Imagination
Middle Ages

In the Middle Ages, the concept of imagination encompassed domains such as religion, literature, artwork, and notably, poetry. Men of science often recognized poets as "imaginative," viewing imagination as the mental faculty that specifically permitted poetry writing. This association, they suggested, lies in the capacity of imagination for image-making and image-forming, which results in a sense of "visualizing" with "the inner eye."

An epitome of this concept is Chaucer 's idea of the " mind's eye " in The Man of Law's Tale from The Canterbury Tales (ca. 1390). He described a man who, although blind, was able to "see" with an "eye of his mind":

"That oon of hem was blynd and myghte not see, / But it were with thilke eyen of his mynde / With whiche men seen, after that they ben blynde."

Medieval theories of faculty psychology posited imagination as a faculty of the internal senses (alongside memory and common sense): imagination receives mental images from memory or perception, organizes them, and transmits them to the reasoning faculties, providing the intellect with sense data. In this way, it enables the reshaping of images from sense perception (even in the absence of perception, such as in dreams), performing a filtering function of reality.

Although not attributed the capacity for creations, imagination was thought to combine images received from memory or perception in creative ways, allowing for the invention of novel concepts or expressions. For example, it could fuse images of "gold" and "mountain" to produce the idea of a "golden mountain."

In medieval artistic works, imagination served the role of combining images of perceivable things to portray legendary, mysterious, or extraordinary creatures. This can be seen in the depiction of a Mongolian in the Grandes Chroniques de France (1241), as well as in the portrayal of angels, demons, hell, and the apocalypse in Christian religious paintings.
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