No abstract
Scholarship on memory has explored the historical, philosophical, or theological works that are concerned with explicating the medieval conception of memory. The study of memory in the Middle Ages mostly begins with Frances Yates and her Art of Memory, published in 1966. Before this work, there was little systematic attention paid to the processes of memory in the medieval world. While Yates's work traces the art of memory from classical sources all the way to the seventeenth century, she spends a significant amount of time on the medieval treatments of memory. This study, however, is restrictive. Mary Carruthers, who, in 1990, published what is still the definitive study of medieval memory, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, comments that Yates believed that the goal of the art of memory was to repeat previously stored material, that it was "static," without movement, imprisoning, and, as a result, Yates did not outline the basic pedagogy of memory in the Middle Ages (Carruthers 1990, 9).Carruthers wrote her study because she found most scholars asserting there was little interest in memory in the medieval period, despite the proven importance of orality in textual transmission, especially in the early Middle Ages. For this reason, the study of orality-such as, for example, Brian Stock's The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (1983)-is important to the study of memory. M. T. Clanchy, in From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307(1979, focuses on the shift in both individual and societal attitudes with the evolution from memorization and "orality" to writing. The first part of this study of literacy in England is a discussion of the development of record-keeping and the development of trust in written records and, conversely, the creation of the idea of "forgery." The second section focuses on the increasing "literate mentality" and the juxtaposition of this growing literacy with still-functioning traditional "oral" techniques, particularly the desire to "hear" documents as opposed to reading them silently. Clanchy asserts that this change from "oral" to "written" had an equally profound effect upon human memory and thought as the shift from script to print.In The Book of Memory, Carruthers discusses two key questions: what memory is to the medieval thinker and why it is important. As Memoria is considered one of the divisions of classical rhetoric and, for some writers, the noblest of the Brought to you by | Cambridge University Library
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