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

A companion to Mary Carruthers' earlier study of memory in medieval culture, The Book of Memory, her new book, The Craft of Thought, 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.