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Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought- Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 4oo--r2oo, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 399 PP.; 3z black-and-white figures. ISBN 052-1582-3z6. $59.95.
Prof. Carruthers's study - a sequel to The Book of Memory - is one of those rare works of scholarship that will find readers across a wide array of disciplines, in part because it works to break down the boundaries that defined them in the first place. Carruthers's focus remains rhetoric and the art of memory, but her real concern is what one might call the meditational mode, a style of thought and imagination that governed all the monastic arts, not just those genres that we might classify as literature (e.g. prayer, exegesis, dreamvision, and, of course, meditation itself), but also the visual arts (manuscript illumination and, above all, architecture) and, more important still, the art of visualization. Carruthers is at pains to emphasize what she, borrowing a term from comparative study of religions, calls 'orthopraxis': a mixing of theory and practice that is admirably embodied by her own authorial practice, in which clear expositions of method are combined with close, exacting readings of texts from Augustine, Boethius, Prudentius, and Gregory the Great to Hugh of St Victor and Baudri de Bourgeuil. In keeping with her title, Carruthers's emphasis is on memory, not as a set of rules or theories, but as a body of performative practices that enabled an essentially mimetic and experiential effort to reproduce, emulate, and expand the wisdom embodied by a set of venerated exemplars (persons, not just the texts they wrote). Defined in these terms, the craft of memory becomes a flexible rule of life. It is...