INTRODUCTION

This book attempts, through a series of interrelated studies, to give an account of the range of views on memory and its uses during the middle ages. But we must begin with ancient Greek and Roman positions because these would be drawn upon, reinterpreted, even distorted by later, medieval rememberers in order that they might reach working hypotheses that served their own understanding of how men came to know their world and remember their pasts.

Medieval readers believed that the text itself was the self-sufficient object of inquiry and understanding, providing a timeless contribution to the truth of how it is to be a human knower and rememberer. For the most part, when medieval readers confronted ancient texts, they were not troubled by what for us appears to be a major methodological difficulty in understanding the meaning of past texts. Consequently, they rarely, if ever raised the issue of first having to know the social and economic context of a past text as the means of gaining access to its meaning and, so recovering the intentions of its author. Instead, they paid attention to a close analysis of the text, weighing it over and over again in order to elucidate what they took to be its timeless and universal meaning. Only gradually did they come to read a past text in the context of what they took to be the linguistic conventions of the time in which it was written.