Body in Mind: Reader Experience in Early English Text Worlds

Abstract

In Cicero's Dream of Scipio, the protagonist surveys a panoptic vision of the earth, defying the limitations of the human body while experiencing the world mentally and physically. The Dream was known in England in the early medieval period through Macrobius' commentary. Although becoming influential only in the eleventh century, in this essay we suggest that its modelling of embodied experience and guiding of the reader's mental vision are also features of pre-Conquest geographical thought. Beginning from the panoptic orientation of this text, we explore the worlds that are created in pre-Conquest visual and textual media and consider how they might have been experienced by their early English readers, drawing on cognitive literary studies. Taking the examples of the Cotton World Map, the Old English Orosius, the writings of Bede, the elegiac poem The Ruin and the Old English Boethius, we move between the overlapping thematic categories of vision, body and mind to circle from panoptic views of the world to the mental mapping of an ancient city and back again. We demonstrate, therefore, that the creators of early English textual culture were aware of their readers' responses and invited cognitively embodied imaginings of the worlds they presented.