0.8 Making the cognitive turn in art history: a case study  (Page 15/17)

At home again, Joseph is bodily transformed back into “the old man with the beard” [Der grise mit dem barte; l. 3009], as the line near the bottom of the page indicates. Exposing his spindly calves and bowing his back so that his head leans forward (Fig. 16; 51v), Joseph accuses Mary’s companions of complicity in what he can only see as adultery: “Alas for the worry that I have discovered here; you have behaved very wickedly toward me” [O we der sorgen die ih funden han. / ir habt vil ubel an mir getan]. Beginning at the upper left rather than on end of the banderole that Joseph holds near his mouth, these words literally return to him in a visualization of their ineffectiveness. As the women make very clear, he is not in charge here: “What God has brought about here is the angel’s counsel” [Swes hie got verhenget hat. / daz ist des engeles rat]. Alone in his confusion, Joseph is so weighed down with sorrow that he wishes he had died before hearing the people tell lies about him and suffering the loss of his honor. The confidence of the master craftsman is eroded by self-doubt; he knows he will not be able to perform his role as Mary’s protector.

Having reached a decision to abandon Mary, Joseph goes to bed until the moon will rise to light his way; in the miniature (Fig. 17; fol. 53r), his rumpled garments and bedcovers express his “bodily anxiety” [des libes angest” l. 3091], and the text elaborates on his physical condition: “His eyes were dim / From sorrow and the weight of age, / Because in the known region / There was no one older” [sîn ǒgen waren im trube / uon leides vnd des alters swaere, / wand uber die gegende maere / was sîn galter nehein. ll. 3104-7]. Of course, reader-viewers are not to conclude that Joseph abruptly grows older or younger from scene to scene. Rather, both poet and miniaturist manipulate the condition of the body to convey psychological and emotional states. By treating these states as having effects on physical age and wellbeing, the miniatures make them accessible to the body of the reader-viewer, enabling a reaction of empathy.

In his application of evocriticism to similar scenes of deliberation in the Odyssey , Boyd identifies the “flexible intelligence” that evolved in humans and “can with effort arrive at novel solutions to novel problems.” But allowing flexible intelligence to produce “new responses to difficult situations involves stopping automatic responses and thinking with effort, in a highly conscious way, to solve problems.” Boyd, 258-59. A modern reader-viewer may project this flexible intelligence onto the sleeping Joseph by deciding that he has given himself time to reconsider, but the biblical narrative invokes supernatural intervention to explain Joseph’s awakening with renewed confidence in Mary’s chastity. Boyd attributes the human tendency to seek and accept supernatural explanations to “our theory of mind, our most powerful intuitive ontology,” which always looks for a deeper explanation, especially “a concealed agential cause.” As he observes, “religious myths have provided the standard form of apparently deeper explanation for most humans since we emerged fully into culture.” Boyd, 199-202.