“Our brains make the world smart so that we can be dumb in peace,” writes Andy Clark in Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, a key text in the “situated cognition” movement in cognitive science.1 In early modern studies too, theorists such as Peter Stally-brass and Evelyn Tribble describe certain objects as having a cognitive life of their own, as “exograms” within external symbol systems which couple with and complement the distributed, context-ridden traces or “engrams” of the humoral body.2 Embodied human minds operate in and spread across a vast and uneven world of things—artifacts, technologies, and institutions which they have collectively constructed and maintained through cultural and individual history. This chapter seeks to add a historical dimension to the enthusiastically future-oriented study of “natural-born cyborgs” in the philosophy of cognitive science,3and a cognitive dimension to recent work on material memories and symbol systems in early modern England, bringing humoral psycho-physiology together with material culture studies. The aim is to sketch an integrative framework which spans early modern ideas and practices relating to brains, bodies, memory, and objects. Embodiment and environment, I’ll argue, were not (always) merely external influences on feeling, thinking, and remembering, but (in certain circumstances) partly constitutive of these activities.
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