Year: 2016
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This thesis considers the interaction between wonder and scepticism in long twelfth-century Europe. Wonder is presented as necessitating a cognitive reaction that involves a process of evidence and fact-checking, which leads to a subjective assessment of a phenomenon’s truth or falsehood, or its probability or improbability. Brewer explores a variety of wonder stories from the Middle Ages to chart this reaction. Such stories include green children, monsters, wild men, miraculous healings, and marvelous tales of the exotic East. Brewer proposes that medieval people reacted to novel and unexplained phenomena using a transhistorical epistemological process, but that there were nevertheless significant synchronic differences in terms of what phenomena were accounted bizarre, what the normative reactions to various phenomena were considered to be, and the overall availability of sense-derived knowledge. In particular, the burgeoning empiricism of the long twelfth century created tension with the pervasive idea of faith as a necessity to understanding God’s creation. Brewer therefore proposes that, in some ways, evolutionary mechanisms such as the emotion of wonder were at odds with medieval cultural pretensions.
Author: Keagan Brewer
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2581033814