Ancient and Medieval Memories
Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past

This book comprises a series of studies which take ancient texts as evidence of the past, and show how medieval readers and writers understood them.

Janet Coleman (Author)

9780521019378, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 8 September 2005

668 pages
22.9 x 15.3 x 4 cm, 1.003 kg

'Coleman' s scholarship is stunning: her research does a great service to scholars in a variety of disciplines, for whom she opens up and makes accessible an unexpectedly large number of philosophical accounts of memory.' The Times Literary Supplement

This book is an analysis of thinking, remembering and reminiscing according to ancient authors, and their medieval readers. The author argues that behind the various medieval methods in interpreting texts of the past lie two apparently incompatible theories of human knowledge and remembering, as well as two differing attitudes to matter and intellect. The book comprises a series of studies which take ancient texts as evidence of the past, and show how medieval readers and writers understood them. The studies confirm that medieval and renaissance interpretations and uses of the past differ greatly from modern interpretation and yet betray many startling continuities between modern and ancient and medieval theories.

Introduction
Part I. The Critical Texts of Antiquity: 1. Plato
2. Aristotle
3. Cicero
4. Pliny and Roman naturalists on memory
Borges's Funes the Memorious
5. Plotinus and the early neoplatonists on memory and mind
6. Augustine
7. Augustine, De Trinitate
Part II. The Practice of Memory During the Period of Transition from Classical Antiquity to the Christian Monastic Centuries: 8. The early monastic practice of memory: Gregory the Great
Benedict and his rule
9. Bede, monastic grammatica and reminiscence
10. Monastic memory in service of oblivion
11. Cistercian 'blanched' memory and St Bernard
12. Twelfth-century Cistercians: the Boethian legacy and the physiological issues in Greco-Arabic medical writings
Part III. The Beginnings of the Scholastic Understanding of Memory: 13. Abelard
14. Memory and its uses: the relationship between a theory of memory and twelfth-century historiography
Part IV. Aristotle Neoplatonised: The Revival of Aristotle and the Development of Scholastic Theories of Memory: 15. Arabic and Jewish translations of sources from antiquity: their use by Latin Christians
16. John Blund, David of Dinant, the De potentiis animae et objectis
17. John of la Rochelle
18. Averroes
19. Albert the Great
20. Thomas Aquinas
Part V. Later Medieval Theories of Memory: The Via Antiqua and the Via Moderna: 21. John Duns Scotus
22. William of Ockham
23. The legacy of the via antiqua and the via moderna in the Renaissance and beyond
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX]