THESE WORDS, WRITTEN in Barcelona in 1417 by Violant de Bar, the queen dowager of John I of Aragon, defined Christianity as a compendium of historical events which form an exemplar for life: the narrative events in the Gospels and the lives of the saints. Throughout the Middle Ages, memory, a compendium of what was recalled from the past, became the essential basis for one's own identity and for establishing strategies to consolidate the future.

Medieval, particularly Christian, society gave great importance to memory; this chapter features this importance. It shows how memory penetrated all aspects of human relations, to the point that we can say life was memory. This led people of the Middle Ages to question the nature of memory, and so, in the second section of this introduction, we will see how medieval science interrogated the qualities of memory. The combination of these two aspects—the importance of memory in the lives of medieval men and women and the efforts of medieval science to define and place the memory physiologically—leads to a third point: the need to maintain and cultivate memory, the reason we dedicate the third section to the contemporary methods for stimulating the capacity to recall. It becomes clear that memory in the Middle Ages had a significant social dimension, which forces us to analyze it as a conscious strategy in the fourth section of this introduction. These social strategies ultimately reflect the powers-that-be, reinforcing their interests and dominant ideology. The introduction concludes with a section illustrating what we could term a guided memory.

Life is Memory

Medieval confidence in the past was inherited from classical culture along with a mistrust of change, thought to be inferior to what went before: the ancient models should not be forgotten or altered. Tacitus, for instance, is very clear: “in all matters the arrangements of the past were better and fairer and that all changes were for the worse; everything that is transformed, changes for the worse.” The so-called Fathers of the Church, writing in the two first centuries of Christianity, established the bases from which a line of continuity was drawn. In the second century CE, Irenaeus of Lyon restricted true knowledge as delimited by the teachings of the Apostles, the order established by the Church, and the apostolic succession.