To this end, the panel will consist of three papers of approximately 15-20 minutes each. The first paper by Brian J. Reilly takes the idea of perceptual narrowing from developmental cognitive science to explain the visual and aural basis of antisemitism found in Old French literature from the thirteenth century (examples will include Rutebeuf and the Lancelot-Grail Cycle). As the human mind learns what to discern in the “blooming, buzzing” environment, so too does it learn to include or exclude others by what they can see and hear. Using the recent work of psychologist Katherine D. Kinzler on the relations of speech to community formation, I show how the medieval writers exploited these relations to create a Christian community via the perceptual exclusion of others, in particular Jews. This talk establishes the foundational cognitive science underlying the medieval expression of antisemitism by showing how this literature links perception (the cognitive phenomenon of perceptual narrowing) to discrimination (the moral phenomenon of community narrowing).
Turning to cognitive theories of metaphor and language acquisition, Katherine A. Brown argues that the 12th-c. Roman d'Eneas transforms Virgil's model by laying bare the ways in which cognitive processes of abstraction and language development work. Contemporary theories of cognitive abstraction and metaphor, in particular the work of Dedre Gentner and Jennifer Asmuth, hold that abstract concepts emerge from embodied concepts that undergo a process of analogical abstraction. Similarly, linguistic theorists have long argued that metaphors may become so common as to be considered literalized and therefore no longer metaphorical. This trajectory of a concept from concrete to abstract and then literal is mapped out in the use of certain metaphors (namely, war, money, and travel) in the Old French Roman d'Enéas. This process of semantic transformation shows how language, and specifically metaphorical language, is conceived and develops.
Building on the concept of mapping, Emily Mahan uses Dedre Gentner’s theory of structure-mapping to argue that while fables are in some sense “directional” projections of information from the base (animal) to the target (human), they are first processed “symmetrically,” i.e., perceived commonalities of the base and target are apprehended together and relationally, with a transformative effect on perceptions of both. Though fables have been understood since antiquity to be both patently fictional, and not truly about animals on a deeper level, even the youngest readers are expected to interpret the narratives non-literally, i.e., to grasp the morals, and discern in them lessons about human nature, rather than natural history. This would seem at first glance to make fables resistant to readings through the lens of Critical Animal Studies. Indeed, they have rarely been examined that way, even amongst scholars of medieval literature, despite the key educational role of beast fables during the Middle Ages. However, research in cognitive linguistics would indicate that the literal content of beast fables cannot simply serve as a springboard for thought about humanity—it inevitably encodes, and shapes, human thought on animals themselves. Structure-mapping theory suggests that fable animals do not function simply as precursors to anthropocentric morals, and that their animality is not erased, despite being anthropomorphized. Accordingly, this talk analyzes fable animals as animals, with a focus on portrayals of interspecies relationships, in works such as Marie de France’s Fables and the Latin “elegiac Romulus.”