{"title":"Julian of Norwich’s a Revelation of Love: A Grounded Cognition Approach to a Late Medieval Text","authors":"Katarzyna Stadnik","doi":"10.18778/1731-7533.21.1.02","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Julian of Norwich was a late medieval anchoress and writer, whose work, The Showings, is known for its vivid imagery and bodily resonance it prompts in the reader. The paper identifies a gap in research on the embodied aspects of Julian’s imagery. The article discusses the connection between perception, action and the grounded nature of cognition, exploring its role in structuring Julian’s text. It uses the conceptions of situated conceptualisation and sociocultural situatedness to embed the work in the visual/material culture of the Middle Ages. It reveals how the mystic construes emotionally intense images, which underpin the abstract language of the text’s final chapters. To conclude, the recent conceptions from cognitive science may expand the analytical toolkit of cognitive-diachronic research in particular, helping illuminate the interplay of language, culture, and cognition.","PeriodicalId":38985,"journal":{"name":"Research in Language","volume":"36 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2023-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Research in Language","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.18778/1731-7533.21.1.02","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"Arts and Humanities","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Julian of Norwich was a late medieval anchoress and writer, whose work, The Showings, is known for its vivid imagery and bodily resonance it prompts in the reader. The paper identifies a gap in research on the embodied aspects of Julian’s imagery. The article discusses the connection between perception, action and the grounded nature of cognition, exploring its role in structuring Julian’s text. It uses the conceptions of situated conceptualisation and sociocultural situatedness to embed the work in the visual/material culture of the Middle Ages. It reveals how the mystic construes emotionally intense images, which underpin the abstract language of the text’s final chapters. To conclude, the recent conceptions from cognitive science may expand the analytical toolkit of cognitive-diachronic research in particular, helping illuminate the interplay of language, culture, and cognition.
期刊介绍:
Research in Language (RiL) is an international journal committed to publishing excellent studies in the area of linguistics and related disciplines focused on human communication. Language studies, as other scholarly disciplines, undergo two seemingly counteracting processes: the process of diversification of the field into narrow specialized domains and the process of convergence, strengthened by interdisciplinarity. It is the latter perspective that RiL editors invite for the journal, whose aim is to present language in its entirety, meshing traditional modular compartments, such as phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and offer a multidimensional perspective which exposes varied but relevant aspects of language, e.g. the cognitive, the psychological, the institutional aspect, as well as the social shaping of linguistic convention and creativity.