The Craft of Thought
Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200
Published on 26. October 2000
Book
Paperback/Softback
456 pages
978-0-521-79541-8 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
'... 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.' Natalie Grinnell, Envoi '... 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 'This is a vigorous and learned book.' David Griffith, Expository Times '... 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)More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
35 Halftones, unspecified
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 27 mm
Weight
735 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-521-79541-8 (9780521795418)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
10/1998
Cambridge University Press
€55.71
Article exhausted; check for reprint
Previous edition
Book
10/1998
Cambridge University Press
€55.71
Article exhausted; check for reprint
Person
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.
Content
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'.