Can We Believe Our Own Eyes?: Optics, Vision and Cognition in Late Medieval Religion

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Sight appears an obvious faculty. However, societies see and evaluate what they see in radically different ways: the history of sight is 'scientific', religious and social. During the late Middle Ages (c. 1260-1460: Roger Bacon and Nicholas of Cusa provide my timeline), Western Christendom was increasingly concerned with the (un)trustworthiness of sight. The significance of this anxiety has been obscured as it appeared across fields that historians have analysed separately (Denery, 2005; Tachau, 1988). My project will examine vision's peculiar centrality to late medieval religion through debates where preoccupation with theories of vision and cognition (perspectiva) was crucial. Beyond worries about bodily materiality (Walker Bynum, 2011), I argue that concerns about the credibility of sight per se were central to justifications of Christian truth claims: 'hard' science interacted with 'hard' theology. This had important consequences not only for medieval religion and optics, but also for its early modern descendants, in terms of both criticisms of Catholicism and the shape of visual science (Clark, 2007).I will tackle three areas: the soul's posthumous sight of God (the major 'Beatific Vision' controversy), possible saints' evaluations, and the recognition of demonic illusions. Redemption, sainthood, and the diabolic were essential to Christianity: accurate interpretation of visual experiences was central to all three. Each demonstrates how concern with the quality of sight cut across European society, enabling me to engage with both 'high' and 'low' perspectives. I will investigate how theories of visual error and certainty were selected and deployed to understand these problems. Each area has strikingly distinct historiographies (Trottmann, 1995; Vauchez, 1988; Ostorero, 2011) that have prevented medievalists from understanding vision's centrality to these debates (Lindberg, 1976) and establishing continuities with early modernity. My project breaks down both barriers. I will focus on how individuals thought about and justified the quality of sight within and across my chosen fields. Beyond analysing the discrete perspectiva corpus, I will examine disputations and sermons (Beatific Vision); hagiographies and canonisation evidence (saints); and biblical exegesis and heresy investigations (demons). This enables me to analyse attitudes towards the visual across genres, social groups and debates, providing a more complete picture of late medieval anxieties about sight than existing historiographies suggest. I will concentrate on how 'narrow' optical analyses were consistently embroiled in mainstream Christian controversies, raising questions about divisions between 'theory' and 'practice'. The place of visual cognition in scholarly and popular understanding tends to be restricted to religious subjectivity (visionary mystics) or elevated to rarefied objectivity ('scientific' optics). Vision's importance to mainstream society is thus underestimated. I will show how religious concerns drove innovations in optical theory as well as how optics altered the terms of religious debates.