Memory is a key aspect of learning, and especially of catechesis. However, it is downplayed or neglected in contemporary culture, and even educational culture. Teachers lament “rote memory” or having to implore students to memorize “facts and dates” from history. Yet, I’ve become convinced that memory is one of the most important aspects not only of the Christian life but of human life itself. We are constituted by our memories; it is critical to who we are and how we live. How and where we choose to focus our attention will have an extraordinary bearing on the kinds of people we become.
To begin to help us think about memory and the art of catechesis, I’ve begun to compile a list of articles, books, and talks on the art of memory. Please do get in touch to let me know about other resources that you have found helpful.
Hans Boersma
Boersma gave an awesome lecture for the IRCC colloquium a few years ago on Catechesis and Memory. You can purchase that set of talks here.
“Memory and Repentance.” An article that originally appeared in First Things and focuses on Lent. However, it articulates well what about memory is important to the Christian life and the formation of character.
Kevin Vost
Kevin Vost (D. Psy) is a popular Catholic writer and speaker. He has written broadly about memory in the classical, medieval, and contemporary traditions and has presented this material for a general audience.
He has a number of books on memory (on memorizing the Catholic Mass, or reasons for the faith, but you might start with one called Memorize the Faith, which outlines the basics of medieval memory and how it may be applied to learning the basics of the faith.
Also, here is a two-hour webinar he gave on the art of memory from 2019:
Mary Carruthers
For a deeper dive into the medieval “world” of memory, there are few better scholars on the subject than Mary Caruthers, professor emerita from New York University. Two books in particular are:
The Book of Memory: A Study in Medieval Culture, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Publisher’s Description: Mary Carruthers’s classic study of the training and uses of memory for a variety of purposes in European cultures during the Middle Ages has fundamentally changed the way scholars understand medieval culture. This fully revised and updated second edition considers afresh all the material and conclusions of the first. While responding to new directions in research inspired by the original, this new edition devotes much more attention to the role of trained memory in composition, whether of literature, music, architecture, or manuscript books. The new edition will reignite the debate on memory in medieval studies and, like the first, will be essential reading for scholars of history, music, the arts and literature, as well as those interested in issues of orality and literacy (anthropology), in the working and design of memory (both neuropsychology and artificial memory), and in the disciplines of meditation (religion)
The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric. and the Making of Images. 400-1200 (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Publisher’s Description: The Craft of Thought, first published in 1998, is a companion to Mary Carruthers' earlier study of memory in medieval culture, The Book of Memory. This more recent volume examines medieval monastic meditation as a discipline for making thoughts, and discusses its influence on literature, art, and architecture. In a process akin to today's 'creative' thinking, or 'cognition', this discipline recognises the essential roles of imagination and emotion in meditation. Deriving examples from a variety of late antique and medieval sources, with excursions into modern architectural memorials, this study emphasises meditation as an act of literary composition or invention, the techniques of which notably involved both words and making mental 'pictures' for thinking and composing.
“Memory: The Engine of Thought.” Lecture for the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies
Frances Yates
The Art of Memory. London, 1966.
A classic work on the art of memory in antiquity and the Renaissance. From the publisher: “The ancient Greeks, to whom a trained memory was of vital importance, as it was to everyone before the invention of printing, created an elaborate memory system, based on a technique of impressing 'places' and 'images' on the mind. Inherited and recorded by the Romans, this art of memory passed into the European tradition, to be revived, in occult form, at the Renaissance, and particularly by the strange and remarkable genius, Giordano Bruno. Such is the main theme of Frances Yates's unique and brilliant book, in the course of which she sheds light on such diverse subjects as Dante's Divine Comedy, the form of the Shakespearian theatre and the history of ancient architecture. Aside from its intrinsic fascination, The Art of Memory is an invaluable contribution to aesthetics and psychology, and to the history of philosophy, of science and of literature.