The Craft of Thought
Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200

An examination of monastic meditation, first published in 1998.

Mary Carruthers (Author)

9780521795418, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 26 October 2000

456 pages, 35 b/w illus.
22.6 x 15.2 x 3.3 cm, 0.61 kg

'… The Craft of Thought is an important contribution to our understanding of memory, the medieval world, and how our image of the world today both converges and diverges from our past. By showing how medieval monastic meditation influences literature, art, and architecture … [the book] underscores the importance of memory in bringing these disparate disciplines together as a unitary whole. Remarkable and learned … [this] is a book to be read and recollected again and again.' Lee Trepanier, VoegelinView (www.voegelinview.com)

The Craft of Thought, first published in 1998, is a companion to Mary Carruthers' earlier study of memory in medieval culture, The Book of Memory. This more recent volume 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 literary composition or invention, the techniques of which notably involved both words and making mental 'pictures' for thinking and composing.

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'.

Subject Areas: Cognition & cognitive psychology [JMR], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Literary theory [DSA]