ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the relationship between the scholastic encyclopedia and memory is best understood when memoria is defined in two ways: as a store cultivated by each individual scholar, according to medieval practice that enabled the scholar to enter the literary community, and also as something at once more fugitive and modern. Between Hrabanus and Vincent, between Vincent and Diderot, there are both continuities and ruptures, and so this triad of texts will allow us to trace the shifting relationship between memorial and encyclopedic practice from the ninth to the eighteenth century. The encyclopedia is intended to facilitate access to that storehouse: its fragmentary references to various other texts will recall to the reader's mind his earlier experience of reading them in full. While the Carolingian encyclopedia thus presupposes the kind of memorial practice developed in rhetorical training, the Enlightenment encyclopedia both eliminates the mnemonic component from the discipline of rhetoric.
