Introduction: The Imagination and Image in Premodern Faculty Psychology

In this Introduction, we first explain our historicist approach to the embodied imagination. Our basic argument is that the imagination, far from being isolated or autonomous, conducted its tasks alongside other psycho-physiological processes that it influenced and was, in turn, influenced by, and thus neither it nor the literature it informed can be fully understood without considering its close relations with the senses, the affections, the memory, the intellect, and other faculties. We then argue for the importance of historicizing the embodied imagination by situating it between medieval scholasticism and the emergence of modern science, noting how it can be distinguished from Cartesianism. We turn next to the question of why the volume’s topic, indebted to several general and specific trends in contemporary criticism, is significant for the study of early modern literature. Our second argument is that, given the currency of faculty psychology, poets and playwrights regarded the literary image not as an objective picture but as an extension of thought itself that enabled writers to make visible and explore inner thinking and to intervene in the interiority of their readers. Attention to the embodied imagination thus gives us new perspectives on image production and reception in the period’s literature.