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The Empirical Middle Ages explores the characteristics of people's attention to everyday objects and areas: wooden carvings, towns, coastal regions, and other built and natural phenomena. What draws people toward their items? What methods do they use in gathering information about them? How do they present their findings?

To answer these questions, Matthew Boyd Goldie explores how people in the Middle Ages attended to familiar phenomena with great precision, correlating and measuring to such an exhaustive degree that the recording took over as their predominant activity. Focusing on the history of empiricism in particular, Goldie reveals that the Middle Ages were not empirical in the sense of academic experimentation or scientific observation. Rather, the cases described in The Empirical Middle Ages enable readers to look outside scholastic discussions about factuality and toward administrative, practical, and legal contexts. The results comprise a historically shaped phenomenology usually denied to the medieval: objectivity, forensics, realism, empiricism.