The Middle Ages Are within Your Grasp: Motor Neurons, Mirror Neurons, Simulacra, and Imagining the...

Studies in Medievalism XXIV, 2015

The Middle Ages Are within Your Grasp: Motor Neurons, Mirror Neurons,

Simulacra, and Imagining the Past

Jeff Rider

Today, the Middle Ages might be conveniently defined as the study of the events and artifacts in Europe (more or less) between 500 and 1500 (more or less) that still survive, and our interactions with them. Countless medieval acts of various kinds have been incorporated, and survive as what Bruno Latour has called “actants,” in our present institutions, artifacts, and gestures, but they are so combined with so many other actants that it is impossible to disentangle the medieval actants from the others, and meaningless to do so since in these cases their value lies not in their historical difference, their “medievality,” but precisely in their having been assimilated into modern institutions, artifacts, and gestures.1 Certain artifacts have, however, been set off as being “medieval,” which is to say past and other. Some of these artifacts are relatively intact but the larger and more complex ones – like “medieval” churches – almost never are, having been repaired or transformed

1 Latour writes: “An action in the distant past, in a faraway place, by actors now absent, can still be present, on condition that it be shifted, translated, delegated, or displaced to other types of actants, those I have been calling nonhumans”; “a fresh hybrid […] carries past acts into the present and permits its many makers to disappear while also remaining present. […] in a minute I may mobilize forces locked in motion hundreds or millions of years ago. The relative shapes of actants and their ontological status may be completely reshuffled – techniques act as shape-changers, making a cop out of a [speed-]bump in the road, lending a policeman the permanence and obstinacy of stone. The relative ordering of presence and absence is redistributed – we hourly encounter hundreds, even thousands, of absent makers who are remote in time and space yet simultaneously active and present” (“On Technical Mediation – Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy,” Common Knowledge 3.2 [Fall 1994]: 50, 40).

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over the years. Some of these “medieval” artifacts, like churches, are still in use today for contemporary purposes, which may in some cases be analogous to the purposes for which they were used during the period in which they were created. Relatively few of these “medieval” artifacts are immediately or directly useful today, however, at least for their original purposes, and those that are have almost always been modified or supplemented to serve modern purposes. These “medieval” artifacts have by and large been constituted and preserved as a distinct set of objects on account not of their immediate and practical usefulness but on account of their ability to enrich the present, everyday world and to enable us to see and experience potentialities in our present, everyday world that we would not otherwise see or experience. It would in fact probably be most accurate to say that the Middle Ages, today, are primarily a set of potential actions, thoughts, and feelings that are avail-able to us thanks to the survival of these artifacts. I have published elsewhere a preliminary discussion of the ways in which our imagining the other worlds, which once existed but no longer exist, to which these artifacts point is useful and productive for us because it opens up for us what Paul Ricœur called “new possibilities of being-in-the-world.”2 In this essay, I would like to concentrate on the ways in which the artifacts themselves open up new possibilities of being-in-the-world for us … directly, immediately, pre-reflectively. In order to do so, however, we must first take a short detour through some recent developments in neuroscience.

Mirroring Movement

Our brain possesses certain “visual dominant and visual and motor AIP [anterior intraparietal area] neurons [. . .] that [. . .] respond selectively to specific three-dimensional stimuli. Some respond to spherical objects, others to cubes, others again to flat objects, etc.” When we perceive an object, thanks to these neurons, there is an

immediate and automatic selection of those of its intrinsic proper-ties that facilitate our interaction with it [or “affordances”].3 These [affordances] […] incarnate the practical opportunities that the object offers to the organism which perceives it. […] As soon as we see [an object] […], these affordances selectively activate groups of AIP

2 See Paul Ricœur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” Philosophy Today, 17:2 (Summer 1973): 129–41; and Jeff Rider, “L’Utilité du Moyen Âge,” in Médievalisme. Modernité du Moyen Age, ed. Vincent Ferré (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010), 35–46.

3 The notion of affordances was introduced by J. J. Gibson in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1979).


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neurons. The visual information is then transmitted to the F5 [one area of the premotor ventral cortex or cortical motor system of the brain] visuomotor neurons, which, however, no longer code the individual affordances, but the motor acts which are congruent to them. In this way the visual information is translated into motor information […]. Many objects […] have more than one affordance. It follows that when we see these objects, more than one set of neural AIP populations will be triggered, each of which will code a specific affordance. It is likely that these action proposals will be sent to F5, sparking off what can be defined as potential motor acts.4

The translation of visual information into motor information, of action proposals into potential motor acts, takes place in F5 because of “a vocabu-lary of motor acts,” which it contains and “in which the words are represented by populations of neurons.” This vocabulary or “repertoire” of motor acts “facilitate[s] the association of these acts and the visual affordances extracted by the AIP neurons.” When, in other words, a set of neurons has been acti-vated by an object’s visual affordances, it sends a set of action proposals to the F5 visuomotor neurons. These action proposals evoke “potential motor acts [from the repertoire or vocabulary of motor acts contained in F5 that] cate-gorize the ‘seen’ object as [in the example given by Rizzolatti and Sinig aglia] graspable in this or that manner, with this or that grip, etc., endowing it with a ‘meaning’ that it otherwise would not have had.” The F5 neurons then select “the most appropriate motor act” from the potential motor acts that have been evoked, a choice that depends not “only on the intrinsic properties of the object in question (its shape, size, and orientation), but also on what we intend to do with it, on its functions, etc.”5 The chosen action may at this point remain potential, or be sent to other parts of the brain for enactment. An object’s affordances are thus part of our perception of it, are insepa-rable from our perception of it, and are “seen” immediately, pre-reflectively by our brain. We do not see an object and then decide what we can do with it. What we see is in fact less an object than a set of potential actions involving the object. Our brain “tells” us, as part of its perception of the object, what we can do with it. Our brain automatically perceives all objects in our environment as “virtual pole[s] of action” or “hypotheses of action” and presents them to us in this way.6 We are surrounded, in sum, by an environ-

4 Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain – How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions, trans. Frances Anderson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 34–35.

5 Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, 46–47, 50, 38, 35.6 Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, 48, 77.



ment filled not with static, independent objects, but with potential actions we can perform. We imagine new motor acts, enlarge our vocabulary of motor acts, through another set of neurons (other than the AIP/F5 visuomotor neurons) called mirror neurons, some of which are to be found in F5, others in other parts of the brain. Unlike AIP neurons, mirror neurons “do not discharge at the sight of […] three-dimensional objects […;] their activation depends on the observation of specific motor acts involving a body part […] – object interaction”; “the visual stimulus is not constituted by an object or its move-ments, but by object-related movements made by another individual with the goal of grasping, holding, or manipulating them.” These neurons, in sum, respond specifically to human object-related movement and “are primarily involved in the understanding of the meaning of ‘motor events’, i.e. of the actions performed by others.”7

If the observed action (or something reasonably like it) already exists in the brain’s repertoire of actions, the activation of these mirror neurons “generate[s] an ‘internal motor representation’ of the observed motor act, [. . .] a potential motor act is evoked in [. . .] [the] brain which is to all effects similar to that which was spontaneously activated during the organi-zation and effective execution of that action” in the brain of the individual who performed it, and “these movements take on meaning for the observer, thanks to the vocabulary of motor acts which regulates his own capacity to execute an action.”8 If the observed action or something like it is not already present in its repertoire of actions, however, the brain learns it, adds this new action to its repertoire, by:

the integration of two distinct processes: in the first, the observer segments the action to be imitated into its individual elements or, in other words, he converts the continuous flow of movements observed into a string of acts belonging to his motor repertoire; in the second he arranges these coded motor acts into a sequence that will compose an action replicating that of the demonstrator.9

It is important to remember that this mental activity is pre-reflective and automatic. When we see someone throw a stone, our brain automati-cally, immediately, and pre-reflectively generates a motor representation of throwing a stone similar to the motor representation that was activated during the organization and execution of that action in the brain of the

7 Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, 80, 98, 97.8 Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, 96–97, 98.9 Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, 145–46.



thrower, whether or not we have ever thrown one. If we have thrown one, our brain remembers what it is like to do so; if we have never thrown one, it segments the action into a string of smaller motor acts that are in its motor repertoire and then combines them into a sequence that replicates as completely as possible throwing a stone. This is how we learn by watching. The brain can, of course, then attempt to perform the new action it has seen – it can try to throw a stone – according to the motor representation it has generated, and the experience, in turn, provides motor and visual feedback that allows the brain to develop and refine the motor representation. When we perceive an artifact, its visual affordances immediately and pre-reflectively activate groups of AIP neurons. This visual information is trans-mitted to a set of visuomotor neurons, which translate it into a series of small motor acts congruent to the affordances. If we have already observed movements related to this artifact or a similar one, we have pre-existing sequences of motor acts (internal motor representations) associated with the artifact’s affordances in our brain’s repertoire of movements, and can use these pre-existing representations simply to imagine or to imagine and carry out these movements. If I have seen a knife used to cut something, my brain has created a motor representation of using one to cut something, and I can use anything with affordances like those of a knife to cut. If we observe a new movement related to this artifact or a similar one, the brain creates a new sequence of motor acts that becomes part of its repertoire of movements. I need to see only one knife thrown to know, at least approximately, how to throw a knife. When humans make or modify objects, when they create artifacts, they provide them with artificial affordances that facilitate certain movements, certain sequences of motor acts, in relation to those artifacts. They intend the artifacts to be used in certain ways and their intentions are reflected and materialized – memorialized – in the artifacts’ affordances. A soccer ball, for example, has clearly been made to roll smoothly along a flat surface; a brick has not. A medieval artifact has thus been provided with certain artificial affordances to facilitate certain movements, and, given how little human beings have evolved over the last couple of thousand years, I suspect that my brain still perceives all of a medieval artifact’s affordances, including those with which it was endowed by its medieval creator, and that they all evoke the small motor acts congruent to them in my brain.10 If, however, I have

10 It is in this sense that we have to understand, I think, Frank Ankersmit’s remark that “the past itself can be said to have survived the centuries and to be still present in objects that are given to us here and now, such as paintings, burial chambers, pieces of furniture, and so on”; that “the past can properly be said to be present in the artifacts that it has left us” (Sublime Historical Experience [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005], 115).



never observed the larger movements these artificial affordances were created to facilitate, I do not know how to sequence the small motor acts in order to perform the larger movement. A medieval artifact bears the impression, so to speak, of certain movements, but it is difficult for me to replicate those movements without seeing them at least once. The problem in replicating medieval object-related movements thus lies in learning how to combine the small motor acts congruent to the object’s affordances into complex, continuous movements that replicate unobserv-able medieval ones. Our brain has at least five means I can think of for overcoming this lack of observable medieval movements. First, in some cases at least, the sequence of small motor acts the artifact has been intended to facilitate seems to have been clearly inscribed on it. Few people, I think, would try to manipulate a knife with their teeth: “handle” is clearly inscribed on one part of the object. Modern children may well have never seen a butter churn, but if one placed one in the middle of a group of ten-year-olds, I suspect they would quickly discover the movements its maker intended it to facilitate, as well as a great many movements he or she did not have in mind, even if they have no idea what it is supposed to be used for. A book begs to be opened even if one cannot read. Second, I can see medieval visual representations, and read medieval verbal representations, of people using artifacts, and I can, on the basis of those representations, imagine them doing so. These representations are incom-plete – the visual ones are static and show one moment in a continuous movement while the verbal ones cannot provide the same degree of informa-tion as seeing someone perform a movement and must be “translated” by the brain into an imagined continuous movement – and we cannot be sure that the movements they represent were truly medieval ones, but they provide a guide for imagining how to combine the small motor acts congruent to the object’s affordances into complex, continuous movements that replicate unobservable medieval ones. Third, many past artifacts have analogies in the contemporary world, and the movements related to those contemporary objects can suggest analogous movements related to past artifacts. If I have used a pen to write on paper, I can imagine using a stylus of wood or bone to write on wax. Observing someone aiming a rifle helps me imagine aiming an arrow. Watching a modern soldier put on a helmet or a modern woman put on a dress helps me imagine the movements related to analogous objects in the Middle Ages. In some cases, moreover, certain disciplines or practices with respect to analogous modern artifacts, whose antecedents go back to the Middle Ages (at least), still exist. Modern competitive fencing is undoubtedly quite different from medieval your-life-may-depend-on-it fencing, but someone



who wished to replicate an unobservable medieval movement related to a sword would do well to consult modern fencers. In many cases, fourth, the potential motor acts related to an artifact may also be indicated by its preservation and presentation. I once spent several weeks transporting prehistoric stone tools from an old to a new storage space in a museum of natural history, and I was surprised at how often it seemed to me that I immediately and automatically “knew” how to hold this or that tool and what I could use it to do. Part of this “knowledge” may have been due to the kind of clear inscription on the object itself of the sequence of small motor acts it had been intended to facilitate that I mentioned above – these were not, after all, very sophisticated tools – but this “knowledge” was undoubtedly also due to the fact that these stones had already been identified for me as tools, which immediately evoked a set of movements associated with certain purposes. Had I simply found them lying amid a pile of rocks, I might not have recognized them as tools. When we perceive a medieval artifact, our brain uses such means, and undoubtedly many others, to imagine movements with respect to the artifact that it cannot observe directly. These mental images stand in the place of observations and, like them, generate motor representations of the imagined motor act, although my imagining of an unobserved movement will neces-sarily be more approximate than would my mental image of an observed one, and so presumably will the motor representations generated by it. It is like trying to follow the directions for assembling a particular piece of furniture without ever having seen that precise piece of furniture assembled. Fifth, this approximate imagining of a movement I have not observed can be enhanced, refined, filled in, so to speak, by means of experimentation and practice, by trying to perform what I have imagined. This is how we get better at any motor activity: the fifth time I reassembled my daughter’s coffee table, I did not even bother to look at the directions. Enacting movements in relation to an artifact refines the motor representation corresponding to the movement through motor and visual feedback. The “knights” who joust and perform throughout the Unites States each year provide a striking example of such enactments with respect to medieval artifacts and of the degree to which such enactments are learning experiences. As Dashka Slater wrote in a New York Times article in 2010:

horsemanship and targeting are what make jousting so difficult. Staying on a horse while wearing 50 to 100 pounds of armor is challenging enough, particularly when your vision is restricted by the helmet’s narrow eye slit. Persuading a horse to run toward another horse at full speed is more challenging still. Jousting requires you to do both while simultaneously lowering a heavy and unwieldy weapon from vertical to



horizontal, aiming it at a small target and receiving a massive wallop in the chest.11

Contemporary jousters are trying to master an old, and therefore unfamiliar and difficult techne, a set of motor skills that requires the development of a substantial new vocabulary of internal motor representations related to medieval artifacts through training and practice. One of these jousters, Jeffrey Hedgecock, even runs a “Knight School” one day a month to teach “the art of knightly combat.” In order to participate, one must already be “an experienced and confident rider,” and anyone who is interested in attending is forewarned that “jousting is a very demanding sport that is difficult to ‘dabble’ in. Most people involved in jousting take it very seriously and make it their sole hobby. Like any gear or skill intensive hobby, jousting is a sport that requires a significant time and financial investment even to participate at a very basic level.”12 The curriculum at the Knight School includes:

Exercises to prepare your horse for joustingIntroducing your horse to joustingRiding in armourBalance with and without a lanceFocusCoordination for both horse and riderLance handling techniques[…]Historical technique, based on works of Duarte, Monte, Quixada and

WallhausenProper set up of horse and rider for a passRunning the passRecovering from the strikeCompleting the pass in a controlled and measured mannerSpecial techniques to improve lance targeting and presentation goalsExhibiting style and grace as detailed in historical sources.13

11 Dashka Slater, “Is Jousting the Next Extreme Sport?” New York Times, 8 July 2010 <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/magazine/11Jousting-t.html?_r=2&hp> [accessed 6 August 2014].

12 <http://www.knightschool.us/KnightSchool.co/KnightSchool_-_Requirements.html> [accessed 6 August 2014].

13 <http://www.knightschool.us/KnightSchool.co/KnightSchool_-_Program.html> [accessed 6 August 2014].



The technical nature of jousting and the skill and body-learning that are required to do it well (or at all) is also evident in journalists’ frequent refer-ences to it as a sport, an extreme sport, a competitive sport, an equestrian sport, a form of theater, or as being “(un)choreographed.”14 Charlie Andrews, six-time World Champion of Full Contact Heavy Armored Jousting, is quoted as saying, “‘I don’t know jack about history, nor do I care,’” but he clearly knows the advantages and disadvantages of the affordances offered by different forms of medieval helmets, and might in many ways understand better a medieval description of knightly combat than would someone who does know nothing about history.15 As the example of these modern jousters shows, it is possible to develop a sophisticated vocabulary of internal motor representations, of movements related to medieval artifacts, and to refine that vocabulary through experi-ence. The existence of medieval artifacts, in other words, offers us the oppor-tunity to enrich and enlarge our motor vocabularies. Some of these new motor representations may seem relatively useless to most people – how many of us are ever going to want or need to know how to use a lance while riding on a horse? – but once the representations of these new movements have become part of the brain’s repertoire of motor acts, they, or at least some of their components, may be evoked by contemporary objects as well. I believe, for example, that I read, physically read, modern books differently, in a richer, more comprehensive way, because I have read medieval manu-script books. When I perceive a medieval artifact, I perceive more practical opportunities in the world than I did before, can imagine doing more and other things than I could before. By imagining and refining movements related to medieval artifacts, I learn old ways to move (but that are new to me), new things I can do, and how to relate newly learned old movements to contemporary objects.

Mirroring Feeling

The mirror neurons discussed above are activated by object-related move-ments, motor acts involving an object’s interaction with a body part, and

14 “‘If we had sponsorship, jousting could make for some really fantastic viewing programs – and they wouldn’t be on the History Channel, either, they would air alongside other sports and people would watch. [. . .] Imagine if Red Bull or Under Armour came out and sponsored this sport?’” (Mary Buckheit, “Chivalry isn’t dead at World Joust event,” ESPN Page 2, 2 November 2010, <http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=5755510>) [accessed 6 August 2014].

15 Dashka Slater, “Is Jousting the Next Extreme Sport?”; <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWHJI9n6v8Q> [accessed 6 August 2014].



enable us to understand the meaning of actions performed by others by replicating those movements in our brain as if we were performing them, without necessarily carrying them out. There is, however, another mirror neuron mechanism, located in a different part of the brain, “that codes [. . .] sensory information directly in emotional terms.” In this mechanism, “the information from the visual areas [of the brain], providing descriptions of faces or bodies expressing emotion, is conveyed directly to the insula [of Reil, a part of the brain], where it autonomously and specifically activates a mirror mechanism that immediately codes these descriptions in the corresponding emotive mode.” This mirror neuron mechanism, in other words, evokes in us the emotions that the perceived motor acts, even intransitive motor acts like smiling or skipping, would evoke in us if we performed these motor acts. I see someone laughing or kicking a vending machine and I know, approxi-mately, what he or she is feeling because I imagine what I would be feeling if I were performing those movements. “Experiencing […] [an emotion] and perceiving it in others appear therefore to have a common neural basis.” Like the motor neuron mechanism that allows us to understand the object-related movements of others by imagining ourselves performing them, this visceromotor neuron system allows us to understand what other people are feeling by imagining what we would be feeling if we were performing the movements we see them performing. “We do not need,” moreover:

to reproduce the behavior of others in full detail in order to understand its emotive meaning, just as action understanding does not require the actions to be replicated. Even if they involve different cortical circuits, our perceptions of the motor acts and emotive reactions of others appear to be united by a mirror mechanism that permits our brain to immediately understand what we are seeing, feeling or imagining others to be doing, as it triggers the same neural structures (motor or visceromotor respectively) that are responsible for our own actions and emotions.16

My brain has to imagine looking quizzical to understand what someone I see looking quizzical is feeling, but I do not have to actually look quizzical to do so. Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia observe that “the instantaneous understanding of the emotions of others, rendered possible by the emotional mirror neuron system, is a necessary condition for the empathy which lies at the root of most of our more complex inter-individual relationships” and that “which-

16 Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, 186, 189, 185, 191–92, 190.



ever cortical areas are involved, whether motor or visceromotor centres, and whatever the type of mirroring induced, at neural level [sic] the mirror neuron mechanism embodies that modality of understanding which, prior to any form of conceptual and linguistic mediation, gives substance to our experience of others.”17

I would go a step further and suggest that no movement can occur without some emotional coloring – we can say that someone opened a door reluc-tantly or closed it eagerly, and the reluctance or eagerness is visible as much in the gesture, I would suggest, as on the face; even involuntary visceral functions like the beating of my heart have emotional associations – and that understanding the movements of others thus requires understanding the feelings associated with those movements. Mirroring the movements of others – imagining myself doing what they are doing – always also involves mirroring their feelings – imagining myself feeling what they are feeling.18 Anger and compassion, that is, are associated at the neural level with certain movements and certain movements are associated at the neural level with them. I cannot feel anger without its evoking certain movements, whether or not I carry them out; I cannot, as acting teachers have known for a long time, perform certain movements without their evoking certain feelings. I would thus suggest that, to the degree that the perception or imagina-tion of movements in relation to a medieval artifact generates internal motor representations, it will also generate internal visceromotor representations of the feelings associated with them.19 If I then refine and enhance those move-ments through experimentation and practice, I will also refine and enhance the feelings associated with them. Like the perception of any unfamiliar object, in sum, the perception of a medieval artifact leads automatically and pre-reflectively, “prior to any form of conceptual and linguistic mediation,” to the evocation of some potential motor acts and some feelings that would

17 Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, 190–92.18 Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia suggest much the same, albeit a bit more guardedly (see Mirrors

in the Brain, 173–74). 19 When the first knight was knocked off his horse at the Gulf Coast International Jousting

Championships in January 2010, writes Slater, “it was as if someone had sent an electric current through the arena’s aluminum bleachers. Men leapt to their feet with their fists in the air. Teenage girls clutched one another’s arms. Tolle [the unfortunate knight] lay on his back on the ground flanked by two squires and didn’t move for a full minute. When the squires pulled him to his feet, he stumbled and nearly fell again before limping off. ‘I want to see another guy get paralyzed,’ a boy in front of me squealed, waving a toy sword” (“Is Jousting the Next Extreme Sport?”). Jeremy Smith, a competitor in the fall 2010 Tournament of the Phoenix, is quoted as saying “‘Do you know how many meatheads come through here and love it? […] Sure this is a King René style tournament, but you don’t have to know or care who that is to want to watch us beat on each other’” (Buckheit, “Chivalry isn’t dead”).



not be evoked by a familiar object, and, once these motor acts and feel-ings have become part of my neural vocabulary, they, or at least some of their components, may be evoked by other objects as well. My motor and visceromotor vocabularies are enhanced and enlarged. I am able to see more practical opportunities in the world than before and have a wider range of feelings than before. The world becomes a denser, richer place. This is what happens, I suggest, when one enters a medieval church. Churches were constructed to encourage certain movements – forward and back rather than from side to side – to draw our attention to certain focal points – forward toward the altar, up to the ceiling, up to the windows at the ends of the transept, the choir, and the nave – and to elicit certain feelings like curiosity, amusement, and a sense of a pattern underlying the physical world. A particular church’s affordances, the practical opportunities that it offers me when I enter it, the movements I can make in relation to it, and the feelings associated with those movements, are inscribed in it. The basic movements the affordances evoke, moreover, are so simple and common even now – walking and looking – that no one, I think, would have any trouble imagining them even in the absence of an observable model. I thus think that a medieval church’s affordances will evoke, at the neural level, internal representations of roughly the same movements and the same feelings in the brain of any human being entering it. The brain of a fanatical skateboarder may hierarchize these movements and feelings differently from mine – his or her vision may be drawn towards the floor rather than the ceiling . . . and so might have been that of someone in the Middle Ages whose job was to push a wheelbarrow – but I suspect that at the neural level there is substantial overlap in our brains between both the movements and the feelings evoked by the perception of the interior of the church and their hierarchization. And ultimately all human beings, to the degree their brains resemble one another, will perceive and imagine, will imagine and mirror largely the same set of movements and feelings. When I perceive the interior of a medieval church, in sum, I experience something similar to what people experienced when they perceived it in the Middle Ages and to what people who perceive it in five hundred years will also experience. Once it has reached the reflective level of the mind, of course, that experience will be articulated differently by different people based on all sorts of cultural and social differences, but at the neural level it must be reasonably similar. I would further suggest, the movements and feelings generated by the perception of the interior of a medieval church are different from those generated by entering a modern church or a different kind of medieval building. Perceiving the interior of a medieval church enriches and enlarges my motor and emotional vocabularies in ways that no other perception



would do in exactly the same way. It is simultaneously a unique experience and one that I can potentially share with every other human being. This is why two people who have been to Notre Dame of Chartres understand one another’s descriptions of the experience in a way that someone who has not been there never can. And if I enact the set of movements and feelings generated by the perception of the church’s interior by moving through it and looking at it and allowing myself to feel the feelings it was built to evoke, I can further enrich and refine the motor and visceromotor representations the perception has generated. I can become expert at visiting a particular medieval church, or medieval churches in general: with no art historical or historical knowledge, I can, with practice, learn the most affective way to visit a particular church or, to some degree, medieval churches in general, and learn to distinguish the different itineraries and effects generated by different churches. This “revelation of new modes of being,” as Ricœur put it,20 this broad-ening of our capacity to project ourselves in our own world of everyday experience, this discovery of new possibilities of being-in-the-world through the perception of the artifacts of a past world, also seems to be what Johan Huizinga experienced at an exhibition of works by Flemish Primitives in Bruges in 1902 (an experience that, according to Frank Ankersmit, inspired The Waning of the Middle Ages). At this exhibition, Huizinga later wrote, the details of an engraving by Jan van der Velde (the Younger, I presume)

suddenly [gave] […] me the conviction of an immediate contact with the past, a sensation as profound as the profoundest enjoyment of art, an (don’t laugh) almost ekstatic experience of no longer being myself, of a flowing over into a world outside myself, of a getting in touch with the essence of things, of the experience of Truth by history. […] This is the nature of what I call historical sensation.21

Elsewhere, Huizinga wrote:

there is in all historical awareness a most momentous component, that is most suitably characterized by the term historical sensation. One could also speak of historical contact. […] This contact with the

20 Paul Ricœur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” 141; and “Appropriation,” in Paul Ricœur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1981), 192–93.

21 Johan Huizinga, “De taak de cultuurgeschiedenis,” in Johan Huizinga, Verzamelde Werken 7: Geschiedwetenschap, Hedendaagsche Cultuur (Haarlem H.D. Tjeenk Willink, 1950), 72. Cited and translated by Ankersmit in Sublime Historical Experience, 126.



past […] is the entrance into a world of its own, it is one of the many variants of ekstasis, of an experience of truth that is given to the human being. […] This contact with the past, that is accompanied by the absolute conviction of complete authenticity and truth, can be provoked by a line from a chronicle, by an engraving, a few sounds from an old song. It is not an element that an author writing in the past deliberately put down in his work. It is “behind” and not “in” the book that the past has left us. The contemporary reader takes it along with himself in his encounter with the author from the past; it is his response to his call.22

Ankersmit seems to suggest that this experience, which he calls “historical experience,” involves some sort of direct contact with the past, but I would suggest that what is discovered or revealed in such experiences is not the past, but new potentialities in the present. Whatever it felt like – that is, however he explained it to himself – Huizinga’s “ecstatic” historical experience at the exhibition of Flemish Primitives was not a moment of unmediated (or even mediated) contact with a past world, not a direct experience of the past, but rather Huizinga’s apprehension, as a result of viewing the engraving, of something new in his world. Viewing the engraving, that is, helped Huizinga broaden his capacity to project himself in his own world of everyday experi-ence in, evidently, a sudden and dramatic way. It is important to realize that Huizinga was in fact enacting a movement – viewing an engraving – that is automatically and immediately generated in the human brain by an engraving’s visual affordances. The engraving’s visual affordances generated a motor representation of viewing it in his brain and he enacted that representation. He was thus enacting the movements and feelings that the engraving had been created to evoke. He was looking at it, consuming it the way its creator had intended it, apparently, to be consumed. But something even more complex was, I think, going on. Viewing an engraving was presumably not a new experience for Huizinga and remains a reasonably common experience today. Simply seeing an engraving, that is, would not necessarily have evoked any new motor- or visceromotor-representations in Huizinga’s brain; viewing a work of art was already in his motor- and visceromotor-repertoire. This experience occurred, however, at a formal exhibition of selected works of art, which marked the works in a specific way: they were examples of art from a particular region at a

22 Johan Huizinga, “Het historisch museum,” in Johan Huizinga, Verzamelde Werken 2: Nederland (Haarlem: H.D. Tjeenk Willink, 1950), 566. Translated and discussed by Ankersmit in Sublime Historical Experience, 119–28.



particular time. Huizinga’s training and background undoubtedly made him especially sensitive to this marking,23 and I do not see how he could not have thought also of a seventeenth-century viewer viewing the engraving. He thus imagined an unobservable past act in relation to that artifact, and this imagined act evoked the same motor- and visceromotor-representations as the artifact’s affordances. He was simultaneously enacting these representa-tions and imagining a seventeenth-century viewer doing so, simultaneously viewing the engraving and imagining a seventeenth-century viewer doing so. The resemblance, the identity in fact, at the neural level between the internal motor representation that he was imagining a seventeenth-century viewer enacting and simultaneously himself enacting produced a profound sense of shared feeling with that imagined early modern viewer. At that moment, that is, Huizinga sensed the deep and broad commonality of human experi-ence: the fact that any human being viewing the engraving would experience at least something of what he was experiencing. The empathetic quality of his experience is clear from his description of it as “sudden,” “immediate,” “profound,” “ecstatic,” and so on.24

I would suggest that this kind of experience does not, however, take place “behind” the artifact, as Huizinga wrote, but rather, as Ricœur puts it, “in front of” the artifact,25 between the artifact and the viewer – something that Huizinga also suggests when he writes that this experience is the modern observer’s “response” to the past artisan’s “call.” This call emanates from the

23 See Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 256.24 Even more was, I think, going on. The “historical sensation” or “historical contact”

Huizinga experienced when looking at van der Velde’s engraving, his “almost ekstatic experience of no longer being [him]self, of a flowing over into a world outside [him]self ” was particularly strong, I would suggest, because at a higher mental level, although perhaps still not consciously, Huizinga was probably also imagining what it would be like to live in the past world of the early seventeenth-century viewer of the engraving whose viewing he was imagining – enhancing his sense of empathy with that viewer – and imagining what it would be like to live in the fictional world projected by the engraving, an act of imagination he also shared with the imagined seventeenth-century viewer. He was imagining what it would be like for him to live in the seventeenth-century viewer’s world, and was imagining sharing both his (I imagine Huizinga imagined a man) viewing of the engraving, and his imagining of what it would be like to live in the world projected by the engraving. As Ankersmit points out, “the visual arts, more than anything else,” are likely to produce this sense of a shared experience (Sublime Historical Experience, 134). We can consume relatively intact artistic products in roughly the same way that their original consumers did and be moved or shaped by them in analogous ways. This is why we can, for example, learn something about past “emotionologies” from past stories (see Jeff Rider, “The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature,” in The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature: Grief, Guilt and Hypocrisy, ed. Jeff Rider and Jamie Friedman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1–25.

25 Ricœur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” 140.



artificial affordances with which the past artisan has endowed an artifact, and the response is generated by the observer’s motor- and visceromotor-repertoire. The interaction takes place “in front of” the artifact, between the artifact and the modern observer, or, more accurately, within the brain of the observer. It is one part of the brain’s response to the call, to the action proposals, of another part of the brain. The simplest way in which our interactions with medieval artifacts enrich the present is thus to generate a set of motor acts and feelings associated with them that may be at least partially unlike those suggested by any modern object: by enlarging our motor- and visceromotor-vocabularies. Without such artifacts, we would have smaller, simpler, ruder motor and visceromotor repertoires. We preserve medieval artifacts, and other past artifacts, precisely because they enable us to have larger motor and visceromotor repertoires than could be created by only contemporary objects, and because of the ideas they generate.

Replicas

Certain medieval artifacts, like churches or castles, may be relatively acces-sible, but relatively few people are able to handle, or even to see, smaller medieval artifacts. Replicas of these artifacts are, however, reasonably acces-sible, and, since the affordances of any object are visual, these replicas evoke, to at least some degree, the same internal motor- and visceromotor-repre-sentations that the authentic artifact would evoke. It is probably the case that two-dimensional replicas – images, whether electronic, photographic, or artistic – evoke these representations less well than three-dimensional replicas simply because we can see all of a three-dimensional replica’s affordances while some of those of a two-dimensional replica’s remain hidden, but the material composition of replicas is important only insofar as it affects our visual perception of the object. The visual affordances of a good plastic replica of a medieval sword, that is, will evoke the same internal motor- and visceromotor-representations as the original. The material composition of a replica is important if one seeks to enhance and refine these representations by manipulating it. The manipulation of a virtual sword in a video game, for example, may enhance and refine to some degree (depending on the sophistication and realism of the program running it) the internal motor- and visceromotor-representations evoked by the visual affordances it shares with the real sword it replicates, but it will not do so anywhere near as well as would the manipulation of a replica that reproduces, insofar as possible, the original’s material composition. As the material variation between the replica and the original shrinks, moreover, the difference between them grows less important from the point of view of



the evocation, refinement, and enhancement of motor- and visceromotor-representations. When the material variation between the replica of a late-twelfth-century northern French sword and the original is no greater than the material variation between one late-twelfth-century northern French sword and another, the replica is in fact every bit as good as the original for the evocation, refinement, and enhancement of the motor- and visceromotor-representations evoked by the original. The very best sort of replica not only reproduces the original’s affordances and material composition but is produced, insofar as possible, with the same tools and methods as the original. The “thirteenth-century” castle currently under construction in Burgundy is an example of this kind of replica.26 This projects – Guédelon – began in 1997 is expected to be completed in 2020. According to the Guédelon website:

Guédelon is a field of experimental archaeology – a kind of open-air laboratory. The aim is to recreate the site organization and the construction processes that might have existed on an early 13th century building site. Unlike traditional archaeology, which is concerned with cata-loguing, excavating and analysing an existing structure, experimental archaeology puts this process into reverse. A structure is built from start to finish in order to obtain, following experiments and observations, a set of conclusive results. Guédelon is a back-to-front archaeological dig.27

26 The website of the castle project may be found at: <http://www.guedelon.fr/index.php?lg=en> [accessed 6 August 2014].

27 <http://www.guedelon.fr/en/the-guedelon-adventure/the-scientific-approach_01_04.html> [accessed 6 August 2014]. On “experimental archeology,” see also <http://www.greatarchaeology.com/experimental_archaeology.htm> [accessed 6 August 2014], and <http://exarc.net/> [accessed 6 August 2014]. I should perhaps point out that I am not unaware of the popular and lucrative aspects of this project. It was started by Michel Guyot, who restored and owns Saint-Fargeau castle in Yonne, where he stages a massive, six-hundred-actor spectacle for a month every summer presenting ten centuries of history in an hour and a half. The project is open to the paying public and has a strong popular dimension: Guédelon, for example, is visited each year by “around 60,000 schoolchildren,” has a “tavern” where one may sample medieval-inspired fare, and an online store (<http://www.guedelon.fr/en/the-guedelon-adventure/an-educational-site_01_05.html> [accessed 6 August 2014], <http://www.guedelon.fr/en/visit-guedelon/guedelon-tavern_02_30.html> [accessed 6 August 2014], <http://www.boutique-guedelon.fr/en/> [accessed 6 August 2014]). But castles were of course already a means of extracting money from people in the Middle Ages.



Distanciation

One of the pillars of the broad intellectual, indeed cultural, trend that became dominant in the social sciences in the 1870s and is generally labeled positivism was the systematic devaluation of the cognitive, scientific utility of emotions, especially of empathy.28 Objectivity had to triumph over subjectivity (in reaction, one supposes, to Romanticism). One aspect of this systematic devaluation was the denial of empathy as a form of historical understanding.29 This trend and its resistance to empathy as a form of histor-ical investigation may have lost its dominance around the 1970s, but it is still well established today. 30 As Alexander Cook has noted, a “tendency to privilege a visceral, emotional engagement with the past at the expense of a more analytical treatment” is still one of the major concerns with “sympa-thetic identification” with past people, and there is still quite a bit of “suspi-cion,” “perplexity, hostility,” “cynicism,” and “anxiety” among “academic historians” about enactment and the sympathetic identification with past people it suggests as a historical method or tool. Although Cook is himself generally sympathetic towards what I have termed enactment as a means of historical study, even he cautions that “there is a legitimate question whether such an objective stands in tension with the critical distance that can be one of the greatest tools of historical investigation.”31

Given that the distance between us and the medieval worlds and people is infinite (since those worlds no longer exist), and given that medieval arti-facts are as physically present to us as any other objects in our world and have always already evoked motor- and visceromotor-representations in our brains before we start thinking about them, it would seem that the object from which academic historians want to maintain a critical distance (that is, neither too far nor too near) cannot be either those vanished worlds and people or their surviving artifacts. I would suggest, rather, that the object from which historians want to maintain a critical distance is their own imaginings of past movements, people, and worlds. They want to discipline

28 On the more recent recognition of the cognitive role of emotions, see Rider, “The Inner Life of Women,” 1–2.

29 For an interesting and complex reaction to this trend, which both embraced and resisted it, see Jeff Rider, “Roger Sherman Loomis: Medievalism as Anti-Modernism,” in Studies in Medievalism VI: Medievalism in North America, ed. Kathleen Verduin (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), 143–62.

30 See Jeff Rider and Alan V. Murray, “Introduction,” in Galbert of Bruges and the Historiog-raphy of Medieval Flanders, ed. Jeff Rider and Alan V. Murray (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 7–9. See also Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experi-ence, 160–91.

31 Alexander Cook, “The Use and Abuse of Historical Reenactment: Thoughts on Recent Trends in Public History,” Criticism 46 (2004): 488, 495 n2, 490.



their imaginations. Historians try to mix as little of their own subjectivity as possible into the unobservable past movements they imagine in relation to an artifact so that those movements will be as new and unfamiliar to them as possible, and thus enrich and enlarge as much as possible their neural vocabularies of movement and feelings.32 It is thus clear why enactment, which appropriates those imagined movements and reduces their strangeness by bringing them closer and making them ours, is anathema to objectivist historians. The vehemence, energy, and institutional armature with which this disci-plining of the imagination, this maintenance of a critical distance between our imaginings of our world of everyday experience and of past worlds, is still often promoted and defended is a good indication of the usefulness of the otherness of past worlds as a means of enriching the present. It also indi-cates, however, that such objectivity – such a refusal to engage emotionally and subjectively with the past world one imagines – is unnatural, for only a struggle against nature would require such means. As was noted earlier, “empathy,” as Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia write, “lies at the root of most of our more complex inter-individual relationships” and mirroring the movements and feelings of others, the basis of this empathy, is what “prior to any form of conceptual and linguistic mediation, gives substance to our experience of others.”33 Empathetic identification with others, that is, is the natural neural way to approach other people: to assimilate them to us; to replicate their actions and emotions. It is thus unnatural for us to imagine past people without feeling empathy, or at least sympathy, for them, and one has to wonder about the value of any method that begins by denying this and struggling against it. Because our neural system automatically and immediately sees the affordances offered to us by every object, we cannot imagine a past world without imagining it as a world full of practical opportunities for us, without projecting ourselves into it, just as we project ourselves into our everyday world. If we imagine a past world with people in it, we draw on our internal, neural motor- and emotional-vocabularies to imagine them doing and feeling things, and our brain spontaneously, immediately, and pre-reflectively creates representations of their imagined movements and feelings that are neces-sarily familiar to us since they are composed of elements in our motor- and emotional-vocabularies. This could all be very solipsistic were it not for arti-facts, whose affordances suggest new, unfamiliar movements, movements we could not otherwise imagine, and the feelings associated with them. This is

32 On the way our imaginings of past worlds do this, see Rider, “L’Utilité du Moyen Âge.”33 Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, 190–92.



what Ricœur describes by means of the notions of distanciation and appro-priation.34 Artifacts, like texts, point to movements, feelings, and ultimately worlds that do not, or at least no longer, exist. Our brain automatically and inevitably imagines these movements, feelings, and worlds at the neural, pre-reflective level but possibly at higher psychological levels as well. These artifacts thus permit us to distance ourselves from ourselves in imagination, to imagine doing, feeling, and being otherwise, and then to appropriate this otherness, creating a new, larger self. The appropriation of the imagined past movements, feelings, and world proposed by the artifacts is thus not neces-sarily either solipsistic or self-congratulatory. “What is ‘made our own,’” in this appropriation, Ricœur wrote:

is the projection of a world, the proposal of a mode of being-in-the-world … appropriation is the process by which the revelation of new modes of being – or, if you prefer Wittgenstein to Heidegger, new “forms of life” – give the subject new capacities for knowing himself. If the reference of a text [or artifact] is the projection of a world, then it is not in the first instance the reader [observer] who projects himself. The reader [observer] is rather broadened in his capacity to project himself by receiving a new mode of being from the text [artifact] itself. Thus appropriation ceases to appear as a kind of possession, as a way of taking hold of […]. It implies instead a moment of dispossession of the narcissistic ego […]. Only the interpretation which satisfies the injunction of the text [artifact], which follows the “arrow” of meaning and endeavours to “think in accordance with” it, engenders a new “self-understanding.”

To understand,” Ricœur concludes, “is not to project oneself into the text; it is to receive an enlarged self from the apprehension of proposed worlds which are the genuine object of interpretation.”35 Or, as Bruno Latour observes:

Each artifact has its script, its “affordance,” its potential to take hold of passersby and force them to play roles in its story. […] You are different with a gun in hand; the gun is different with you holding it.

34 See Ricœur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation” and its later versions – “La Fonction herméneutique de la distanciation,” in Exegesis: Problèmes de méthode et exercices de lecture (Genèse 22 et Luc 15), ed. François Bovon and Grégoire Rouiller (Neuchâtel; Paris: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1975), 201–15; and “The Hermeneutical function of Distan-ciation,” in Ricœur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 131–44 – as well as Ricœur, “Appropriation.”

35 Ricœur, “Appropriation,” 192–93, 182–83.



You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you. The gun is no longer the gun-in-the-armory or the gun-in-the-drawer or the gun-in-the-pocket, but the gun-in-your-hand, aimed at someone who is screaming. […] Neither subject nor object (nor their goals) is fixed.36

From this point of view, the “accuracy” of our imaginings of past move-ments in relation to past artifacts and the feelings associated with them is unimportant and cannot, in any case, be tested. All that matters is that the observer learn something new through this act of imagination and enlarge and enhance his or her motor- and visceromotor-repertoire. Children – or bankers – playing at being knights with plastic swords may not be enacting very accurately the movements and feelings associated with early twelfth-century northern French swords, but they may be learning a great deal and may live richer lives because of it.37 Discouraging the appropriation and enactment of the motor- and visceromotor-representations we imagine with respect to past artifacts is impossible, at the neural level, unnatural, and unproductive. It narrows our capacity to project ourselves in the world of everyday experience and limits our possibilities of being in it.

36 Latour, “On Technical Mediation,” 31, 33.37 For some reflections on artifacts, enactment, and learning, see Janet Coles and Paul

Armstrong, “Living history: learning through re-enactment,” a paper presented at the 38th Annual SCUTREA Conference, 2–4 July 2008, University of Edinburgh, <http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/172304.pdf> [accessed 6 August 2014], and Kokila Vani Nagalingam “The Art of Re-constructing the Past: Historical Empathy through Artefact Creation,” The International Journal of the Humanities, 9.3 (2011): 223–34 (<http://ijh.cgpublisher.com/product/pub.26/prod.2069> [accessed 6 August 2014]).


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