Techniques, Imagination, and the Body

Techniques, Imagination and the Body publishes scholarship on historical debates, techniques, and traditions concerned with the imagination’s ability to affect the human body and influence the material world. Despite a flourishing of recent research on materiality and embodiment in history and the humanities, the imagination is generally conceived as a vaguely elusive, disembodied concept. The present series reframes the historiography by considering the impact of cultural and intellectual transfers dating from the Middle Ages and foregrounding the imagination’s corporeality, techniques and powers.

In the second half of the twelfth century, Latin translations of Aristotle and other significant texts from Greek and Arab traditions of philosophy and medicine generated new interest in physical phenomena, both natural and corporeal, raising questions about the faculties of the soul, and thus the imagination. Connecting mind and body, the imagination was understood as a material component of the soul that accompanied reason and memory. This tripartition derived from Galen and reflected his conception of imagination, reason and memory as three "hegemonic" functions of the soul. This triad, already accepted in Arab medicine, was transferred into Latin European scholastics with the translation work of Constantine the African. While the imagination had often been dismissed as a mental faculty apt to provoke errors of thought, mental illusions, and moral sin, thinkers and practitioners from various disciplinary orientations and institutional positions commenting upon these various translations began to support the idea that the imagination, in fact, possessed great material powers.

Explored as a conduit between perception, sensation and action, the imagination was investigated for its impulsive powers that could affect and act upon not only the "body proper" of the "self" but also objects or "bodies" that were exterior to that self. Scholars questioned whether seeing red caused the body itself to bleed. They debated whether a pregnant woman’s imagination could imprint the foetus with the mark of a shocking visual impression. They evoked the imagination to contest the origin of St. Francis’ stigmata, or suggest natural causes in cases of demonic possession. The scholarship in this collection situates these sometimes polemical, unorthodox explanations of the material powers of the imagination by contextualizing the reception and interpretation of mind-body techniques whereby people or objects were "moved" or driven to action.

Techniques, Imagination, and the Body is resolutely interdisciplinary. Histories of belief and philosophies of the soul intersect with intellectual history, art and cultural history and histories of the body. Sciences of cognition dovetail with investigations of emotion, fiction and faith. Medical practices inform and are informed by various body-centered arts and sciences such as natural magic, iatrochemistry, ritual practice and dance, or later disciplines such as biology, anthropology, electricity, psychology, architecture and acoustics.

Series editors solicit both monographies as well as edited volumes on all periods from Antiquity to the present day. Monographs can be written in English or French, while edited volumes can be written in multiple languages.