Medieval writers had their own ways of conceptualizing the people, animals, and plants that live on Earth. They understood that Earth is a sphere, and they imagined that Fortune, a personified virtue, is responsible for ensuring that the Earth continues to rotate. Fortune was envisioned to be an egalitarian presence; along with rotating the Earth, she would ensure that in time, each of the Earth’s peoples would get the opportunity to have a reigning empire. 

Although people were aware that the Earth was a sphere, they tended to make highly inaccurate maps, even based on the knowledge available to them at the time. According to Lewis, their maps were stylized and were not intended to be accurate. Instead, they were meant to communicate certain important ideas about the world; sailors would never have used them to navigate. For instance, one medieval map places England and Scotland on different islands. Maps often reverted to classical ideas about the Four Zones, even though many people in western Europe knew about lands as far east as China. References to the end or edge of the world were likely poetic or metaphorical; people did not, on the whole, actually believe that the Earth was flat.

Many aspects of medieval zoology were also highly inaccurate. Lewis contends that medieval writers’ habit of describing animals in such obviously inaccurate ways is somewhat strange; it might make sense for a thirdhand description of a lion, but not for descriptions of common animals like horses. People lived and worked with horses every day, and yet some medieval writers claimed that horses cry when their owners die, which is a reference to the Iliad. Lewis observes that some people seem to have repeated these inaccuracies simply because they came from books, and books were seen as inherently trustworthy. Often, these bizarre claims about animals were interspersed with clearly factual descriptions. 

Classical writers made many odd claims about animals, but they never used those claims to establish moral premises. Medieval writers, on the other hand, may have repeated false stories about animals because those stories gave them a useful metaphorical grounding. Lewis contends that the same thing happens today, as in common phrases such as telling someone not to “hide [their] head in the sand like an ostrich” (109). This example is a useful metaphor that is not connected to real beliefs about animal behavior. Thus, false ideas about animals have persisted not because they are plausible, but because they are useful.

Within the context of the Medieval Mode, humans occupy a specific place. A human is thought to be an animal with base desires and a corporeal form, just like beasts and plants. On the other hand, a human is also rational and intelligent, similar to angels. Human beings therefore occupy a special and central space in the medieval imagination. According to the Medieval Model, plants have a Vegetable Soul that is only responsible for survival instincts like eating and reproduction. Animals have a Vegetable Soul and a Sensitive Soul, the latter of which includes the capacity to feel, to imagine, and to think on a rudimentary level. Within this context, human souls are at once Vegetable, Sensitive, and Rational, meaning that humans can think on a higher, more abstract level. However, this idea was not interpreted to mean that humans have three souls; instead, medieval thinkers envisaged the soul to be rather like the Christian trinity: a single soul with three natures. Many medieval writers referenced this triple concept of the soul.

Lewis goes into more detail on the Rational Soul. It has two parts: Reason and Intelligence. Reason is the capacity to figure things out based on evidence, while Intelligence is the ability to recognize and understand things that are self-evidently true. It is because humans have a Rational Soul that they were able to develop morality, though Lewis (and several of the writers he quotes) appears uncertain whether it is Reason, Intelligence, or both that generates the capacity for morality. In the Medieval Era, some writers personified Reason as a beautiful goddess in their texts.

The Discarded Image includes only a brief description of the Sensitive and Vegetable Souls. The Sensitive Soul has five external qualities and five internal qualities. The external qualities will be recognizable to modern readers as the five senses: smell, taste, touch, sight, and hearing. The five internal qualities are listed as “memory, estimation, imagination, phantasy, and common wit (or common sense)” (116). Estimation might be more accurately described as instinct, especially in animals. Phantasy and Imagination are less easy to distinguish. Phantasy is denoted as being “higher” and more abstract, while Imagination is more closely connected to thoughts about the real world. Common sense does not refer to general knowledge, but to a more rudimentary way to compare experiences. The Vegetable Soul is purely concerned with “all the unconscious, involuntary processes in our organism: for growth, secretion, nutrition, and reproduction” (118), and therefore needs no further explanation.

Just as modern philosophers have tried to understand the relationship between the mental and physical worlds, so medieval writers tried to parse the connection between the Soul and the body. The difficulty arose in the nature of the Soul, for medieval thinkers had to explain the contradictory idea that something immaterial could nonetheless impact the physical world. They solved this problem with what they called the Spirit. Not to be confused with the airy spirits of the aether, the Spirit is denoted as the substance that binds the body and Soul together. Lewis calls it gumphus, the ancient Greek word for a nail. The Spirit nails the Soul to the body, allowing one to act upon the other. At the time, the Spirit was a useful tool to explain what would now be classified as mental health conditions; the Soul, being divine, could not become irrational in any way. In this view, mental health conditions were instead caused by problems of the Spirit that rendered the connection between Soul and body imperfect.

Just as the world was thought to be composed of four contraries (hot, cold, moist, and dry) that combine to form the elements, so too was the human body. The contraries formed different bodily substances known as the humors or tempers. They combined as follows: “Hot and Moist make Blood; Hot and Dry, Choler; Cold and Moist, Phlegm; Cold and Dry, Melancholy” (121). These bodily substances had to remain in balance to avoid illness, though most people were thought to have a dominant temper. Sanguine, the healthiest temper, meant that blood was dominant. Choleric people were angry and vindictive. Melancholic people brooded and had bad dreams, and phlegmatic people (the worst of the bunch) were pale and dull. Different humors were thought to be more dominant at different times of day.

Medieval people had a very different understanding of history than modern people do. In ancient Greece, history was “a meaningless flux or cyclic reiteration” (124). Christian and Jewish conceptions of history were more teleological, building from a moment of creation toward an ultimate ending. While most medieval Europeans were Christian, their view of history fell somewhat between these two poles. The Model placed little emphasis on historical accuracy, and it was uncommon to divide the past into epochs that were meaningfully different from each other. Medieval people believed that any writing about history ought to be entertaining and informative while glorifying great deeds. They asked much the same from their fictional stories, so there was a great deal of overlap between supposedly factual history and fictional narratives. Stories were often read as history even when they were not remotely true.

There was a sense in the medieval era that it was not the business of historians or writers to decide what was true and what was false. Their job was to relate the whole story, with the burden of proof falling on their critics, if it fell anywhere. It was less important to uncover new facts than to uphold the story of the past that everyone already knew. While this story of the past was popular and often retold, people may have accepted it more as a metaphor or as common parlance than as fact. Most likely, “Everyone ‘knew’ [they] were descended from the Trojans” (129), but they might not have literally believed it. When people did imagine the past, they tended to assume that it looked very much like their present, with the same foods, styles of dress, and social mores. From this perspective, the past differed from the medieval present only in that it was thought to have been better, more exceptional, and more beautiful.

The Model also dictated educational standards. People who were able to receive a formal education were taught the Seven Liberal Arts. These were seven disciplines thought to be immutable and crucial to any education. They were Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, and Astronomy. “Grammar” referred largely to Latin grammar, as Latin was the lingua franca of Europe. Grammar was fundamentally focused on establishing order and hierarchy, including syntax and etymology. The meaning of the term later expanded to refer to learning in general, and then it became associated with magical learning. Someone versed in “grammary” was thought to know magic; it is from this word that the word “glamor” emerged. 

Dialectic taught students how to argue persuasively, but the term should not be understood in the Marxist sense. Rhetoric was similar, but it also encompassed some parts of philosophy, the law, and poetry. In the Medieval Era, it was common for people to praise poems for their rhetoric (the way the language is used) rather than the substance of the poem itself. Rhetoric taught writers to include digressions and recapitulations in poetry, and it also encouraged writers to experiment with syntax in imitation of Latin, which allows for free word order. There were several standardized ways of ending a poem at this time: by stating the story’s moral, by asking another writer for assistance, by “asking indulgence for [one’s] deficiencies” (139), by bragging, or by praising God.