Lately I’ve been reacquainting myself with a wonderful book, The Book of Memory by Mary Carruthers.  It is an in-depth study of memory as it was understood and practices in medieval times.  It’s commonly known that in the pre-print age people relied on their memories to store information, but it is not commonly realized just what this entails.  When we think of memorizing something, we think in terms of learning something by rote, so that we could recite it if called upon to do so.  An actor learning his lines is an example, or perhaps someone learning the catachesis as part of their religious upbringing.

St. Thomas Aquinas.

The medieval memory went far beyond that.  The art of memory was not merely about holding information, but about processing it. As an example, the story is told (I am still looking among our hoarded books for the volume where I read this, as I don’t remember where I read it) about an Abbot at a monastery who wrote a letter in Latin (naturally) to his counterpart at another monastery.  In the letter, he made an insignificant but basic grammatical error.  His correspondent replied, and in his letter he chided the Abbot for making the mistake, whereupon the Abbot sat down and, off the top of his tonsured head dashed off a letter in which he quoted numerous instances where the great authors of Roman antiquity; Tacitus, Cicero, etc., had made the same kind of mistake.

Think about that for a moment.   To be able to quote these precise sections of these Roman authors meant that he had not merely memorized them, he understood the text as a very deep level.  Consider, too, that unless someone else had already done the research, he could not have compiled this body of information using Google, had it been available to him.

Another example concerns one of the most prodigious memories of his time, St. Thomas Aquinas, the 13th century theologian.  A powerful memory was considered a sign of moral rectitude and an indication of divine favor.  So the correspondence carried out by the Vatican regarding the possible beatification of Thomas makes many references to his mnemonic power.  For instance, you could ask him to start with a Psalm, say Psalm 14, and he would recite a “psalm” consisting of the first word of the first verse of Psalm 14, the second word of the second verse of Psalm 15, and so on.  Amazingly, the ability to do this was not all that uncommon, and was but one of the many things Aquinas could do with his remarkable mind.

Apparently it was possible to train the mind do this kind of thing.  We have one surviving text, Ad herenium, which is attributed to Cicero and goes into some detail about how to train the memory.  Carruthers gives other sources as well.  Many people believe that the advent of printing removed the need for super-memory, but I agree with Carruthers that this doesn’t make sense, since the monks who displayed the most remarkable feats of memory were the ones with access to all the books.

It seems more likely, then, that the book played a different role in medieval times than it did with the advent of the Renaissance.  The monks seemed to feel that knowledge in books was not so much preserved as embalmed.  The real life given to a certain body of knowledge was when it lived inside someone’s head and could be combined with other such knowledge to create new works. Moreover, knowing something at this level demands that you evaluate it, and decide whether it’s really worth saving.

I would love to see this kind of training revived, if possible, in our educational system.  Not that I have any illusions that our exponentially increasing knowledge could be stored in any number of human minds, and there is plenty of data that just isn’t usable without external tools.  But for the options it provides for processing and assaying what we know strike me as very exciting.  I have wondered for many years if a change in the way we think about our new ways of storing knowledge might give us a new means of using it, one St. Thomas and his colleagues could never have imagined.