120 121 charlemagne Quid dicis de nobilissima, ut reor, rhetoricae parte, memoria? 1 Alcuin, Disputatio de rhetorica et de virtutibus sapientissimi regis Karli et Albini magistri, XXXIX On June the 29 th , 1940, seven days after the armistice of Compiègne between Nazi Germany and the French Third Republic, Fernand Braudel was imprisoned at Col du Bonhomme in the Vosges. Because of his lieutenant’s rank, the scholar was conducted to the “prisons aristocratiques et tristes des Olags”, 2 irst in Mainz and then, from 1942 to 1945, in Lübeck. The Geneva Convention of 1929 mandated, among other things, that oficers could exchange letters with their families and friends, 3 and that they could also receive scientiic documents and books. 4 Thank to the support of his close friend Lucien Febvre, Braudel was able to collect a mini- mal library and to establish a university inside the prison camp. In the meantime, while his notes were secured in a cave in the centre of Paris, he composed his masterwork, La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, 5 relying almost exclusively on his memory. 6 La Méditerranée was actually the doctoral thesis of Fernand Braudel: be- cause of the war, he took exactly twenty years between iling the subject and the defense of the thesis before the commission. And in a context of the work of PhD students, it was an incredible and astonishing endeavour to write a doctoral thesis with a bunch of books gathered in wartime plus his own memory of previous studies. 1 “What, now, are you to say about Memory, which I deem to be the noblest part of rhetoric?” 2 Fernand Braudel, La capivité devant l’histoire, Revue d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale 25, 1957, p. 4. 3 Convenion relaive to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Geneva, 27 July 1929. Part III, Secion IV, Art. 36. 4 Convenion relaive to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Geneva, 27 July 1929. Part III, Secion IV, Art. 39. 5 The irst ediion of which was published by Armand Colin, Paris, in 1949. 6 Erato Paris, La genèse intellectuelle de l’œvre de Fernand Braudel: La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (1923-1947), Athens 1999, pp. 263–325. But as Mary Carruthers pointed out, because of our education in a post-Ro- mantic, post-Freudian world, when asked what is the highest creative power, we invariably answer imagination instead of memory. Imagination “is the highest accolade for intellectual achievement (…). The memory, in contrast, is devoid of intellect: just memorization”. 7 With a few notable exceptions, such as Henri Bergson 8 or Maurice Halbwachs, 9 this central rôle of memory was rarely a topic of interest in the theoretical discussions of the last century. There was a great change in the intellectual status of imagination and memory: ancient and medieval people considered imagination as a mental unconsciousness, even dangerous, or at its best as an intermediary between perception and thought. 10 They rather reserved their awe for memory: Pliny the Elder collected a little anthology of prodigious memories in his Naturalis Historia, from Mithridates of Pontus who knew all twenty-two languages spoken in his kingdom 11 to the Greek philosopher Charmadas, able to repeat the content of all the volumes of his li- brary; 12 describing St. Thomas Aquinas, his biographer Bernardo Gui wrote that “His memory was extremely rich and retentive: whatever he had once read and grasped he never forgot; it was as if his knowledge were ever increasing in his soul as page is added to page in the writing of a book”. 13 What we are talking about when we talk about memory. The inventor of the science of mnemonics, or “ars memoriae” in the words of Cic- ero, 14 was Simonides of Ceos (ig. 1), a Greek poet living in Greece around the ifth century bc. 7 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge – New York 2008 (2 nd ed.), p. I. 8 Henry Bergson, Maière et mémoire, Paris 1896. 9 Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collecive, Paris 1952; writen in 1939, but published posthumous. 10 Aristotle, De anima, III, VII, 431. 11 Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, VII, 88. 12 Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, VII, 89. 13 Bernardo Gui, The Life of St. Thomas Aquinas. Biographical Documents, edited by K. Foster, London 1959, p. 50. 14 Cicero, De Oratore, lxxxvi, 351, edited by Edward William Suton – Harris Rackham, London – Cambridge (MA) 1959, p. 464. Maps and Memories. The Representation of the oikoumene in the Middle Ages. Francesco Lovino