Mary
Carruthers.
The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the
Making
of Images, 400 - 1200.
Cambridge University
Press, 2000.
Cambridge
Studies
in Medieval Literature 34.
xvii,399pp, 4 colour
& 28
mono
plates, 3 text figures.
Paperback, ISBN
0521795419.
Publisher's
recommended price £15.95
A
companion to Mary
Carruthers' earlier study of memory in medieval culture, The Book
of
Memory, The Craft of Thought examines medieval monastic
meditation
as a discipline for making thoughts, and discusses its influence on
literature,
art, and architecture. In a process akin to today's 'creative'
thinking,
or 'cognition', this discipline recognises the essential roles of
imagination
and emotion in meditation. Deriving examples from a variety of late
antique
and medieval sources, with excursions into modern architectural
memorials,
this study emphasises meditation, as an act of lierary composition or
invention,
the techniques of which notably involved both words and making mental
'pictures'
for thinking and composing. This book was previously published in
hardback
in 1998.
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