Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past

ISBN-13: 9780521411448 / Angielski / Twarda / 1992 / 668 str.

Janet Coleman

Opis

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.

Recenzje

'Coleman' s scholarship is stunning: her research does a great service to scholars in a variety of disciplines, for whom she opens up and makes accessible an unexpectedly large number of philosophical accounts of memory.' The Times Literary Supplement

Spis treści

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.