Cocking J.M. Imagination: A Study in the History of Ideas

Routledge, 1991. — 320 p. Edited with an introduction by Penelope Murray.Imagination: A Study in the History of Ideas explores the history of imagination from antiquity to the Renaissance. The author looks at the writings of Aristotle and Plato, developments in the Middle Ages, with particular attention paid to parallel traditions in Islamic thought, Dante, and the Neo-platonists.Editor's introduction
Acknowledgements1. The Greek Rationalists: Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics
2. Imagination begins to be recognized: Literary theorists and Neopythagoreans in the early centuries AD
3. The Neoplatonists: Imagination as the 'vehicle of the soul'
4. Neoplatonism in Christian guise: The mystic way as the affirmation and negation of images
5. Holy images
6. Imagination in Islam
7. The Western Middle Ages
8. Ficino
9. Ideas about poetry and painting in the Italian Renaissance
10. The French Renaissance and afterEpilogue. The imagination as messenger: From Plato to KristevaNotes