Techniques, Imagination, and the Body

Techniques, Imagination and the Body publishes scholarship on historical debates, techniques, and traditions that explore the imagination’s capacity to affect the human body and influence the material world. Although recent research in the humanities has seen a flourishing interest in materiality and embodiment, the imagination is still too often treated as an elusive, disembodied notion. This series proposes to reframe the historiography by re-situating the imagination within its full corporeal dimension, foregrounding its techniques and powers, and highlighting the cultural and intellectual transfers—many rooted in the Middle Ages—that shaped its conceptual evolution.

A pivotal moment in this intellectual history emerged in the second half of the twelfth century, when Latin translations of Aristotle and other major works from Greek and Arabic philosophical and medical traditions generated renewed interest in physical phenomena, both natural and corporeal. These texts opened new avenues for reflecting on the faculties of the soul, and particularly on the imagination. Understood as a material link between mind and body, the imagination was described as one of the soul’s components, functioning alongside reason and memory. This tripartition, inherited from Galen—who conceived imagination, reason, and memory as the three “hegemonic” powers of the soul—had already been integrated into Arabic medicine and entered Latin scholastic thought through the translation work of Constantine the African.

As a result, the imagination, long regarded with suspicion as a faculty prone to mental error, illusion, and moral deviation, was reappraised by thinkers and practitioners from various disciplinary and institutional backgrounds. Commenting on these translated texts, they increasingly supported the idea that the imagination possessed significant material agency. Examined as a conduit between perception, sensation, and action, the imagination became the focus of inquiries into its impulsive powers—powers capable of acting not only on the “body proper” of the individual but also on external objects and bodies. Scholars debated whether seeing the color red could cause the body to bleed, whether a pregnant woman’s imagination could imprint the fetus with the trace of a shocking visual impression, whether the stigmata of St. Francis could be attributed to imaginative force rather than miraculous intervention, or whether certain cases of demonic possession might receive natural explanations rooted in imaginative activity. Contributions to this series situate these sometimes polemical or unorthodox claims within a broader investigation of mind-body techniques through which persons and objects might be “moved” or compelled to act.

Techniques, Imagination and the Body is emphatically interdisciplinary. Histories of belief and philosophies of the soul intersect with intellectual, cultural, and art history, as well as with histories of the body. Cognitive sciences converge with inquiries into emotion, fiction, and faith. Medical practices both shape and are shaped by body-centered arts and sciences such as natural magic, iatrochemistry, ritual practice, and dance, and later by disciplines including biology, anthropology, electricity, psychology, architecture, and acoustics.

The series editors welcome both monographs and edited volumes covering all historical periods from Antiquity to the present. Monographs may be submitted in English or French, while edited volumes may include contributions in multiple languages.