Brigham Young University
by Laura Hatch
Before the rise of psychological realism, romance literature offered a robust imaginative space for exploring cognition, emotion, and decision-making. This paper argues for the value of examining premodern storytelling through the lens of cognitive literary studies. Drawing on examples from medieval and early modern romance, I show how romance narratives, with their insistence on contingency, remain central to our understanding of how minds work. Far from being naïve or escapist, these stories stage meaningful engagements with the limits of knowledge and the challenges of human behavior. By bridging literary history with cognitive science, this approach invites us to rethink what kinds of stories best represent human thought and how older narrative forms can contribute to interdisciplinary conversations about the mind.