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

视力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：视觉的历史是“科学的”、宗教的和社会的。在中世纪晚期（约1260-1460年：罗杰·培根和尼古拉斯的库萨提供了我的时间表），西方基督教界越来越关注视力的（不）可靠性。这种焦虑的重要性被模糊了，因为它出现在历史学家单独分析的各个领域（Denery, 2005; Tachau, 1988）。我的项目将通过对视觉和认知理论（透视）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（Walker Bynum, 2011），我认为对视觉本身的可信度的担忧是基督教真理主张正当性的核心：“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影响，而且对其早期的现代后代也产生了重要影响，无论是对天主教的批评还是视觉科学的形成（Clark, 2007）。我将讨论三个方面：灵魂死后对上帝的看法（主要的“幸福愿景”争议），可能的圣徒评价，以及对恶魔幻觉的认识。救赎、圣徒和恶魔对基督教来说是必不可少的：对视觉体验的准确解释是这三者的核心。每一个都展示了整个欧洲社会对视力质量的关注，使我能够接触到“高”和“低”的视角。我将研究如何选择和运用视觉误差和确定性理论来理解这些问题。每个领域都有截然不同的史学（Trottmann, 1995; Vauchez, 1988; Ostorero, 2011），这使得中世纪主义者无法理解视觉在这些辩论中的中心地位（Lindberg, 1976），也无法与早期现代性建立连续性。我的项目打破了这两个障碍。我将专注于个人如何思考和证明我所选择的领域内和领域外的视觉质量。除了分析离散的视角之外，我还将研究争论和布道（真福异象）；圣徒传记和封圣证据（圣徒）；圣经注释和异端调查（恶魔）。这使我能够分析不同流派、社会群体和辩论对视觉的态度，提供了一幅比现有历史编纂所暗示的更完整的中世纪晚期对视觉的焦虑图景。我将集中讨论“狭隘的”光学分析是如何一直卷入主流基督教争议的，提出了关于“理论”和“实践”之间分歧的问题。在学术和大众的理解中，视觉认知的地位往往被限制在宗教的主体性（有远见的神秘主义者）或被提升到纯粹的客观性（“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条件。

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.