https://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/gateway/plugin/WebFeedGatewayPlugin/atomJournal of Cognitive Historiography2023-11-05T17:16:19+00:00Irene Salvoirene.salvo@univr.itOpen Journal Systems<p><em><span lang="EN-US">The Journal of Cognitive Historiography</span></em> is the first peer-reviewed publication for research concerned with the interactions between history, historiography, and/or archaeology and cognitive theories. <a href="https://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/about">Read more about the journal</a>.</p>https://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/27319In Gratitude2024-01-30T13:55:49+00:00Irene Salvo2024-01-30T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2024 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/27099Magic and Cognition2024-01-30T13:55:49+00:00Esther EidinowIrene Salvo
<p>A short introduction to the special issue.</p>
2024-01-30T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2024 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/25994Moralizing Supernatural Punishment and Reward2024-01-30T13:55:49+00:00Jennifer LarsonHarvey WhitehousePieter FrancoisDaniel HoyerPeter Turchin
<p>In this article we respond to three critiques of our 2019 article ‘Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods throughout World History.’ We clarify that our research does not, as our critics suppose, support the claim that moralizing gods played a decisive role in the development of complex societies. Indeed our goal was to test this claim and we found it wanting. Our methods ‘reduce’ neither religion or social complexity in the ways claimed, while our tentative conclusions about the relationship between frequent, routinized ritual and social cohesion are supported by much research beyond the paper under discussion. In the Roman Empire, many forms of collective ritual contributed to the propagation of Romanitas. We have never claimed that this depended on absolute uniformity of belief. Other misconceptions about our supposedly ‘inattentive’ qualitative analysis result from misreadings of information in our open-access database, which functions as an evolving set of information relevant to specific research questions rather than a general encyclopedia. Despite these disagreements, we continue to maintain that neither qualitative historical methods nor quantitative analytic approaches alone can produce satisfying answers to causal questions about world history. The best approach, we argue, is to integrate the insights from humanities with ‘Big Data’ analyses from social science, and we welcome continued engagement and collaboration across traditional disciplinary boundaries.</p>
2024-01-30T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2023 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/18581The Highs and the Lows of Construal Level Theory in the Community Rule from the Dead Sea Scrolls2022-12-24T01:41:57+00:00Melissa Sayyad Bach
<p>This article applies Construal Level Theory (CLT) on the ancient Jewish text the Community Rule (1QS), from the Dead Sea Scrolls. CLT, a theory developed within social and cognitive psychology, operates with the association between mental construals (high- or low-level) and psychological distance (spatial, temporal, social, or hypothetical). CLT proposes that the human mind’s ability to traverse the “here-and-now” is dependent on the interaction between levels of construal and psychological distance. High-level construals are abstract, general, and superordinate representations of things (i.e. the why, the end-state), while low-level construals are concrete, specific, and subordinate representations (i.e. the how, the means). Reading 1QS through the lens of CLT reveals one possible way in which this ancient text strives to persuade its potential recipients to act according to its ultimate goal by combining different modes of expression.</p>
2022-12-24T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/22403Investigating and Contextualizing Dramaturgical Perspectives2023-01-25T15:14:54+00:00Roman PalitskyIsaac F YoungBen Williams
<p>Believing that “all the world’s a stage” exemplifies using theater as a metaphor for life, also known as a dramaturgical perspective (DP). This project examines DPs in two historical contexts—contemporary psychological research, and the work of medieval Indian philosopher and literary theorist Abhinavagupta. Recent psychological research suggests that viewing oneself as “acting out a part” protects against social threats, but can simultaneously be alienating. Abhinavagupta posits that recognizing performativity can aestheticize life in a way that offers freedom from reified notions of self and other. This divergence suggests that DPs are entwined with cultural contexts. To test this, we examined the association of cultural orientations with responses to the DP among US emerging adults (N = 1146). Cultural variables were associated with DP endorsement, and with a key component of associations between DP endorsement and distress: feelings of inauthenticity. The discussion focuses on salient socio-cultural dimensions of DP operation.</p>
2022-12-24T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/22648Seeing Afar2022-12-24T01:41:53+00:00Jed Forman
<p>“Piercing gazes” or “penetrative stares” are common idioms in English. Yet, on reflection, these phrases oddly suggest an extramissive, projective connotation of vision, countering our learned understanding that sight passively receives light. Nevertheless, these projective connotations are highly intuitive. Exploring Indian debates on yogic perception through a cognitive science lens, this paper argues that extramissive theories of sight constitute our most basic intuitive understanding of vision. Yogis are said to have extra powerful extramissive visual rays that allow them not only to apprehend distant objects but penetrate spiritual truths. Buddhists, by contrast, reject that the senses are extramissive. Still, they retain extramissive connotations when they explain yogic perception as a type of mental—rather than sensorial—feat. The explicit Buddhist rejection of extramission alongside their implicit retention of extramissive metaphors corroborates the thesis that extramission was highly intuitive within an ancient Indic milieu. Indeed, it likely constitutes a pan-human intuition.</p>
2022-12-24T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/22649Perhaps an Other Time2022-12-24T01:41:51+00:00Julia McClenon
<p>In this article it is argued that conceptions of time have important cognitive and behavioural effects on historical agents, and that in ancient China at least one such conception tied fundamentally with the traditional Chinese calendar, the Stems and Branches system, is significantly different than the worldwide dominant modern conception of time in ways that deserve wider acknowledgement and exploration. The article relies on cognitive science literature, Takayama’s method of uncovering ancient cognition, and Bradd Shore’s Cultural Models Theory, to make its case. By examining the underlying qualitative and calculative structures of the calendar(s) in use by the humans we study, we can begin to see just how potentially different these views of time were and are in ways so fundamental to being in the world as to warrant new (re)considerations of historical actors cognizing about in and about their respective conceptual frameworks of time and the behaviours they engage in as a consequence.</p>
2022-12-24T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/22650“Big Gods” in Ancient Mesopotamia2023-01-05T01:06:34+00:00Karolina Prochownik
<p>According to the Big Gods Theory, religions with beliefs in moralizing supernatural agents were culturally selected because they enhanced in-group cooperation during intergroup competition and conflict (e.g. Norenzayan 2013). According to the supernatural punishment hypothesis (SPH), this was possible because such agents were culturally represented as punitive and wrathful (e.g. Shariff and Norenzayan 2011). These gods activated reputational concerns, fears of punishment, and social compliance among believers. I examine evidence for the SPH from ancient Mesopotamia based on the cultural evolution of beliefs in the god Marduk. I argue that, contrary to the SPH, Marduk and other ancient Mesopotamian gods were often imagined to be both punitive and benevolent. I examine potential psychological and ecological factors involved in the cultural transmission of beliefs in these supernatural protectors alternative to those proposed by the SPH. I raise general questions concerning collecting and interpreting big data as evidence for Big Gods.</p>
2022-12-24T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/22807Fear and Terror in Buddhist Meditation2022-12-24T01:41:48+00:00Jared R LindahlWilloughby B BrittonDavid J Cooper
<p>This article explores the extent to which cognitive historiography can be employed to comment on debates concerning the interpretation of meditative experiences in select Buddhist texts. In particular, this article considers references to meditation-related fear and other associated emotional, perceptual, and cognitive changes. Qualitative data from Western Buddhist meditation practitioners and meditation teachers are employed to further illustrate the range of fear-related experiences and how they are interpreted. To account for why certain references to fear in Buddhist literature could plausibly be read as representative of meditation-related experiences, this article develops cognitive models based on neuroscientific research on meditation as well as from cognitive and affective neuroscience more broadly. However, this process reveals some current limitations in the field of neuroscience of meditation as well as other methodological difficulties faced by cognitive historiography when attempting to account for religious experiences from other cultures and from distant times.</p>
2022-12-24T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/23123Introduction2022-12-24T01:41:47+00:00Jed Forman
<p>.</p>
2022-12-24T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/23124Cognitive Historiography2022-12-24T01:41:45+00:00Glen Alexander Hayes
<p>The essays in this issue of the Journal of Cognitive Historiography explore a variety of developing methodologies in the field, taking us on a tour through a range of cognitive and cultural contexts in East and South Asia, the Middle East, and modern America. Although there are a number of ways to consider the goals of cognitive historiography, the essays in this issue are all engaged in a scholarly pursuit of historical minds, seeking to uncover the deep and nuanced cognitive processes at play in different historical and cultural contexts. The essays include an exploration of ancient Chinese calendrical models and the experience of time, consideration of yogic perceptions and construals of vision and spatiality, applications of the “world as theatre” metaphor of the Hindu polymath Abhinavagupta, an evaluation of the punitive and benevolent qualities of gods in ancient Mesopotamia, and using neuroscience to study the affective responses of fear and terror in Buddhist meditation.</p>
2022-12-24T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/23400If not Now, When? Reclaiming Academic Journals as a Space of Kindness2022-12-24T01:41:45+00:00Irene Salvo2022-12-24T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2022 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/24365Fearing the Gods?2024-01-30T13:55:50+00:00Celia Sánchez Natalías
<p style="font-weight: 400;">After some introductory remarks on current approaches to curse tablets, this article focuses on the <em>defixiones </em>from Britannia, analyzing the idiosyncratic features of this corpus to demonstrate how the island’s inhabitants adopted and then adapted this magico-religious technology. In particular, it examines a group of curses in which the name of the practitioner is clearly stated. This specific piece of information has been understood by previous scholarship as a reflection of the fearlessness that these practitioners (who were supposedly asking for something fair) felt towards the gods. Nevertheless, this article interprets the use of names as a reflection of the perception that these practitioners had of the god’s omniscience. Additionally, this research also takes into account the context where these artefacts were deposited and the array of rituals that took place in those spaces. Tellingly, most of the curse tablets from Britannia with this feature (i.e. the name of the practitioner) come from sanctuaries and shrines, a context that could have promoted different ways for practitioners to conceive of the cursing ritual and the types of relationship that it created between the author of the curse and the invoked deity.</p>
2024-01-30T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2024 Equinox Publishing Ltd.https://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/21150The Unfulfilled Promise of Cross-Cultural, Interdisciplinary Ancient History2022-01-06T00:53:08+00:00Ryan Nichols
<p>This commentary focuses on G.E.R. Lloyd’s latest work, Ambivalences of Rationality (2018). The book is summarized chapter by chapter. Criticisms are presented with special attention to Lloyd’s unusual wealth of research from developmental psychology, cross-cultural psychology, anthropology, experimental linguistics and cognitive science. The commentary concludes that Lloyd has done a disservice to cited researchers in the mind sciences who investigate cross-cultural differences.</p>
2021-11-26T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/19349Homo anxius, or How Fear and Anxiety Conquered the Social World2022-01-06T00:53:14+00:00Leonardo Ambasciano
<p>The article offers an extended review, counterpointed by a critical commentary, of two recent and outstanding volumes, Turner et al.’s The Emergence and Evolution of Religion (2018) and Sanderson’s Religious Evolution and the Axial Age (2018). Both books are eminently interdisciplinary in their scope: the first displays a distinctive deep-historical and neurosociological attention to the evolution of negative emotions and inter-group competition, while the latter focuses on the contribution of world transcendent religions to help human beings cope with new and challenging biosocial conditions derived from ultrasociality. While the two volumes gain unprecedented multidisciplinary width, they also tend to lose intra-disciplinary depth. However, and for all their differences, they both represent the vanguard of a renewed qualitative, scientific, and interdisciplinary study of the history of religion(s) through cognitive historiography. This contribution presents the main theses of both books, highlights their strengths, and provides a comprehensive discussion of their epistemological and methodological shortcomings.</p>
2022-01-06T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/19353Homines Emotionales and Religion as an Evolutionary Exaptation2022-01-06T00:53:12+00:00Anders Klostergaard PetersenJonathan H. TurnerArmin W. GeertzAlexandra Maryanski
<p>This article offers a critical reply to Leonardo Ambasciano’s commentary on our volume (Turner et al. 2018) available in this same issue of the Journal of Cognitive Historiography.</p>
2022-01-06T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/19354Book Reviewers and Their Victims2022-01-06T00:53:11+00:00Stephen K. Sanderson
<p>The article offers a rebuttal to Ambasciano’s commentary on my book Religious Evolution and the Axial Age (Sanderson 2018) included in this same issue of the Journal of Cognitive Historiography. Ambasciano gets much of my overall argument right, but on many specifics misunderstands or misrepresents me and others. One of his most consequential misrepresentations is his charge that I offer a kind of panadaptationism. I am an adaptationist, but certainly not a panadaptationist. I freely concede that there are elements of religion that cannot be regarded as adaptations. Connected to this point, Ambasciano contends that adaptationism is not the default starting point for evolutionary analysis and recommends instead the evolutionism of Stephen Jay Gould – the “gold standard” of evolutionary theory, Ambasciano believes—which holds that most evolutionary change consists of constrained by-products. But Ambasciano fails to recognize that Gould is an odd-man-out among evolutionists, most of whom emphasize natural selection and adaptation.</p>
2022-01-06T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/19549A Reply to Nichols’ “The Unfulfilled Promise of Cross-Cultural, Interdisciplinary Ancient History”2022-01-06T00:53:10+00:00G. E. R. Lloyd
<p>A critical reply to Ryan Nichols’ commentary on my book The Ambivalences of Rationality: Ancient and Modern Cross-Cultural Explorations (2018) published in this issue of the Journal of Cognitive Historiography.</p>
2022-01-06T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/20685The Year the World Became a Cognitive Historiographical Lab En Plein Air2022-01-06T00:53:09+00:00Leonardo AmbascianoNickolas P. Roubekas2022-01-06T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/21151Shamanism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow2022-01-06T00:53:06+00:00Leonardo Ambasciano
<p>The present contribution offers a descriptive account of two recent books concerning shamanism, Homayun Sidky’s The Origins of Shamanism, Spirit Beliefs, and Religiosity: A Cognitive Anthropological Perspective (2017) and Sergio Botta’s Dagli sciamani allo sciamanesimo. Discorsi, credenze, pratiche (2018). The commentary starts by supplying a brief historical contextualization of the subfield of shamanic studies in both Anthropology and the History of Religions, highlighting the main trends and widespread approaches. Sidky’s neurocognitive account and Botta’s poststructural historiographical walk-through are then taken into consideration and reviewed. The conclusions under-score the need for an integration between these two perspectives and urge cognitive historians to collaborate with like-minded anthropologists in order to further the study of shamanism and prevent the subfield from becoming de novo monopolized by paranormal and postmodern anthropology.</p>
2022-01-06T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/21152The Study of Religion in Anthropology2022-01-06T00:53:05+00:00H. Sidky
<p>The present article examines the pervasiveness of non-scientific/anti-scientific hermeneutical perspectives in the study of religion in anthropology, tracing their foundations to the works of Mircea Eliade and Clifford Geertz. Pseudo- and anti-scientific approaches have also been bolstered by a long-standing paranormalism in anthropology championed by Margaret Mead and others. Hermeneutical/interpretive approaches, which emphasize the insider’s perspective and treat religion as an independent variable, have not only hampered scientific studies of religious phenomena, but they have also enabled the development of approaches advocating paranormal beliefs and religious supernaturalism as scholarship. The article concludes by highlighting the problematic nature of these non-scientific and pro-paranormal and religious perspectives as scholarly enterprises.</p>
2022-01-06T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/21153Towards a Renewed Definition of Shamanism2022-01-06T00:53:03+00:00Sergio Botta
<p>The present reply offers some reflections on Leonardo Ambasciano’s commentary entitled Shamanism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow and included in this same issue of Journal of Cognitive Historiography. A particular point of contention is represented by the potential contribution that a post-structural approach could offer to a scientific re-description of shamanism as an analytical category in the contemporary academic field of Religious Studies.</p>
2022-01-06T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/21154Mythohistory in Light of How Memory Works2022-01-06T00:53:02+00:00Elizabeth Wayland BarberPaul T. Barber
<p>“Myths” did not start as quaint stories but as compellingly memorable devices to record events and observations in nonliterate societies. By understanding how people encoded information so as to maximize their brains’ abilities to remember, we can begin to extract at least some historical information from these inherited tales. But not all oral tradition is directly useful to historians because not all the information thus recorded is of events, and the clarity of the events diminishes radically as the lifestyle and especially the location of the storytellers change.</p>
2022-01-06T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/21155Thinking Outside the Altruistic Box2022-01-06T00:53:00+00:00Luke J. Matthews
<p>Two theories currently share prominence as explanations for the near universality of organized religion. Theory 1, the costly signalling hypothesis and its extensions have not to date generated predictions about the central question of why religion is religious; that is, why does religion invoke the gods? Theory 2, supernatural punishment, predicts that religion would be religious, but it requires group selection to stabilize its proposed evolutionary dynamics. We should not immediately dismiss group selection hypotheses, but given its rarity in the rest of nature, asserting group selection in humans requires extraordinary evidentiary support that at present is not enjoyed by the supernatural punishment hypothesis. Researchers studying the evolution of religion should consider more fully alternatives to these two currently popular hypotheses. Alternatives include the hypothesis that standardization of religious rituals and beliefs for signalling social group membership but potentially without group selection, that religion might function primarily for emergence of mutualism rather than prosocial altruism, and that group selection might apply to religious systems only during punctuated bursts of denominational diversification and death.</p>
2022-01-06T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/21156The Promise and Peril of the Data Deluge for Historians2022-01-06T00:52:59+00:00Gary N. Smith
<p>Historical analyses are inevitably based on data – documents, fossils, drawings, oral traditions, artifacts, and more. Recently, historians have been urged to embrace the data deluge (Guldi and Armitage 2014) and teams are now systematically assembling large digital collections of historical data that can be used for rigorous statistical analysis (Slingerland and Sullivan 2017; Turchin et al. 2015; Whitehouse et al. 2019; Slingerland et al. 2018–2019). The promise of large, widely accessible databases is the opportunity for rigorous statistical testing of plausible historical models. The peril is the temptation to ransack these databases for heretofore unknown statistical patterns. Statisticians bearing algorithms are a poor substitute for expertise.</p>
2022-01-06T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/21157How Complex were Ancient Societies and Religions?2022-01-06T00:52:57+00:00Maik Patzelt
<p>Whitehouse et al. (2019) recently concluded their groundbreaking big-data historical research by stating that “moralizing gods” followed in the wake of early increases in social complexity, rather than preceding and paving the way for such increases. According to these results, it was doctrinal (group) rituals that helped facilitate an increase in social complexity and (religious) identity. The idea of a “supernatural punishment” came later, helping to maintain the existing cooperation in societies once those societies reached a certain size. However, the focus on big data in the pursuit of these questions runs the risks of leading to oversimplifications and presuppositions. I will draw on examples from Roman religion that appear in the Seshat dataset to illustrate some critical points, and will point out some problems concerning cooperation and social complexity that follow from the way in which the historical evidence is handled and, thus, merged into the databank.</p>
2022-01-06T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/21159Some Remarks on Whitehouse et al. (2019), “Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods throughout World History”2022-01-06T00:52:56+00:00Franziska Naether
<p>This contribution reviews the methods behind historical data-gathering and data-coding in the Seshat Databank and the results illustrated in Whitehouse et al.’s (2019) “Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods throughout World History.” Particular emphasis is placed on data from Ancient Egypt and Roman periods. Critical reflections on the moralizing gods debate are also presented. The conclusions call for more integration between already existing projects within the Digital Humanities and warn researchers of the pitfalls of inattentive historical and qualitative analysis in Big Data scholarship.</p>
2022-01-06T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/21160Big Gods and Big Rituals2022-01-06T00:52:54+00:00Jörg Rüpke
<p>This short article reviews recent claims made about large-scale rituals and moralizing gods for the formation of large-scale societies. It starts from a reconstruction of the actual contents of the claims made in very different forms and wording and points to the very vague suggestions about causal relationships or chronological coincidence. Against these claims, three main arguments are advanced. First, it is difficult to formulate a model of trans-locally standardized rituals that would be able to keep together trans-local societies without the existence of secondary media, above all writing, which would be an even more important factor in processes of homogenization. Secondly, historically religion can be shown to serve as frequently for stabilizing distinction and dissent as for producing unity. Thirdly and finally, the very possibility of an exhaustive and stable classificatory grid across cultures and epochs is questioned. In a brief final case study, the lack of adequate descriptors in the database under review is demonstrated for ancient Rome.</p>
2022-01-06T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/21161Aelius Aristides’ Sacred Tales2022-01-06T00:52:53+00:00Olympia Panagiotidou
<p>Aelius Aristides’ Sacred Tales, composed in the 2nd century CE, is considered a unique literary work, in which the author claimed to have recorded the dreams he had received from Asclepius over a long period of time. Modern historians explore the value of the Sacred Tales both as a literary work and as a personal oneiric record of actual dreaming experiences. In this article, I take into account the modern insights offered by the embodied human cognition paradigm in order explore the possible long-term influence and repercussions of the Sacred Tales on the readers’ imagination and dreaming experiences. In particular, I suggest that Aristides’ oneiric descriptions would have been meta-represented in the readers’ minds upon reading the text, priming specific images, representations, mental, and emotional states as well as expectations about potential divine revelations during the ritual of incubation. Later, those readers who would find themselves in similar bodily, mental, and emotional conditions like the ones experienced and described by Aristides, could have implicitly used the primed representations for meta-representing a personal epiphany of Asclepius. Thereby, the Sacred Tales would have provided the raw material to feed the readers’ imaginative simulations and to elicit a personally meaningful divine revelation.</p>
2022-01-06T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Journal of Cognitive Historiographyhttps://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/article/view/21162Writing as Thinking in Paul’s Letters2022-01-06T00:52:51+00:00Paul Robertson
<p>This article uses findings from cognitive sciences and neuroscience to detail the unique brain processes that stem from writing texts by hand. Such findings are described and then applied to the case of the Christian apostle Paul, whose letters – penned by Paul himself and/or via a scribe – are often used as evidence in reconstructions of early Christian social contexts. An attention to the findings from cognitive sciences and neuroscience around what I term “handwriting-thinking”, however, demonstrates a significant difference between the cognitive processes of Paul as author and the cognitive processes of his audience, who would have typically been exposed to Paul’s letters aurally. This difference in cognitive processes between Paul and his audience significantly problematizes the usage of Paul’s letters as evidence for his audience’s understanding of his letters and the concepts therein. More broadly, an attention to the embodied cognition of handwriting-thinking demonstrates differences in conceptual understandings between historical text-producers and their audiences, suggesting that we should focus more on individual text producers and their contexts instead of audiences.</p>
2022-01-06T00:00:00+00:00Copyright (c) 2021 Journal of Cognitive Historiography