Caulfield, Genevieve E; (2024) Can we believe our own eyes? Optics, vision and cognition in late medieval religion. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis aims to provide a connected account of how sight was understood across late medieval (c.1200-c.1450) religious contexts. During this period, medieval philosophers, theologians, hagiographers, and preachers developed a wealth of visual techniques for establishing adequate trust in visual experiences. By analysing numerous genres of texts in which sight was implicated, I bring the (traditionally distinct) historiographies of science, theology, and religion into dialogue. Building on recent calls to historicise the concept of belief and to reject the outdated, credulous image of late medieval religion, I further suggest that the development of methods for certifying ordinary visual perceptions and the proliferation of techniques for justifying Christian truth claims were reciprocally related. Chapter one analyses how three major thirteenth-century optical treatises constructed trust in relation to sight. Chapter two considers how the visual cultivation emphasised by these treatises could serve Christian truth claims in Franciscan pastoral and exegetical contexts. Chapter three uses a selection of hagiographical sources to construct a preliminary typology of styles of describing seeing, which helped to develop strikingly different models of sanctity. Chapter four investigates episodes of demonic intervention in human sight in pastoral and demonological treatises, suggesting that authors presented a spectrum of accessible practices for overcoming potentially demonic visual uncertainty. Finally, chapter five examines the beatific vision controversy. This discrete fourteenth-century debate over the timing of blessed souls’ sight of God represents the theological culmination of the thesis: advice for cultivating reliable sight in pastoral and hagiographical discourses flowed into and out of this major eschatological debate. My analysis of visual credibility across genres that are usually examined separately not only provides a more connected understanding of how sight was conceptualised in the late Middle Ages, but also sheds new light on the variety and sophistication of methods for constructing belief in this period.

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