>>324996>Bro even in the middle ages scholars emphasized memory because books were so expensive. They had mnemonic "mind temples" they utilized in their imagination to better retain legal information.Maybe they should have been working to amend the bodies of their civilizations with sounder systems of religion and government and economics that the memorizing of the details of the old systems would no longer be necessary? Wouldn’t this have been a wiser course than setting into memory the antiquated commands of old legal codes that from within a better society would have no place? I forgot where I found this latin sentence, but it is from a medieval author, and its sense is relevant:
Quorsum requireretur legum prudentia, cum abessent mali mores, ex quibus haud dubie bonae leges prognatae sunt? Whereto would be required the prudence of the laws, when evil habits would be absent, from out of which not doubtfully good laws are derivative?
And even (((Thomas More))) in his proto-communist Utopia makes his hero Hythlodaeus (a greek pun meaning: distributor of nonsense) speak the following regarding the Utopian islanders:
leges habent perquam paucas. sufficiunt enim sic institutis paucissimae. quin hoc in primis apud alios improbant populos, quod legum interpretumque uolumina, non infinita sufficiunt. ipsi uero censent iniquissimum; ullos homines his obligari legibus; quae aut numerosiores sint, quam ut perlegi queant; aut obscuriores quam ut a quouis possint intelligi. They have very few laws. For thus do very few fit their purposes. That this firstly near other peoples do they disapprobate, that not even infinite volumes of laws and interpreters suffice. They themselves however account most wrong, any men to be bound by these laws, which either may be more numerous than so that they may be able to be read; or more obscure than so that from whomever they may be able to be understood.
These were nearly medieval writers and in them we find disesteem for the structure of the old traditional legality then surviving in their own time. I wonder what they would have thought at hearing of scholars being “chained to their desks” copying to mind sentence after sentence of older legal decision? And here in conceptual sympathy with them I can ask: what is the purpose in rote memorizing almost infi
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.