Reveals the diverse ways that cognition was seen as spread over brain, body and world in the 9-17th centuries

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 bring recent insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to bear on how cognition is seen as 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.