The Renaissance Extended Mind

The Renaissance Extended Mind explores the parallels and contrasts between current philosophical notions of the mind as extended across brain, body and world, and analogous notions in literary, philosophical and scientific texts circulating between the fifteenth century and early-seventeenth century. This perspective illuminates Renaissance texts and aims to inspire a more general reevaluation in the humanities of what constitutes cognition.

Anderson begins with an overview of research and debates surrounding notions of the mind and subjectivity as extended in current cognitive scientific and philosophical research. This invites a reconsideration of other theories concerned with the relationship between brain, body and world, including psychoanalytical and literary theories. The book then explores Renaissance notions of the mind and subjectivity, in terms of the use of one's body, words, objects and other people as extensions of the mind and subject. It concludes by focusing on Shakespeare's literary and dramatic works.

The Renaissance Extended Mind reveals the interdisciplinary potential and wider relevance of the notion of the extended mind: it establishes its capacity to contribute to a rethinking of the history of ideas and that it holds repercussions for literary methodologies, as well as offering a means to richer readings of literary texts.

Miranda Anderson is a literary scholar at the University of Edinburgh. She is the initiator of, and a Research Fellow on, the AHRC-funded project, A History of Distributed Cognition. She received a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship for work on this book and was a Research Associate on the Balzan Project, based at St John's College, Oxford University. Dr Anderson combines specialization in Renaissance literary, philosophical and scientific texts, with a broader interest in investigating paradigms of the mind and self across historical and disciplinary boundaries.