2005-2006 Faculty Colloquia

For many in the medieval period who followed Aristotle's teachings, the heart was the indisputable center of the body and of the soul. But Galen, that other great authority for medieval scholars, held that many functions that Aristotle attributed to the heart were in fact functions of the brain or even of the undignified liver! The medieval period reveals much about the ways in which a political, theological or philosophical framework can integrate, suppress or shift to accommodate new evidence. This talk follows some twists and turns in the search for the center of the body.

This talk presents an overview of several genres of Spanish sea writing during the early modern period (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), with theoretical considerations for an interdisciplinary study of both literary and historical documents.

Her heart seethed with anger.

He kept a secret locked tight in his heart.

When speakers of Modern English use images such as these, which locate emotions and thoughts in the heart, we do so metaphorically. Writers of Old English texts, too, locate emotions and thought in the heart and the chest, but do they do so metaphorically?

Evidence from within the Old English corpus alone does not provide a satisfactory answer to this question. However, a comparison of the Old English evidence with a vast array of cross-cultural analogues, from the Greek Presocratics to the data gleaned by modern-day transcultural psychiatrists, suggests that the Old English mind-in-the-heart was, at some point in the history of the language, used as a literal expression of everyday perceptions of the physiology of emotion.

In order to discern when the mind-in-the-heart became a metaphor, we can turn again to Old English and Anglo-Latin sources, especially homilies and medical texts, which demonstrate that Anglo-Saxons of the eleventh century increasingly associated the mind with the incorporeal soul and the mind’s faculties with the organ of the brain.

If you are interested in presenting during Spring Quarter, please contact Richard Firth Green at green.693@osu.edu or Ethan Knapp at knapp.79@osu.edu.