The Book of Memory Quotes

“My point in setting these two descriptions up in this way is simply this: the nature of creative activity itself – what the brain does, and the social and psychic conditions needed for its nurture – has remained essentially the same between Thomas’s time and our own. Human beings did not suddenly acquire imagination and intuition with Coleridge, having previously been poor clods. The difference is that whereas now geniuses are said to have creative imagination which they express in intricate reasoning and original discovery, in earlier times they were said to have richly retentive memories, which they expressed in intricate reasoning and original discovery.”
― Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture

“Ancient Greek had no verb meaning “to read” as such: the verb they used, anagignsk, means “to know again,” “to recollect.” It refers to a memory procedure. Similarly, the Latin verb used for “to read” is lego, which means literally “to collect” or “to cull, pluck,” referring also to a memory procedure (the re-collection or gathering up of material).”
― Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture

“Writing something down cannot change in any significant way our mental representation of it, for it is the mental representation that gives birth to the written form, not vice versa.”
― Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture

“Human imagination, however, involves some quasi-rational activity, for humans are not just moved by imagination’s products, but judge and form opinions about them. Human imagination is what Aristotle calls “deliberative” (bouleutik or logistik): “Imagination in the form of sense exists, as we have said [in De anima III, ii], in other animals, but deliberative imagination only in those which can reason” (De anima, III, xi, 434a 5ff.). Pure sensation is always true, enjoying something of the status which contemporary philosophers accord to what some of them call “raw feels”; but imagination can be false.31 It is therefore a more rationalizing activity than the elementary sensory receptiveness of the common sense.”
― Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture

“The memory of an orator is like a storehouse of inventoried topics that ideally would contain all previous ways-of-saying ethical truths like “justice,” “fortitude,” “temperance,” from which he draws in order to fit words to yet another occasion, requiring another way-of-saying. But this storehouse should be thought of as a set of bins that are empty when we are born and get filled up with a lot of “coins” or “flowers” or “nectar,” whose aggregate is a meaningful if only partial “speaking” of “justice,” or whatever. And each “speaking” of “justice” adds to the common store.”
― Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture

“Where classical and medieval rhetorical pragmatism diverges from modern, I think, is in assigning a crucial role to a notion of common memory, accessed by an individual through education, which acts to “complete” uninformed individual experience.”
― Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture

“The extreme idealist or formalist thinks of language in terms of how completely it represents the tiger, and since it can never fully get that right, would rather lapse into silence than speak.”
― Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture

“The Latin word textus comes from the verb meaning “to weave” and it is in the institutionalizing of a story through memoria that textualizing occurs.”
― Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture

“Fundamentalism denies legitimacy to interpretation. Instead of interpreting, a reader is engaged at most only in rephrasing the meaning of the written document, a meaning which is really transparent, simple, and complete – but which the detritus of history and linguistic change have temporarily concealed. Fundamentalist translations are considered to be merely restatements of an inerrant truth that is clear and non-ambiguous – they are not adaptations or interpretive readings. Fundamentalism ideally should produce no gloss or commentary. Thus the role of scholarship is solely to identify the accumulations of interpretive debris and to polish up the original, simple meaning. It is reasonable, from a fundamentalist attitude, that God must be the direct author of the Bible. This belief holds true as well among secular fundamentalists writing about literature, who postulate a God-like author who plans, directs, and controls the meaning of his work.”
― Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture