Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017, pp. 268.

Michelle Karnes, Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana), has produced a brilliant book that makes a major contribution to medieval studies. Like Mary Carruthers’s, The Book of Memory and The Craft of Thought, Karnes’s study of medieval imagination and cognition is paradigmatic, inspirational, and poised to be remarkably influential in the field. It makes a bold case for understanding the medieval <?page nr="460"?>concept of the imagination in Aristotelian and Augustinian terms, especially as these terms were synthesized by Bonaventure, and focuses on how meditation on the life of Christ within the imagination was seen as a path to spiritual progress: a means of connecting to the divine.