Miranda Anderson is an Anniversary Fellow at the University of Stirling and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on cognitive approaches to literature and culture. She is the author of The Renaissance Extended Mind (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Michael Wheeler is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Stirling. He is the author of Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step (MIT, 2005). He is co-editor of Heidegger and Cognitive Science (Palgrave, 2012) and The Mechanical Mind in History (MIT, 2008).

1. Series Introduction: Distributed Cognition and the Humanities
Miranda Anderson, Michael Wheeler and Mark Sprevak

2. Introduction: Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Miranda Anderson

3. Medieval Icelandic Legal Treatises as Tools for External Scaffolding of Legal Cognition
Werner Schäfke

4. Horse-Riding Storytellers and Distributed Cognition in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Guillemette Bolens

5. Cognitive Ecology and the Idea of Nation in Late-Medieval Scotland: The Flyting of William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy
Elizabeth Elliott

6. The Mead of Poetry: Old Norse Poetry as a Mind-Altering Substance
Hannah Burrows

7. Enculturated, Embodied, Social: Medieval Drama and Cognitive Integration
Clare Wright

8. Ben Jonson and the Limits of Distributed Cognition
Raphael Lyne

9. Masked Interaction: The Case for an Enactive View of Commedia dellArte (and the Italian Renaissance)
Jan Söffner

10. Thinking with the Hand: The Practice of Drawing in Renaissance Italy
Cynthia Houng

11. The Medieval (Music) Book: A Multimodal Cognitive Artefact
Kate Maxwell

12. Distributed Cognition, Improvisation and the Performing Arts in Early Modern Europe
Evelyn Tribble and Julie E. Cumming

13. Pierced with Passion: Brains, Bodies and Worlds in Early Modern Texts
Daniel T. Lochman

14. Metaphors They Lived By: The Language of Early Modern Intersubjectivity
Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski

15. Le Sigh: Enactive and Psychoanalytic Insights into Medieval and Renaissance Paralanguage
L. O. Aranye Fradenburg

16. 'The Adding of Artificial Organs to the Natural': Extended and Distributed Cognition in Robert Hooke's Methodology
Pieter Present

Notes on Contributors
Bibliography

Reveals diverse notions of distributed cognition in the Medieval and Renaissance worlds This collection brings together 14 essays by international specialists in Medieval and Renaissance culture and provides a general and a period-specific introduction to distributed cognition and the cognitive humanities. The essays revitalise our reading of Medieval and Renaissance works in the fields of law, history, drama, literature, art, music, philosophy, science and medicine, by bringing to bear recent insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind on the ways in which cognition is distributed across brain, body and world. As many of the texts and practices have influenced later Western European society and culture, this book reveals vital stages in the historical development of our attempts to comprehend and optimise the distributed nature of cognition. Miranda Anderson is an Anniversary Fellow at the University of Stirling and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Michael Wheeler is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Stirling.