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

我们能相信自己的眼睛吗？：中世纪晚期宗教中的光学、视觉和认知

• 批准号: 2239392
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University College London
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2019 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2239392
• 关键词: Believe; Our; Own; Eyes; Optics

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.

视觉似乎是一种明显的能力。然而，社会以完全不同的方式看待和评价他们所看到的东西：视觉的历史是“科学的”，宗教的和社会的。中世纪晚期（C。1260-1460年：罗杰·培根和库萨的尼古拉斯提供了我的时间轴），西方基督教世界越来越关注视力的可靠性。这种焦虑的意义一直被掩盖，因为它出现在历史学家单独分析的领域（Denery，2005; Tachau，1988）。我的项目将通过对视觉和认知理论（perspectiva）的关注至关重要的辩论来研究视觉在中世纪晚期宗教中的特殊中心地位。除了对身体物质性的担忧（步行者拜纳姆，2011），我认为对视觉本身的可信度的担忧是基督教真理主张的核心理由：“硬”科学与“硬”神学相互作用。这不仅对中世纪的宗教和光学产生了重要的影响，而且对它的早期现代后裔也产生了重要的影响，包括对天主教的批评和视觉科学的形成（Clark，2007）。我将讨论三个领域：灵魂死后对上帝的看法（主要的“至福异象”争议），可能的圣徒评价，以及对恶魔幻象的认识。救赎、圣徒身份和恶魔是基督教的基本要素：对视觉体验的准确解释是这三者的核心。每一个都展示了对视觉质量的关注如何贯穿欧洲社会，使我能够同时接触到“高”和“低”的视角。我将研究视觉误差和确定性的理论是如何被选择和部署来理解这些问题的。每一个领域都有着截然不同的历史编纂（Trottmann，1995; Vauchez，1988; Ostorero，2011），这阻碍了中世纪学者理解视觉在这些争论中的中心地位（Lindberg，1976），并与早期现代性建立连续性。我的项目打破了这两个障碍。我将集中讨论个人如何思考和证明我所选择的领域内和跨领域的视觉质量。除了分析离散的perspectiva语料库，我将检查争论和布道（至福异象）; hagiographies和封圣的证据（圣徒）;和圣经注释和异端调查（恶魔）。这使我能够分析跨流派，社会群体和辩论对视觉的态度，提供了一个比现有史学更完整的中世纪晚期对视觉焦虑的画面。我将集中在如何“狭隘的”光学分析一直卷入主流基督教的争议，提出了关于“理论”和“实践”之间的分歧的问题。视觉认知在学术和大众理解中的地位往往被限制在宗教的主观性（有远见的神秘主义者）或被提升到稀薄的客观性（“科学”光学）。因此，视觉对主流社会的重要性被低估了。我将展示宗教关注如何推动光学理论的创新，以及光学如何改变宗教辩论的术语。