Cognitive Maps of Time and Tide Among Medieval Seafarers

Abstract

To predict the treacherous tides and currents of northern Europe, medieval sailors employed a schema for directions, the rose of the mariners' compass, as a cognitive device for correlating lunar with solar time and for memorising the lunar-tidal regimes of each port. It was a stratagem that enabled the medieval sailor to construct in his mind the information which the modern literate sailor must seek written down in his tide and current tables. This study addresses a basic issue in the investigation of human cognitive ability. There is a long, and still flourishing, line of argument claiming that certain socially-defined sets of persons have-as a group-minds of lesser quality than 'we' do-whoever 'we' might be. Like 'primitives', the inhabitants of the Middle Ages have frequently been attributed with lesser cognitive abilities. This study, by examining actual cognitive performances of individual human beings in the course of their daily lives, shows that thinking at the highest level, at Piaget's stage of formal operations, is not, as many have claimed, the hallmark of the modern, literate, scientific mind, but is, rather, the hallmark of the human mind when confronted with a task sufficiently necessary, sufficiently challenging, and sufficiently clear in outcome.