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
1. 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. Neoplatonims in Christian guise : the mystic way as the affirmation and negation of images -- 5. Holy images -- 6. Imaginations in Islam -- 7. The western middle ages -- 8. Ficino -- 9. Ideas about poetry and painting in the Italian Renaissance -- 10. The French Renaissance and after
