The distinction between mind and body was complex and more fluid than in post-Cartesian thought, complicated by ideas of the soul, by different views on where in the body faculties were situated, and by the integration of thought and affect. HippocratesвЂ™ theory of the four humours, developed by Galen in the second century ce, underpinned the notion of a mindвЂ“body continuum, for humours shaped both mind and body. Just as modern psychology can be understood as a development of and challenge to Cartesian ideas about the separation of mind from body, so medieval writers about the mind were working from the starting point of a particular intellectual landscape. We aim to show how medieval w riters approached the mind, highlighting some areas in which their ideas are particularly relevant to, and even prescient for, todayвЂ™s scientific psychology. We can also look to imaginative fiction, which offers especially valuable insights into cultural attitudes and experience, of both men and women, and which suggests how ideas of mind, body and affect carried over into secular culture.

We cannot look for a straightforward cross-section of medieval thought: much writing is by religious men, and personal testimonies and accounts of experience are inevitably filtered through assumptions concerning gender, class and religious belief вЂ“ as well as genre.Д«ut hazards are also opportunities: medieval piety foregrounded affective experience, meditation and prayer, and the need to shun distractions in order to stay focused on those tasks. Psychology was most of all the realm of theologians, who were interested in questions of desire, will, intention, sin and virtue. Western medieval writing assumed a Christian thought world, and writing was frequently seen as the domain of men. Social and cultural contexts were very different. Interpreting any texts or images from so long ago requires a shift of belief systems, in order to appreciate the ontology and background of assumptions with which medieval thinkers operated. Understanding medieval psychology, though, is fraught with problems. Before Descartes, mind and body were seen to interlink in ways that have a remarkably modern flavour. Another reason is that medieval texts open onto a psychology that was not dominated, as many recent discourses are, by essentially Cartesian notions of mindвЂ“body dualism. Why should we look back to medieval ideas about the mind? One reason is that the Middle Ages saw considerable engagement with questions of mind, body and affect, and the development of sophisticated thinking about psychology вЂ“ at least among the educated Г©lite, many of them clerics, who read and wrote the texts that have been passed down to us. Here, we set out some prominent medieval models of mind and their implications for understanding memory, imagination, emotion and the relations between mind and body. Yet ideas about the mind in the medieval period, itself a huge span of time (from the late classical period to the 15th century) that saw many shifts in thought, were much more sophisticated than that caricature would allow.

A progressive view of human knowledge that sees it as inexorably proceeding towards greater understanding would suggest that we have little to learn from a psychology dating from the days before science. Those were the days, we think, of supernatural forces intervening in human affairs, and with views of medicine, biology and psychology that strike the modern reader as primitive and unsatisfyingly pre-scientific. From a 21st-century perspective, looking to our medieval ancestors for help in understanding the mind would seem to be a backward step.

Inner monologue vs abstract thought