Arts of Memory

This paper is a tentative step towards a historical cognitive science, in the domain of memory and personal identity. I treat theoretical models of memory in history as specimens of the way cultural norms and artifacts can permeate ('proto')scientific views of inner processes. I apply this analysis to the topic of psychological control over one's own body, brain, and mind. Some metaphors and models for memory and mental representation signal the projection inside of external aids. Overtly at least, medieval and Renaissance theorists agreed that such models had to allow for, or even guarantee, some conception of cognitive order and discipline. Individual memory traces had to be independent, not mixed up or interfering with others. The long tradition of improving or bypassing 'natural memory' by deliberately internalizing artefactual models was part of an arduous process of self-fashioning. Moral panic about confusion and mixture features centrally in the imposition of cognitive discipline in local memory traditions.

This article examines the influence exerted by the Aristotelian cognitive metarhetoric over the treatment of memory in Book 3 of the Rhetorica ad Herennium. Sections 3.16.28-29, 3.19.32 and 3.22.35-37 are read against the backdrop of the core principles of Aristotle's psychological treatises on mind and memory, De Anima and De Memoria et Reminiscentia, together with the multifaceted concept of energeia, found in these treatises as well as in the Rhetoric and the Metaphysics. The results suggest that the psychology of memory of the Rhetorica ad Herennium and its rhetorical products are indebted to Aristotelian philosophy, with particular emphasis on the imagines agentes within the mnemonic system per locos et imagines.

L'analyse des manuscrits du traité d'Étienne de Bourbon - à ordre logique, et sans rubriques thématiques - montre comment le prédicateur pouvait se repérer dans cet ouvrage. Le savoir préalable de l'utilisateur est nécessaire pour ce faire. D'un autre côté, les Artes praedicandi fournissent une technique pour retenir des exempla. L'appel à la tradition exigé par les recueils d'exempla à ordre logique ne résista pas face à l'irruption des recueils composés suivant l'ordre alphabétique ; quant à l'art mnémotechnique, il s'inclina devant l'invention de l'imprimerie.