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08592_Field_TCGG T357.txt
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1996-04-10
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To us, such visual memory would seem prodigious,
but it was surely not unusual in times when only a few
could read and write, and when images played the role of
writing.
Seligmann has here grasped another essential feature of
oral culture, the training of the memory. Just as pronuntiatio ,
the fifth division of classical rhetoric, was cultivated, as Hajnal
has shown, for the art of writing and making books, so
memoria , the fourth division of ancient oratory was a needful
discipline in the manuscript age, and was served by the very
arts of gloss and marginal illumination. Smalley, indeed, records
(p. 53) that the marginal gloss, although of unknown origin,
served among its users “as notes for the delivery of oral
lecturae .”