Medieval Memory Research Articles

Medieval Memory in Theory and Practice: Some Exploratory Thoughts in the Guise of a Conclusion

All contributions printed in this volume are concerned with the ars memoria or memory craft, a rhetorical skill for people to access their memories. The techniques they describe are largely devised for a learned audience, and, not surprisingly for the Middle Ages, most of the evidence comes from manu? scripts originally in monastic or cathedral libraries. Essentially, the rhetorical skill enables a practitioner to manipulate learned information, so that its component parts can be accessed easily, reshuffled, used, and then stored away again. The use of mental images was a common way to provide frameworks for the stor? age of details that needed to be remembered. From forming a mental image to making a physical image on parchment, stone, or metal was but a small step to take to widen the application of these intellectual techniques for a broader public. Herein, it seems, lie the specific interests of modern art historians in the medieval uses of memorial imagery. One of the contributions in this special issue of Gesta devoted to the ars memoria is by Mary Carruthers, the inspirational doyenne of medieval mem? ory studies. Her article focuses on the image of the Cherub, one of the angels, and in particular on the use of its wings, which from the early twelfth century became a well-known mnemonic device.1 They were used as space for ideas about penance, and, with time, not only did the storage aspect expand (by using feathers attached to the wings) but the com? plexity of thinking about penance also evolved (by grading sins and appropriate penance for them). That these devices were used primarily for the dispensers of penance, that is, priests and monks, rather than for the laity seems self-evident. While the Cherub was a creature of God's creation somewhere between

The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940 (review)

The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940 (review)

Stefan Goebel.The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940.:The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940.(Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare, number 25.)

Stefan Goebel.<i>The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940</i>.:The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940.<i>(Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare, number 25.)</i>

Stefan Goebel. The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940. Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare, no. 23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. 301. $90.00 (cloth).

Stefan Goebel. The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940. Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare, no. 23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. 301. $90.00 (cloth).

The Great War and medieval memory: war, remembrance and medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914-1940

Introduction 1. Catastrophe and continuity: the place of the war dead in history 2. Mission and defence: the nature of the conflict 3. Destruction and endurance: the war experience 4. Chivalry and cruelty: the soldiers' character and conduct 5. Regeneration and salvation: the prospects for the living and the dead Conclusion.

Medieval Memories of the Apostolic Past: Reception and Use of the Apocryphal Acts in the Liturgical Commemoration of the Apostles

Medieval composers of liturgical texts for the feast-days of the apostles were greatly inspired by the apocryphal Acts of the apostles as they had been transmitted in the West from the early Middle Ages onwards. A number of prominent medieval authors continued the patristic debate on the reliability, authority and usefulness of the apocrypha, which resulted in a balanced judgment. This is not only visible in the written accounts reflecting the debate on apocrypha, but it is also expressed in the sources of the liturgical commemoration of the apostles, where the apocryphal narratives were keenly incorporated. The use of the apocryphal narrative in a ritual context did not leave these traditions unchanged. The ritual commemoration (anamnesis) of the apostles’ foundation work, their dealing with the demoniac, their preaching, their relation with the local people and their martyrdom is an expression of the topical significance of these stories for the local liturgical community. Moreover, the medieval community that took part in the ritual commemoration of the apostles rephrased its identity in relation to the apostolic patronage to which they appealed.

Collecting the Desert in the Carolingian West

AbstractThe Egyptian desert summoned for its early medieval progeny memories of a past age of superhuman askêsis that posed a challenge to Carolingian attempts at Benedictine hegemony. In response, the architects of ninth-century monastic reform labored to present their votaries with a carefully controlled memory of the Egyptian past, and they did so through a propagandistic aesthetic of literary, visual, and ritual "bricolage." Jaś Elsner defines this aesthetic of bricolage as an artistic form based on symbolic ownership of the past through the display of ancient spolia on contemporary monuments (e.g., the sculptured reliefs collected from past, imperial regimes and exhibited as spolia on the Arch of Constantine) or the layering of present-day texts with past literary forms (e.g., Christian typological exegesis of Hebrew Scripture). Similarly, for the Carolingians, who also ventured into the artistic realm of bricolage, collecting, embodying, and displaying were methods of exerting control over the past.

Medieval

Books reviewed:Elisabeth van Houts (ed), Medieval Memories. Men, Women and the Past, 700–1300N. J. Higham and D. H. Hill (eds), Edward the Elder, 899–924Steven Bassett, Anglo‐Saxon Coventry and its ChurchesWilliam Chester Jordan, Europe in the High Middle AgesRichard Gameson and Henrietta Leyser (eds), Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to Henry Mayr‐HartingRobert Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth CenturyRobert I. Burns (ed), Las Siete PartidasDavid Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans. From Protest to Persecution in the Century after St FrancisNicholas Vincent, The Holy Blood. King Henry III and the Westminster Blood RelicPauline Stafford, Janet L. Nelson and Jane Martindale (eds), Law, Laity and Solidarities. Essays in Honour of Susan ReynoldsRosemary Horrox and Sarah Rees Jones (eds), Pragmatic Utopias. Ideals and Communities, 1200–1600J. Beverley Smith and Llinos Beverley Smith (eds), History of Merioneth. Volume II. The Middle AgesHelen Nicholson, The Knights HospitallerDavid Ditchburn, Scotland and Europe: The Medieval Kingdom and its Contacts with Christendom, 1214–1560. Volume I: Religion, Culture and CommerceDaniel Waley and Peter Denley, Later Medieval Europe, 1250–1520

Medieval Memories: Men, Women and the past, 700-1300

Medieval Memories: Men, Women and the past, 700-1300

A Trio of Hungarian Balkanists: Béni Kállay, István Burián and Lajos Thallóczy in the Age of High Nationalism

SEER,Vol. 8o, No. 2, April2002 A Trio of Hungarian Balkanists: Beni KMalay, Istv'an Burian and Lajos Thalloczy in the Age of High Nationalism ROBIN OKEY ONE of the least attractive products of East European nationalism, open enmity apart, is the lack of interest individual nations display in each other. The respective intelligentsias have been much more familiarwith west European culturesthan with their neighbours', and figureswho concerned themselveswith the latter have regularlybeen viewed with suspicion,aspotential sellersout of the nationalcause.Yet, ironically, the activities of these same individualscan often be seen to have been skewed by their patriotic preoccupations, and their knowledge of neighbouring societies to have been put to manipulative purposes, in the interests of hegemonic pretensions revealed, in hindsight,to be illusoryor worse. Examplescan be found in the history of German-Slavor Serb-Croatintellectualrelations,as alsoin the work of Russian scholars.This articledealswith a Hungarianexample of the genre, which does not merit the odium of some of the instancesjust mentioned, but offersa way into the intellectualmind-set of the age of high nationalism, exposing some of the temptations and even some of the pathos of an ultimatelyunsuccessfulnationalism. Hungary in the later nineteenth century fulfilled all the conditions for an emerging nationalism. Major advances in communications, economic growth and popular literacy transformed the backward feudal society Istvan Szechenyi had deplored, making Budapest by 1914 a city of a million inhabitants, dwarfing Belgrade, Zagreb or Sofia. By an easily explicable paradox, 'modernization' provided the sinews whereby an emerging intelligentsia felt encouraged to revive purported past greatness, matching the national self-assertivenessof larger nations to the west. The national movement against Habsburg absolutism and, from i867, self-governmentunder the Austro-Hungarian Compromise provided the political frameworkfor the development of such perspectives,which could build on Hungarian traditions as a majorBalkanplayerbefore the eclipse of the medieval state on the Robin Okey is Reader in History at the University of Warwick. A TRIO OF HUNGARIAN BALKANISTS 235 field of Moh'acs in I526. Austria-Hungary's occupation and later annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (i 878/I908) was a furtherfactor, which was central to the careersof the three scholar-officialsreviewed below.1 Beni Kallay, Istv'anBuri'anand LajosThalloczy were between them active fromthe finalphase of Europeanliberalnationalismin the i 86os to what is called here the 'high nationalism' that developed in the decades before the FirstWorld War.2All belonged to what was then and remains the small school of Hungarian Balkanists. That there shouldbe such a school is not surprising,bearingin mind that fromthe start of the twelfth century until I9I8 the Croatian kingdom was incorporated into the wider realm of the Hungarian Crown and that medievalHungarylaidclaimto BosniaandDalmatia andled resistance to fifteenth-century Turkish Balkan conquest. The exiled Kossuth himself,in hisplansfora Danubian confederation,had recognizedthat in an age of awakening nationalisms enlightened self-interestshould lead the Magyarsto seek a relationshipwith similarly-sizedSouth Slav and Romanian neighbours.3That the school was smallwas due partly to I 50 years of intervening Turkish occupation, overlaying medieval memories, but also to the Hungarianpolitical class'swestward-looking perspective and absorptionin relationswith Vienna. Hungarianswith Balkan interests have often tended to be of South Slav origin themselves, like the bibliographer of Serb and Croat historiography, Ede Margalits(I849-1940), or, later, the historianof Serb Orthodoxy, Laszlo Hadrovics (i 9' o-). Fewer, and facing an uphill struggle to influence their indifferent countrymen, have been those Hungarians drawnto South Slav issuesby theirbelief in the political importanceof Balkanlinksfortheirfatherland. The three subjectsof this articlebelonged to this latter group:none had South Slav antecedents, except for Serbian ancestry on Kallay's mother'sside, too remote to provide a personalmotivation. Kallay and Buri'anwere members of the Hungarian middle nobility, patriots but supportersof the Habsburg connection. They shared, if in somewhat differentways, the mix of liberal and conservativevalues this stratum had inherited from the Reform Era of I825-48, conditioned by the I There is no satisfactory monograph on Hungarian nationalism in this period. See G. Kem6ny (ed.), Iratoka nemzetisegikerdestdrtMnetMhez Magyarorszagon a dualizmuskordban I867-I9i8, 7 vols, Budapest, I952-99; and F. Poloskei, 'Nacionalismus a dualizmus koraban', in A magyar nacionalismus kialakuldsa e'stdrteete,Budapest, I964, pp. I65-86. 2 In this article 'high nationalism' is...

The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 4000–1200 by Mary Carruthers

REVIEWS Princes. As with Blyth’s edition, Burrow’s method is conditioned by the existence, rare for an editor of medieval verse, of no less than three holographic manuscripts by Hoccleve. In the case of the Regement, which does not itself survive in a holograph, the holographic remains of other texts allow Blyth to follow D. C. Greetham’s proposal for the ‘‘normalisation of accidentals,’’ a procedure whereby even a generally trustworthy scribal manuscript may be amended in matters of spelling, metrics, and morphology in instances where these usages conflict with Hoccleve’s known, and remarkably consistent, practices in the surviving holographs . In the case of the Series, Burrow uses the guidance of Hoccleve’s known practice elsewhere to establish criteria by which to correct Selden on grounds of spelling, morphology, and metrical variation. Moreover, he provides a fill collation of all other existing manuscripts to verify Selden in substantial matters. The result of this labor is the most reliable text to date of both the ‘‘Complaint’’ and ‘‘Dialogue with a Friend.’’ In addition, the apparatus of the volume lives up to the customary lucidity and good judgment of Burrow’s work. The historical material in his introduction is concise and entirely reliable, and his notes add a number of significant new readings to these passages. They will no doubt be offering hints to students of Hoccleve for some time. He also offers three excurses as appendixes: exploring variation between the two holographs of ‘‘Learn to Die’’; printing an important parallel passage from Isidore of Seville; and giving substantial new historical contextualization to Hoccleve’s reference to ‘‘coin-clipping.’’ All in all, this edition represents a significant new moment in Hoccleve scholarship. If there is a fault, it lies only in the fact that some readers may wish for more of a good thing, that Burrow had given us a new text in a single volume through to the end of the Series, but as the edition now stands he is owed gratitude for finally providing reliable texts of these important works. Ethan Knapp The Ohio State University Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 4000–1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xvii, 399. $59.95. One of the odder, and rather amiable, characteristics of the postmodern condition in the humanist disciplines is how persistently romantic its 531 ................. 8972$$ CH21 11-01-10 12:23:06 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER academic practitioners remain when trying to think about the mental processes governing linguistic interiority, and creative thought. Even those among us willing to wave a cool goodbye to the autonomous author and illusions of stable meaning still resort to the imagination, creativity , originality, expressive personality, and notions bordering on inspiration to gesture at the sources of literary productivity and complex ideation. We like to think that our best ideas ‘‘come’’ to us out of a serendipitous meeting of acquired knowledge with innate brilliance, making even laboriously footnoted scholarship something personal and poetic, and we generously project this intuited process backward onto writers and thinkers of the distant past, or at least the ones we like. In The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200, the companion volume to her study of medieval memory practices (The Book of Memory, 1990), Mary Carruthers teaches us how highly literate medieval persons, formed by a consistent and coherent rhetorical education, thought about the experience of thinking, and consciously considered the process of making new things with the contents of their minds. Everything in this erudite and lucid study works to dislodge our recalcitrant notions of memorization as passive rote storage, and of rhetoric as formulaic set-piece repetition, and replace them with active energetic concepts: of memory as ‘‘a universal thinking machine’’ for making new and complex thoughts; of cogitation as ‘‘craft’’ and rhetoric as task-oriented user instructions for retrieving mental contents for new uses. In a central sense, Carruthers’s difficult task is to explain, in several overlapping, mutually illuminating ways, the difference between ‘‘having’’ ideas and ‘‘making’’ them—between persistently romantic inspirational notions and hard-to-recapture premodern modes of thinking about thinking. In a historically...

Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past.Janet Coleman

<i>Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past.</i>Janet Coleman

Ancient and Medieval Memories (review)

u96 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 32:2 APRIL t994 will prove the existence of derivative entities from their definitions and the existence claims. As McKirahan realizes, this entails that Aristotle recognized a modernsounding distinction between basic and derived entities analogous to that between basic and derived truths. It also requires some fancy logical footwork. If the definition of a derived entity is used to prove its existence, then the definition is logically prior to the existence claim: thus, we would be able to know something's definition without knowing that it exists, a view Aristotle often seems to deny. McKirahan's response is not one I think Aristotle could easily accept: before the demonstration, the definition of the derived entity merely says what a word signifies, but afterwards "the significance of the word becomes the essence of the thing" (194) . Chapter XVII tries to determine in exactly what sense the premises of a demonstration can give the cause or explanation of its conclusion. McKirahan argues that the principles must be both ratio essendi and ratio cognoscendi: to have scientific knowledge that p, I must know the reason why p is true, and I must have this knowledge in virtue of knowing the reason why. Grasping a demonstration in the way that an "expert" grasps it is just what constitutes scientific knowledge. All this is, in my opinion, exactly right, as is McKirahan's discussion of the ways in which an Aristotelian ettCgctdiffers from a Humean cause or a covering-law explanation. These lead him to various complaints (some old and some new) against 'cause' and 'explanation' as translations of ctt~ct. But McKirahan's alternative translation 'grounds' is hardly an improvement: by my lights, 'grounds' in ordinary English can only be used of decisions or actions of an agent. The final chapter (XVIII) develops an account of the cognition of indemonstrable principles, drawing primarily on the notoriously intractable An. Post. II. 19- McKirahan takes a moderate "empiricist" line and develops a credible account of how perception and induction might lead us to comprehend first principles (though I found the absence of any discussion of Modrak's views disappointing). His suggestions about the role dialectic might play in finding the principles are intriguing but stand in need of further development. On the whole, this excellent chapter is one of the most sensible discussions of II. ]9 in existence. The book is excellently produced and virtually free of errors--astonishingly so, by recent standards (though the order of terms in diagrams of demonstrations is sometimes reversed, e.g., 21o, 299 n. i3). But shame on publishers who, in this day of computers, print footnotes at the back of the book, and on editors who allow footnotes containing nothing but a three-word citation! ROBIN SMITH Kansas State University Janet Coleman. Ancient and Medieval Memories. New York: Cambridge University Press. 199~. Pp. xx + 646. Cloth, $85.oo. Memory is mostly an afterthought for philosophers today. Its primordial status for the major tradition traced in the present volume is clearest in Augustine, whose construal BOOK REVIEWS 297 of the human mind as the image of God links memory with the Creator/first person of the Christian Trinity, with understanding and will completing the model as analogues of eternal Word and Spirit. The "spacious palaces" of Augustinian memory house both images from one's own life and intelligible realities not derivable from mundane sources. This Christian Platonic view of memory occupies much of the "series of interrelated studies" in which Janet Coleman attempts "to give an account of the range of views on memory and its uses during the Middle Ages." The main contrasting view comes from Aristotle, who places memory on a level with sensation and attributes it to some of the other animals besides us. Aristotelians do, however, make reminiscence--logical searching for memories--a distinctively human capacity, and, as Coleman makes especially clear in her exposition of Aquinas, in this tradition our understanding of what we sense or remember can be sharply differentiated from the sensing or remembering. So far, then, there is no understanding of the past aspast in either tradition. For the Platonists there is understanding of the...

:Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past

:<i>Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past</i>

BOOK REVIEWS

Journal Article BOOK REVIEWS Get access Ancient and Medieval Memories. Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past. By JANET COLEMAN (Cambridge: U.P., 1992; pp. xx + 646. £50). JOHN MARENBON JOHN MARENBON Trinity CollegeCambridge Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume CIX, Issue 430, February 1994, Pages 107–109, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/CIX.430.107 Published: 01 February 1994

Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past

Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past

Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past. Janet Coleman

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsAncient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past. Janet Coleman Marcia L. ColishMarcia L. Colish Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 73, Number 3Jul., 1993 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/489197 Views: 4Total views on this site Copyright 1993 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Ancient &amp; Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past

Ancient &amp; Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past

Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past.

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.

Ancient and Medieval

The Jews among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire. Edited by Judith Lieu, John North and Tessa Rajak Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past. By Janet Coleman Social Memory. By James Fentress and Chris Wickham The Archaeology and History of Glastonbury Abbey: Essays in Honour of the Ninetieth Birthday of C.A. Raleigh Radford. Edited by L. Abrams and J. P. Carley Glastonbury, Domesday and Related Studies. By S. C. Morland The Annals of St Bertin. Edited by Janet L. Nelson The Feudal Transformation,900–1200. By J. P. Poly and E. Bournazel France in the Middle Ages,987–1460. By Georges Duby English and French Towns in Feudal Society: A Comparative Study. By R. H. Hilton The Contest of Christian and Muslim Spain,1031–1157. By Bernard F. Reilly The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia. By Paul Freedman The Military Orders: From the Twelfth to the Early Fourteenth Centuries. By Alan Forey Church and Chronicle in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to John Taylor. Edited by Ian Wood and G.A. Loud The Later Crusades: From Lyons to Alcazar,1274–1580. By Norman Housley Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria. By Otto Brunner. Translated from the fourth, revised edition of Land und Herrschaft by Howard Kaminsky and James Van Horn Melton Woman is a Worthy Wight: Women in English Society c. 1200–1500. Edited by P.J.P. Goldberg The England of Piers Plowman: William Langland and his Vision of the Fourteenth Century. By F.R.H. Du Boulay Enterprise and Individuals in Fifteenth‐century England. Edited by Jennifer Kermode The Household Books of John Howard, Duke of Norfolk. Introduction by Anne Crawford Enclosure and the Yeoman: The Agricultural Development of the South Midlands,1450–1850. By Robert C. Allen A History of Ottoman Architecture. By Godfrey Goodwin Mantegna and Painting as Historical Narrative. By Jack M. Greenstein A Renaissance Cardinal and his Worldly Goods: The Will and Inventory of Francesco Gonzaga (1444–1483). By D.S. Chambers An Island for Itself: Economic Development and Social Change in Late Medieval Sicily. By Stepban R. Epstein