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HANNAH CHAPELLE WOJCIEHOWSKI, VITTORIO GALLESE, Introduction

body image, and the experience of time dilation and contraction,
which are represented therein.
Through his readings, Hogan makes a case for cross-cultural
patterns. “[I]f a work has survived across cultures and historical
periods,” he argues, “we have good prima facie reason to infer that
its representations of human engagement with the world resonate
with the experiences of a wide range of people.” Hogan also
“point[s] to ways of furthering a research program in the psychol-
ogy of space and time, a program that is behavioral, neuroscientific,
cognitive-affective, and literary.”

In “Kinesis in Literature and the Cognitive Dynamic of Gestures in
Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Cervantes,” the third essay in this collec-
tion, medievalist and comparatist Guilleme e Bolens applies the neu-
roscience of motricity — specifically the mirror neuron research of the
Parma group — to the aforementioned medieval and early modern
authors. Locating what she calls “kinesic events” in The Canterbury
Tales, in Don Quixote and in Macbeth, Bolens explores the phenomenon
of perceptual simulations in readerly reception of narrated gestures,
postures, and sensorimotor interactions.
How, Bolens asks, does a narrative prompt readers to trigger
perceptual simulations of complex actions, which are sometimes bla-
tantly impossible in real life — e.g., wringing out a horse (a curious
image from “The Tale of Sir Thopas” in The Canterbury Tales) — yet
which nevertheless make sense through some mentally dynamic ap-
proximation of the action described? In exploring such questions
through the lens of embodied cognition, Bolens helps us to understand
how fictions work on us, and also how they delight us with their rich
and surprising implied motions.
The kinesic passages on which Bolens bases her insightful read-
ings are focused on the actions of humans riding horses. Intriguingly,
these passages recover a range of embodied experiences that were in-
timately familiar to many readers of the Middle Ages and Renais-
sance — namely, the experience of riding on horseback, and of incor-
porating the horse’s body and motions into one’s own peripersonal
space. The passages under study convey those embodied experiences
to modern readers, most of whom are much less familiar with horses

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