Medieval Culture and the Memory Arts

Abstract

Although Frances Yates, Mary Carruthers, and others have written eloquently on the significance of memory and mnemotechnic in medieval culture, themselves exemplars, in the range of their work, of the field they address, it nonetheless behoves us to begin with a short survey of some classical and medieval texts that strike the key notes of our study of the drama. Cicero and Quintilian in the Roman period, as well as the unknown author of the Rhetoric ad Herennium, whose treatise circulated widely in the Middle Ages, lay out the key concepts for our study, which can be traced into the medieval period up to the time of the drama in the work of, among others, the classicizing friar Thomas Bradwardine.