Per cognitionem visualem. The Visualization of Cognitive and Natural Processes in the Middle Ages

Visual representations were deeply involved in medieval traditions related to the dissemination and teaching of philosophy and science. Consequently, they were not only examples of theological or philosophical interpretation, but rather brought together manifold intellectual activities, illuminating various perceptual, cognitive, and spiritual concerns. Visual tools, which appear frequently in medieval manuscripts, have often been considered as “illustrative material” intended to facilitate the comprehension and interpretation of texts. These “visual aids” offer something more than a straightforward correspondence between a conceptual interpretation and its figurative depiction. They are, in fact, key to understanding the methods of acquiring and shaping knowledge through visual frameworks with didactical, disputational or heuristic purposes. The aim of this volume is to deepen our understanding of medieval visual tools that represented and demonstrated philosophical and scientific knowledge and, to an extent, the accumulation of empirical information.

José Higuera (UNED), Introduction

Diagrams & Graphics

Roberto Hofmeister Pich (PUCRS), Dialectics, Visual Tools, and the Methods of Learning: Exploring “Visual Cognition” in Manuscripts on Logic by Jesuits Masters from Ecuador (17th-18th Centuries)

Pippa Salonius (Monash University), Ordo and Nature: The Trees of Sculpted Narrative at Orvieto Cathedral

Albert Soler (UB), Ramon Llull and the “Ars Diagrammatica”

Astrology & Geomancy: Visual Tools

Arianna Dalla Costa (Warburg Institute), Lunar Mansions as Celestial Images in the Thirtennth-century De signis Astronomicis

Alessandro Palazzo (Univeristà di Trento), Images and visual tools in the geomantic treatise Estimaverunt Indi

Visio et cognitio

Maria Manuela Brito Martins (Universidade Católica Portuguesa), Représentations et schémas graphiques de la species visibilis dans le De homine d’Albert le Grand

Peter John Hartman (Loyola University), John Pouilly and John Baconthorpe on Reflex Acts

Paula Oliveira e Silva & João Rebalde (IF-UP), On the production of universal concepts from the fantastic representations, in the Commentary on the De anima by Marcos Jorge, J. P.

Nicolás Vaughan (Universidad de los Andes), Ockham and Wodeham on Perceptual Experience

Tamar Tsopurashvili (Ilia State University), Metaphor as a Source of Visualization of Cognitive Process in Meister Eckhart’s Metaphysics: The Example of Predigt

Visio et experientia

Yael Barash (Cohn Institute-Tel Aviv University), Using Visual Conventions to Depict a Visionary Experience: The Illustration of Vision II of Hildegard’s Liber divinorum operum in Lucca Codex

Francesca Galli (Università della Svizzera Italiana) Through the Mirror. (Super-)natural Properties of Reflecting Surfaces in 13th-Century Scientific and Theological Thought

José Higuera (UNED) The Visualization of Motion: Averroes and Albertus Magnus

José Meirinhos (IF-UP), Concluding Remarks