Perception and Action in Medieval Europe

This is a wide-ranging book, encompassing the whole of Europe from late Antiquity to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; its subjects are complex, elusive, and of considerable importance for understanding medieval society. The kernel of Professor Kleinschmidt's argument is that both perception and action are concepts that are culturally dependent; and that there was a fundamental shift in the nature of perception, moving from one in which the mere fact of perception implied consequences in terms of actions that were determined extrinsically—to perceive was to be directly influenced by what one perceived—to the position advanced by Locke in the seventeenth century, that perception and action were separate processes. Further, the author associates that transition with changes in social organisation, from a pattern in which perception was linked to the actions of groups, such as the war-band, kin, and even the dead, a pre-Christian standard, to one which was imbued with

Action (physics · Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Epistemology · Perception · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · History · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Psychology · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity