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Janet
Coleman.
Ancient
and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past.
Cambridge
U.P., 2005.
ISBN-10:
0521019370 | ISBN-13: 9780521019378.
Paperback.
228 x
152 mm.
666pp.
Publisher's
recommended price £50.00
Previously published in
hardback, 1992:
This book is an analysis of thinking, remembering and reminiscing
according to ancient authors, and their medieval readers. The author
argues that behind the various medieval methods in interpreting texts
of the past lie two apparently incompatible theories of human knowledge
and remembering, as well as two differing attitudes to matter and
intellect. The book comprises a series of studies which take ancient
texts as evidence of the past, and show how medieval readers and
writers understood them. The studies confirm that medieval and
renaissance interpretations and uses of the past differ greatly from
modern interpretation and yet betray many startling continuities
between modern and ancient and medieval theories.
- A
major analysis of how medieval philosophers, theologians and historians
viewed the past, and how they perceived human memory
- A
work of interest in history of ideas, epistemology, psychology,
classics, and theology; Janet Coleman is a well-known historian of
ideas who has worked closely with Brian Redhead on the Radio 4 series
on political thought
- Has
implications for the study of history in general and also for the
historical psychology of human thought
Contents
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.
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