Ancient and Medieval Memories

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.

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.