Minds, Cognitive Ecologies and Old Norse Literary Artefacts (The New Middle Ages)

This open access book examines reading and mindreading in medieval manuscript culture through a focus on Old Norse literature and ecology.It demonstrates how medieval literature, through its textuality and materiality, represents and describes various social and fictional worlds while also forming a constitutive element in the socio-cognitive ecology.To accomplish this, Eriksen engages in a close reading of three texts from different genres, that are all preserved in the fourteenth-century Icelandic manuscript Hauksbók.These include the Old Norse translation of Elucidarius, a pan-European handbook in medieval theology, the Icelandic family saga Fóstbrœðra saga, and the legendary saga Hervarar saga ok Heiðriks.Collectively, the three texts represent a wide variety of minds, bodies, and worlds, through a unique combination of literary styles and forms (prose, dialogue, and skaldic and eddic poetry).Thus, they reveal how one manuscript could offer a great variety of cognitive tools to its