how were thoughts of the people confined in the middle ages
Answers
Answer:
From a 21st-century perspective, looking to our medieval ancestors for help in understanding the mind would seem to be a backward step. Those were the days, we think, of supernatural forces intervening in human affairs, and with views of medicine, biology and psychology that strike the modern reader as primitive and unsatisfyingly pre-scientific. A progressive view of human knowledge that sees it as inexorably proceeding towards greater understanding would suggest that we have little to learn from a psychology dating from the days before science.
Yet ideas about the mind in the medieval period, itself a huge span of time (from the late classical period to the 15th century) that saw many shifts in thought, were much more sophisticated than that caricature would allow. Here, we set out some prominent medieval models of mind and their implications for understanding memory, imagination, emotion and the relations between mind and body.
Why should we look back to medieval ideas about the mind? One reason is that the Middle Ages saw considerable engagement with questions of mind, body and affect, and the development of sophisticated thinking about psychology – at least among the educated élite, many of them clerics, who read and wrote the texts that have been passed down to us. Another reason is that medieval texts open onto a psychology that was not dominated, as many recent discourses are, by essentially Cartesian notions of mind–body dualism. Before Descartes, mind and body were seen to interlink in ways that have a remarkably modern flavour.
Understanding medieval psychology, though, is fraught with problems. Interpreting any texts or images from so long ago requires a shift of belief systems, in order to appreciate the ontology and background of assumptions with which medieval thinkers operated. Social and cultural contexts were very different. Western medieval writing assumed a Christian thought world, and writing was frequently seen as the domain of men. Psychology was most of all the realm of theologians, who were interested in questions of desire, will, intention, sin and virtue. We cannot look for a straightforward cross-section of medieval thought: much writing is by religious men, and personal testimonies and accounts of experience are inevitably filtered through assumptions concerning gender, class and religious belief – as well as genre.
But hazards are also opportunities: medieval piety foregrounded affective experience, meditation and prayer, and the need to shun distractions in order to stay focused on those tasks. We can also look to imaginative fiction, which offers especially valuable insights into cultural attitudes and experience, of both men and women, and which suggests how ideas of mind, body and affect carried over into secular culture.