In September 2025, Stanford’s Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies
hosted Professor Jamie Kreiner, Robert and Dorothy Wellman Chair in Medieval
History at UCLA and a former SHC Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (2011–12). Her
recent book, The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction
(Liveright, 2023), explores how early medieval monks experimented with their own
cognition, showing their elaborate strategies to strengthen memory, to manage the
wandering drift of attention, and to think about thinking itself. What generates a
thought? How does it behave? Do you let it pasture, as a monk suggested, or gather
it, as we still say? What emerges is the realization that distraction is not the blight of
the digital era but a challenge that has always accompanied human life. A full mil-
lennium before ADHD became a diagnosis, monks were already building what we
might call technologies of focus and social systems of accountability—tools that, in
many ways, would feel useful today.