Meditation, Invention, and Designing Thought in the Augustinian Middle Ages (Science in Culture, c.350 - c.1750)

A fresh perspective on how early scholars perceived the cosmos and the nature of knowledge through a tour-de-force study of the central role geometry played in medieval creativity.


Geometry, rhetoric and creativity were intricately linked in medieval thought. Early thinkers integrated mathematical and linguistic frameworks in their attempts to understand both divine and human creation with geometry providing the means through which these scholars tackled everything from theological speculation to the medieval art of "Invention".

Through detailed explorations of the works of figures such as Augustine, Calcidius and Cassiodorus, this book reveals how medieval thinkers conceptualized beginnings-not as fixed points but as unfolding processes with metaphors of weaving, mapping and journeying reflecting how these scholars navigated the act of creation, whether that terrestrial or cosmological.

Engaging with philosophy, theology and intellectual history, this work offers fresh insights into how medieval minds reconciled the limits of human understanding with the vast complexity of the universe. In doing so, it challenges modern assumptions about the separation of mathematical and linguistic thinking, demonstrating the dynamic, process-oriented nature of medieval ideas about the mind and the procedures of thinking.

MARY CARRUTHERS is Remarque Professor Emeritus of Literature, New York University and Quondam Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford. A world-renowned scholar, she has published numerous works on medieval ideas of the mind.