Horse-Riding Storytellers and Distributed Cognition in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
Horse-Riding Storytellers and Distributed Cognition in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
The taming of horses changed humans’ relation to space, movement, and speed. It increased their social agency and environmental impact. In fourteenth-century England, Geoffrey Chaucer writes about the storytelling contest of a group of men and women travelling together on horseback to Canterbury. Bringing an enactive practice of language together with the dynamic of horse-riding, TheCanterbury Tales characterizes its storytelling pilgrims by the way they ride their horses and speak to each other. The pilgrims’ kinesis, narrative skills and cognitive styles are linked to a use of artefacts (e.g., clothing, weapons, stirrups) which defines them as characters. Chaucer conveys such distributed information by working with language in a way that successfully induces readers’ cognitive engagement, and triggers perceptual-motor simulations of situated actions in meaningful ways.
Keywords: Geoffrey Chaucer, Horse-riding, Storytelling, Sensorimotricity, Motor cognition, Artefacts, Enactive cognition
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