Abstract

Anglo-Saxon literature, including both Old English and Anglo-Latin, abounds in descriptions of the mind as a corporeal entity. Because this notion conflicts with the dominant Christian teaching that the mind was part of the incorporeal soul , scholars assume that Anglo-Saxon authors used the corporeal-mind idiom metaphorically rather than literally. This study demonstrates that the Anglo-Saxons did not uniformly espouse the belief in an incorporeal mind. Alongside the "expert theory" of the mind as a component of the incorporeal soul, there flourished a "common-sense theory," arising from the physiological sensations accompanying strong emotions, according to which the mind was literally a part of the body, residing in the chest, and subject to changes in dimension and temperature. ;The first two chapters survey the numerous manifestations of this corporeal-mind idiom in Anglo-Saxon literature, focusing chiefly on Old English verse. Chapter Three adduces a variety of cross-cultural analogues to support the hypothesis that many cultures, including the Anglo-Saxons, subscribed to a common-sense belief that the mind is located in the chest, and that such a common-sense theory is likely to survive in a given culture until a contradictory expert theory, backed by the authority of religion or of science, renders the common-sense psychology obsolete. ;Chapters Four and Five explore the coexistence of materialist and non-materialist strains of psychology among the continental teachers who laid the foundations of Anglo-Saxon education and among early Anglo-Latin writers . Finally, the interaction between common-sense and expert psychologies among the Anglo-Saxons is the focus of Chapter Six. Because it can be demonstrated that the expert theory of the incorporeal mind was not disseminated beyond the educated elite by means of catechesis and preaching before around the year 1000 at the earliest, we may conclude that nearly all surviving Old English verse was composed and recorded in extant manuscripts during the period when most Anglo-Saxons employed the corporeal-mind idiom as a literal expression of their beliefs about the nature of the mind