ABSTRACT
Traditional Western thought was largely though not exclusively composed of a blending of biblical and Greek concepts.1 This admixture of the intellectual frameworks of Jerusalem and Athens reached most explicit expression in the famous ‘Christian synthesis’ of medieval philosophy. We understand the term ‘medieval’ here in its broad designation as a middle epoch between antiquity and modernity, one extending from the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century to the taking of Constantinople in the fifteenth century. What we are seeking, however, is not a history of causal events but an epistemological paradigm (or episteme, to borrow Foucault’s term) which might be said to inform the various concepts of imagination in the medieval epoch.
