-ranging text...illuminating for scholars of classical and medieval history, art history, and literature, as well as the more obvious disciplines of theology and rhetoric." Envoi, Natalie Grinnell, Wofford College"...Carruthers puts forward at a quick pace, a wealth of intuitions and ideas about the function of pictures which are liable to stimulate further research in the fields both of classics and of medieval studies." Classical World
Synopsis
An examination of monastic meditation, first published in 1998.
About the Author
Mary Carruthers is the author of The Craft of Thought (Cambridge 1998) and The Medieval Craft of Memory (University of Pennsylvania 2002) as well as of The Book of Memory (1990 and 2008). She divides her time between New York City and Oxford, where she holds the positions of Remarque Professor of Literature at New York University and Fellow of All Souls College.
Table of Contents
1. Collective memory and memoria rerum; Part I. An Architecture for Thinking; Part II. Memoria Rerum, Remembering Things: 2. 'Remember heaven': the aesthetics of Mneme; 3. Cognitive images, meditation, and ornament; 4. Dream vision, picture, and 'the mystery of the bed chamber'; 5. 'The place of the tabernacle'.