Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- PART I THE CRITICAL TEXTS OF ANTIQUITY
- Introduction
- PART II THE PRACTICE OF MEMORY DURING THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION FROM CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY TO THE CHRISTIAN MONASTIC CENTURIES
- Introduction
- 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: the associative, textual memory and the purified past
- 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
- Introduction
- PART IV ARISTOTLE NEO-PLATONISED: THE REVIVAL OF ARISTOTLE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCHOLASTIC THEORIES OF MEMORY
- Introduction
- PART V LATER MEDIEVAL THEORIES OF MEMORY: THE VIA ANTIQUA AND THE VIA MODERNA.
- Introduction
- Conclusion: an all too brief account of modern theories of mind and remembering
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - The early monastic practice of memory: Gregory the Great; Benedict and his Rule
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- PART I THE CRITICAL TEXTS OF ANTIQUITY
- Introduction
- PART II THE PRACTICE OF MEMORY DURING THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION FROM CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY TO THE CHRISTIAN MONASTIC CENTURIES
- Introduction
- 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: the associative, textual memory and the purified past
- 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
- Introduction
- PART IV ARISTOTLE NEO-PLATONISED: THE REVIVAL OF ARISTOTLE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCHOLASTIC THEORIES OF MEMORY
- Introduction
- PART V LATER MEDIEVAL THEORIES OF MEMORY: THE VIA ANTIQUA AND THE VIA MODERNA.
- Introduction
- Conclusion: an all too brief account of modern theories of mind and remembering
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
All of the methods so far described deal with factors influencing individual observers. They help to show what occurs when a person makes use of some new material which he meets, assimilating it and later reproducing it in his own characteristic manner. Already it is clear, however, that several factors influencing the individual observer are social in origin and character. For example, many of the transformations which took place as a result of repeated reproduction of prose passages were directly due to the influence of social conventions and beliefs current in the group to which the individual subject belonged. In the actual remembering of daily life the importance of these social factors is greatly intensified. The form which a rumour, or a story, or a decorative design finally assumes within a given social group is the work of many different successive social reactions. Elements of culture, or cultural complexes, pass from person to person within a group, or from group to group, and eventually reaching a thoroughly conventionalised form, may take an established place in the general mass of culture possessed by a specific group. Whether we deal with an institution, a mode of conduct, a story, or an artform, the conventionalised product varies from group to group, so that it may come to be the very characteristic we use when we wish most sharply to differentiate one social group from another. […]
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- Ancient and Medieval MemoriesStudies in the Reconstruction of the Past, pp. 117 - 136Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992