Against the backdrop of contemporary debates over the creative potential and embodiment of cognitive processes, imagination, a concept that traditionally mediates between perception and thought, has acquired particular topicality. But whereas the positive role of imagination as productive faculty and agency of knowledge has often been underlined in previous theoretical approaches, concomitant practical and ethical problems, traceable in the longue durée of the critique of imagination, remain largely unilluminated. The present volume addresses these problems and explores the reciprocal relationship between the productive excesses and disciplining exercises of the imagination from the Middle Ages to the present day across art history and theory, history of ideas, literary studies and philosophy.