Memorial Culture in the Middle Ages

I want to share the following quote from Mary Carruthers’ The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture because it made me think about the “History of Rhetoric” as a “text” in Bizzell and Herzberg’s The Rhetorical Tradition—which is, in itself, a mnemonic of sorts used in teaching the history of rhetoric.

“It is my contention that medieval culture was fundamentally memorial, to the same profound degree that modern culture in the West is documentary. This distinction certainly involves technologies—mnemotechnique and printing—but it is not confined to them. For the valuing of memoria persisted long after the book technology itself had changed. That is why the fact of books in themselves, which were much more available in the late Middle Ages than ever before, did not profoundly disturb the essential value of memory training until many centuries had passed. Indeed the very purpose of a book is differently understood in a memorial culture like that of the Middle Ages than it is today.

A book is not necessarily the same thing as a text. ‘Texts’ are the material out of which human beings make ‘literature.’ For us, texts only come in books, and so the distinction between the two is blurred and even lost. But, in a memorial culture, a ‘book’ is only one way among several to remember a ‘text,’ to provision and cue one’s memory with “dicta et facta memorabilia.” So a book is itself a mnemonic, among many other functions it can also have.” (8)

Citation:

Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Check out what Mike Duncan, Rhet/Comp doctoral student at the University of Memphis in Rhet/Comp, has to say about Carruthers' libro on memoria.

P.S.

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