, ed. Juliana Dresvina and Victoria Blud. Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2020, xv, 251 pp., 13 b/w ill.

We are certainly trying our hardest to develop transdisciplinary perspectives also in pre-modern studies. Of course, most of us are not trained enough to draw from pharmacy, mathematics, astronomy, etc., in order to understand medieval literature, for instance. But pharmacists, for instance, also would not have a real training in reading and analyzing fictional texts. The challenge remains huge, and yet it is highly attractive and appealing for us. The contributors to the present volume try to take us one step further by investigating to what extent the latest research on human cognition could be utilized to understand various medieval phenomena. The target audience are medieval scholars, but in most cases, the authors try their hand in neurosciences, which creates a bit of challenges because true transdisciplinarity would require closer collaboration of at least two scholars from different fields. We also would have to raise the question why cognitive science would be the particularly appropriate research area to build bridges to medieval religion/mysticism or literature. But there is no disagreement, I think, that the study of the human being in the historical and cultural context can be enriched with insights from modern science areas. The problem arises, however, with the fact that we have only very indirect access to people, their mind, and their creative works from the pre-modern era.