Was it Karen Armstrong who reckoned they were temporal lobe epilepsy? She had it herself, which tends to colour things. And there are all the ergotism maniacs, for whom I have little time. For secular subjects alive between 1540 and 1909 almost everything can be put down to tertiary syphilis, too.
Myself, I would go with the idea that it was a semi-willed process of visualisation, too. I'm interested in the change in the cultural meaning of vision, because it seems to parallel a change in how people thought about memory, and indicate interesting things about the different way medieval people conceived volition as a whole.
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regna
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-20 05:23 pm (UTC)Myself, I would go with the idea that it was a semi-willed process of visualisation, too. I'm interested in the change in the cultural meaning of vision, because it seems to parallel a change in how people thought about memory, and indicate interesting things about the different way medieval people conceived volition as a whole.