As readers of my newsletters will know, I was blown away by Mary Carruthers' book: "The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture". It gave me a completely different perspective on medieval culture, for a start, and also, I knew nothing about the mnemonic training of scholars in those times (my background being in cognitive psychology), so it was all new to me. Well, I was reading another academic tome (and these are academic works - Carruthers in particular is writing for her peers, all apparently well-versed in Greek, Latin, art history, and medieval studies), and this writer made the fairly compelling point that this emphasis on memory training that Carruthers documents so well, came about because of the information deluge.

There are deluges, and then there are deluges, right? To our eyes, the amount of written material was nothing compared to what we have today. But it's all relative, isn't it? And the scholars of those times didn't have the tools we have today. Forget sophisticated knowledge management technologies, these people didn't have indexes until the thirteenth century. And recall that this was before the invention of the printing press, so we're talking hand-written, idiosyncratic indexes. Usually thematic - the idea of using the alphabet to organise an index took a while to catch on, and even once it did, it was still, shall we say, eccentric. For example, one writer in a work published in Paris in 1518 put Apollo first in the index, because he felt it right that, in a work of poetry, the god of poetry should come first.

This puts a new perspective on memory training, because proponents of mnemonic strategies tend to emphasise the need to remember verbatim - word for word. But this suggests instead that memory skills were needed to help organise material that wasn't organised in any other way.

That doesn't mean we can sit back and say, well, it's all a matter of organisation then, I don't need to remember anything (although many modern educationalists seem to believe something along those lines). The fact remains, we have a huge, stupendously huge, amount of information available to us today, and we can't just say -well, I can find it out. On that basis, you wouldn't be able to read anything of moderate complexity, because you'd have to keep looking things up! Just keeping track of the information I have stored in my computer requires more than a superb organisational structure (I wish). I need to be able to remember at least enough to know when I have something stored on that topic, and sometimes connections might be obscure - it's very very difficult (read impossible?) to cross-reference all your material sufficiently to cover all the possibilities - including the ones you haven't thought of yet, but will, when you acquire some new information that puts other items in a different light.

Anyway, I was excited about this notion that these erudite and complex mnemotechnics so, apparently, beloved by medieval scholars, were not to enable them to memorise vast screeds of text ("memorise" in the sense we tend to use it - i.e., learn "by heart", word for word), but to remember the gist - what the texts were about, the narrative flow, etc. Because I think we tend to believe our memory skills are so much worse than those of our ancestors; we have not only a poor idea of our own abilities, but an inflated idea of what they should be, what they were.

And also, because it reinforces what I keep saying - memory is about organisation. In your files, on the paper ... and in your head.

(the book I was reading, by the way, was "Wax Tablets of the Mind" by Jocelyn Penny Small)