This book is an analysis of thinking, remembering and reminiscing according to ancient authors, and their medieval readers. The author argues that behind the various medieval methods in interpreting texts of the past lie two apparently incompatible theories of human knowledge and remembering, as well as two differing attitudes to matter and intellect. The book comprises a series of studies which take ancient texts as evidence of the past, and show how medieval readers and writers understood them. The studies confirm that medieval and renaissance interpretations and uses of the past differ greatly from modern interpretation and yet betray many startling continuities between modern and ancient and medieval theories.

‘Ancient and Medieval Memories offers a vast, generously learned account of philosophies of knowledge and theories of the past. In Coleman’s study, the history of memory theory is a doorway to the history of philosophy, and in this her book is surely the most comprehensive modern study of early and late medieval theories of mind, perception, cognition, temporality, and language … Ancient and Medieval Memories is a major scholarly achievement, a profound as well as humanely accessible study of how medievals conversed with their past and how we, in turn, can better converse with them.’

Rita Copeland Source: Speculum

‘Coleman’ s scholarship is stunning: her research does a great service to scholars in a variety of disciplines, for whom she opens up and makes accessible an unexpectedly large number of philosophical accounts of memory.’

Source: The Times Literary Supplement