For Europe, a basic work is still Frances A. Yates, “The Art of Memory” (1966), which set out a long chain of memory theory and mnemonic devices, especially visualizations, from Simonides to the Counter-Reformation; incidentally explaining the epistemological status of religious art at different periods in exceptionally clear terms. Despite a tendency to draw larger conclusions than the evidence may warrant (indulged more obviously in her later books), Yates’ survey is quite impressive. Sinologists in particular may already have made the acquaintance of it by way of Jonathan D. Spence’s 1984 book on “The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci,” which deals with one of the later flowerings of the ancient “Ars Memoria.” (Amazon pages for these books link to a variety of more recent publications, most of which, alas, I have not read.)

I agree that it is hard to believe that people can remember all that stuff, but part of the reason that we think it is hard is that we are in a very different intellectual world. We don’t learn to memorize things, and the intellectual tradition we live in is entirely different. Three examples.

-The best known, at least me, is the reconstruction of the Chinese classics after the Qin dynasty. This one is not very surprising, since knowledge of the classics was central to elite education. Part of becoming educated was to memorize these things. Even here though there were differences in what was remembered, leading to the whole Old Text/New Text controversy.
-An example that I know less well is the memorization of the Vedas in India. Supposedly a lot of castes had people who had memorized the Vedas, and finally in the 19th century the British convinced somebody to let them write it all down. This opened the floodgates, since once one caste had opened up everyone opened up. It turned out that although this memorized tradition had been maintained separately all over India the texts were almost exactly the same.
-A final example is the advisor of one of my grad student buddies. When he was a graduate student he used to bet that given 20 minutes he could memorize an entire column of the phone book and recite it without error. This may seem like a pointless stunt, but he always claimed that there were two important things about it. One was that it proved he was a good ancient historian. Since the ancients have fewer sources than we moderns they have a different relationship to them. Second, he denied that it was a useless stunt, since each time he demonstrated his ability he won a pitcher of free beer, which is not quite the same as knowledge of universal truth, but it is free beer.

The final example is what the ability to memorize things is today. Not really of any great scholarly use. The Indian example is sort of an odd one, since I recall reading that one of the reasons that the memorized versions were so accurate was that the people memorizing them had no idea what they meant, and so there was no reason to change anything. The most interesting for me is the Chinese classics case. Here you have people for whom mastery of a body of knowledge is essential to what they are. This was particularly true for people like Yen, for whom being able to use the classics in conversation and in writing all the time was essential to being what they were.

All of this is of some interest to me at present since I am currently starting a new project and am in the process of taking notes on things, i.e. using artificial memory. It is a very slow process because I am not at all sure what I am doing with this project, and thus I am taking notes on everything that I can imagine would ever matter. Eventually I will mine this data for all the information I need and then forget it. Even now I can look at old notes and they seem to have been written by an entirely different person. I can’t think of any body of knowledge that is for me what the Vedas were for those Indian guys, something worth memorizing even though its meaning is beyond me. Nor is there any knowledge I can think of that is really worth internalizing the way Chinese literati did. Nor, sadly, can I think of any knowledge that will get me free beer.

>Modern scholarship tends to be built around remembering
>where to find stuff, rather than collecting it like a jackdaw.

Observation: Because they allow direct linking as a form of citation, online historical sources like Geoff Wade’s Ming Shi-lu could result in more reliable history or at least narrow the range of things that historians argues can argue about.

In some extreme cases the claim is made that there was *only memory* and *no original document*. In the case of the Mon monk of Athwa (c. 1740) who fled from a worn torn area without any manuscripts and rewrote the whole corpus of Mon literature from memory. Today his name is almost synonymous with Mon literature. I personally find it hard to believe that he relied completely on memory, but then again I’ve heard of some pretty tremendous feats of memory (Source: http://slipperybannanapeel.blogspot.com/2006/05/more-warfare-during-razadarit-era-c.html).

The often very personal processes of writing and composition that you discuss are often unrecoverable but there must be cross-cultural universals (and reading, who read, why, and what they did with it).

To those who live in uncertain times, knowledge is indeed prized for its portability: but some kinds of knowledge are more portable, and therefore more valuable, than others. I went to school with a man who had fled Czechoslovakia as a boy soon after the Soviet invasion of 1968. He got a Ph.D. in statistics and he told me he picked that field because as a refugee he had discovered how most kinds of expertise were bound up with a particular social or political milieu, and he wanted a science that he could be sure would remain valid and in demand everywhere. Another example: one of my teachers was an old woman from Vienna who recounted the spring day in 1938 when she successfully defended her doctoral dissertation on Austrian Law. After the congratulations were finished, she emerged and heard a commotion in the streets. “It’s the Anschluss,” she was told — and she knew at once that her doctorate was useless.

You say the ability to look things up successfully is crucial to modern scholarship. It is, and — contrasted with a hodgepodge commonplace book — it should be. But often (and I don’t think you were saying this) it is contrasted with knowing things in one’s head, the implication usually being that you don’t need to know something if you know how to look it up. I believe this is a sophistry. The disadvantage of not knowing something is that you often don’t know you don’t know it, so you may never see a reason to look it up. But there is a bigger case to be made for general knowledge: it provides a kind of gestalt map in which new data can be interpreted. As you suggest, such interpretation has a social dimension, and a body of shared knowledge provides tools for collaboration.