Ancient and Medieval Memories Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past [Hardcover]

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.This book examines how medieval readers interpreted and used history as presented to them in ancient documents and how this interpretation differs from and resembles that proposed by modern historians.This book examines how medieval readers interpreted and used history as presented to them in ancient documents and how this interpretation differs from and resembles that proposed by modern historians.This book contains a series of studies that take the ancient texts as evidence of the past, and show how medieval readers and writers understood them. In particular, they examine how medieval readers examined the construction of these texts to find some reflection of how it felt to exist within the ancient world. The studies confirm that medieval and Renaissance interpretations and uses of the past differ greatly from a modern interpretation and uses, and yet the study betrays many startling continuities between modern and ancient medieval theories. Discussion extends from the nature of historical evidence, through theories behind medieval historiography, to various hypotheses relating physiological attributes of the brain to intellectual processes of the mind.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 phylC#