Impressions from reading Chapter 1 of Mary Carruthers’s book, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200.
Memory is a rich and textured placed filled with localities, emotions and tones. Mary Carruthers draws upon the richness of the western historical tradition to give the reader a sense of memory was thought of in the Middle Ages. The text draws heavily from classical references, weaving within it Augustine and Cicero, Latin and Greek. She incorporates a historical framework constructed out of a modern classical education. Though the time frame she writes about had lost much of its knowledge of ancient Greek and Roman works, the functional society of the had created a Christian narrative overlay remapped from the classical forms.
Middle Ages understanding of memory is explored in a variety of forms. Even the written style seems reflective of the ancient rhetorical form. Associative links are made between historical schools of though and definition of Latin terms. Memory is associated with music, and tone, as well as buildings and machines. Moving and building in time, it seems at first to resonate like the shepherds lyre, and then progress eventfully into the construction of Gothic cathedrals.
The Middle Ages academics form their personal view of the world studying the remnants of classical works and memorizing Latin poetry. The build within themselves associative constructs, and edifices. The cathedral of the mind has chants and music, statuary and spatial mappings. Memory is a pilgrimage through the remapping of the Christian story on the smoldering ruins of the classical world. Even Latin and Greek are reworked into ecclesiastical variants. The philosophy of the church sublimates its classical foundations, incorporating pagan constructs with Christian labels. In doing so the collective memory of the age blots out the classical pagan past, which must remain lost until returned via Andalusia to touch off the Renaissance.
Yet these Middle Ages that separate the classical world from the modern, they form the basis of the western dilemma. The kingdom of Goths picking up the pieces of the classical world, they form a new and different place. Perhaps this world in many was is more alien to modernity than ancient Rome of Greece. So much of the modernity is the product of the reconstruction of classicism. Our civilization is the product of a collective memory. We have undone many of the Christian remapping and sought to re-associate the classical philosophies.
Yet we like our Middle Age counterparts make our own remapping. We sublimate the Middle Age philosophies and cast our own interpretations of the past upon our collective memory. Each intellectual wave changes the collective memory of the past. The Middle Ages rise from the ashes of the Roman empire held together by the pillars of the Roman Catholic church. Protestantism an mercantilism destroyed that form and recast the collective view the individuals relationship with God and Church. Then came the Enlightenment, moving God back as the distant deity and putting at the center of the collective social construct, rationality and empiricism. Then came Marx who re-remembered the past as a constant struggle between apposing forces of class-consciousness.
The past is a collective memory, and within it our own individual memories. Our construct of the world, our very memory and learning process is a product of our society. So it was with each society in different times and different places, at whatever coordinates we set our human existence.
Memory is a rich and textured placed filled with localities, emotions and tones. Mary Carruthers draws upon the richness of the western historical tradition to give the reader a sense of memory was thought of in the Middle Ages. The text draws heavily from classical references, weaving within it Augustine and Cicero, Latin and Greek. She incorporates a historical framework constructed out of a modern classical education. Though the time frame she writes about had lost much of its knowledge of ancient Greek and Roman works, the functional society of the had created a Christian narrative overlay remapped from the classical forms.
Middle Ages understanding of memory is explored in a variety of forms. Even the written style seems reflective of the ancient rhetorical form. Associative links are made between historical schools of though and definition of Latin terms. Memory is associated with music, and tone, as well as buildings and machines. Moving and building in time, it seems at first to resonate like the shepherds lyre, and then progress eventfully into the construction of Gothic cathedrals.
The Middle Ages academics form their personal view of the world studying the remnants of classical works and memorizing Latin poetry. The build within themselves associative constructs, and edifices. The cathedral of the mind has chants and music, statuary and spatial mappings. Memory is a pilgrimage through the remapping of the Christian story on the smoldering ruins of the classical world. Even Latin and Greek are reworked into ecclesiastical variants. The philosophy of the church sublimates its classical foundations, incorporating pagan constructs with Christian labels. In doing so the collective memory of the age blots out the classical pagan past, which must remain lost until returned via Andalusia to touch off the Renaissance.
Yet these Middle Ages that separate the classical world from the modern, they form the basis of the western dilemma. The kingdom of Goths picking up the pieces of the classical world, they form a new and different place. Perhaps this world in many was is more alien to modernity than ancient Rome of Greece. So much of the modernity is the product of the reconstruction of classicism. Our civilization is the product of a collective memory. We have undone many of the Christian remapping and sought to re-associate the classical philosophies.
Yet we like our Middle Age counterparts make our own remapping. We sublimate the Middle Age philosophies and cast our own interpretations of the past upon our collective memory. Each intellectual wave changes the collective memory of the past. The Middle Ages rise from the ashes of the Roman empire held together by the pillars of the Roman Catholic church. Protestantism an mercantilism destroyed that form and recast the collective view the individuals relationship with God and Church. Then came the Enlightenment, moving God back as the distant deity and putting at the center of the collective social construct, rationality and empiricism. Then came Marx who re-remembered the past as a constant struggle between apposing forces of class-consciousness.
The past is a collective memory, and within it our own individual memories. Our construct of the world, our very memory and learning process is a product of our society. So it was with each society in different times and different places, at whatever coordinates we set our human existence.
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