self-awareness. This being the case, I would prefer to speak of spiritual ablation, not of a technique for canceling local portions of our memory.

[Translator’s note: A fundamental strategy in the art of memory consisted in collocating mnemonic images or figures in a series of designated “places” along a familiar route that the orator would follow with his mind’s eye observing the images to be remembered. The art of forgetting consists, then, in eliminating these “places” or reminders. See, for example, Yates (1966) and Eco and Migiel (1988).]

[Translator’s note: My translation from Eco’s text (AO)].

Note that we cannot make an exception either for the most blatant cases of political censure—such as the photographs of the Stalinist period in which the images of the former leaders declared to be heretics and shot have been removed—precisely because that act of violence kept the memory of those eliminated alive in the collective memory. Similarly, the various attempts at revisionism, such as the theory that Kennedy’s death did not occur as the official records have it, because—as we will see later—in cases that involve the (presumed) correction of an error or a debate over two possible solutions to a problem, the tendency is to retain, not just the solution assumed to be correct, but both horns of the dilemma.

When, in the Rhetorica ad Herennium (III, xx, 33), to remember the idea of witnesses (testes), the orator is urged to imagine a goat’s testicles (testes), what we have is an etymological association. When, in the same work (III, xxi, 33), to recall the line of verse, “Iam domum itionem reges Atridae parant” (“And now the kings, sons of Atreus, prepare their return home”), a complex image is conjured up to evoke the families of the Domitii and the Reges (a purely phonetic association), as well as a still more complex image of actors preparing for the roles of Agamemnon and Menelaus, which plays on the one hand on genealogical memories and on the other on semantic analogies—we do not have the impression that any systematic criterion is involved, indeed we are even entitled to wonder whether what we are presented with is really a useful mnemotechnical device, seeing that in any case the author also advises his reader to learn the line by heart.

“Ne mireris, quod quae pro locis supra posuimus, pro figuris nunc apta esse dicamus. Loca enim praedicta pro figuris (secundum diversos respectos) servire poterunt” (“You should not be surprised if we now say that what earlier we posited for the loci is also true for the figures. For the loci previously described could serve [according to various aspects] as figures,” Thesaurus, p. 78).

This is why the logical discussions concerning existential presuppositions, or on the truth value to be assigned to the assertion Yesterday Piero met his sister if we could truthfully assert that Piero has no sisters, appear ingenuous and lacking in common sense. It is in fact unlikely that someone will respond to the first assertion with Your assertion does not make sense because Piero has no sisters. It is highly likely that the answers will be: (i) Whose sister? (presumption of error in the identification of the individual); (ii) You must have been dreaming (reference to existence in a possible world); (iii) Just what do you mean by sister? (presumption of lexical error); I didn’t know Piero had any sisters (correction of one’s previous conviction). This occurs because every assertion, rather than presupposing, posits, makes present in the universe of discourse, by its semiotic power, the entities it names, albeit as entities in a possible world (cf. Eco and Violi 1987).

In Canetti’s Auto-da-fé Professor Kien, endowed with a prodigious memory, records in a notebook all the idiocies he is trying to forget—an ironical narrative invention if ever there was one.

There exist casual mechanisms by which an idea or expression is not forgotten but confused instead with other ideas or expressions. In such cases confusion can occur both between expressions (confusion by pseudo-synomymity, such as mixing up the terms paronomasia and antonomasia), or between an expression and two different meanings, say, or notions or definitional contents (like not remembering whether fragola in Italian means “strawberry” or “raspberry”). Both of these phenomena never occur by subtraction (something is there that subsequently disappears), but by addition (two notions or terms become superimposed in your memory and you no longer know which one is correct). The phenomenon usually occurs the first time we make a mistake; someone gives us the correct information; and from then on we remember the error and the correction together, without recalling which is which. The dilemma left a more lasting impression than its solution, and it is the former and not the latter that stayed in our mind. The same thing often happens with the pronunciation of a word in a foreign language. There are no voluntary devices for forgetting, but they do exist for not remembering properly: you must multiply the semiosis. We may try to forget the medieval mnemonic rhyme invented to remember the moods of the first syllogistic figure (Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferio) by training ourselves to repeat over and over for several days a corrupted version “Birbiri, Celirant, Doria, Fario,” until we are no longer able to recall which of the two formulas is the correct one. We do not forget by cancelation but by superposition, not by producing absence but by multiplying the presences.

For these operations performed by a culture, see also Demaria (2006).

Cited in Brown (2012: 109).

“This was precisely what the medieval encyclopedia … aspired to, not only through the topical arrangement of knowledge, but also, more concretely, by means of diagrams, miniatures, illuminated initials, and so on. With a single image it was possible to embrace the whole of being, from God to the angels, from man to the stones, and retain it in the memory thanks to the power of the imagination” (Cevolini 2006: 96).

On textuality as one means of creating forgetfulness, see Lotman and Uspensky (1975), as well as Demaria (2006: 43): “Cultural memory is the result of different strategies of selection of what may become a memory—that is, of different enunciative praxes which form identities in different ways.”

Metaphor as Knowledge: Aristotle’s Medieval (Mis)Fortunes

In Chapter 1 we observed that Aristotle’s major contribution to the theory of metaphor lay in the emphasis he placed on its cognitive value. Since we are accustomed to seeing the Middle Ages as the age of the rediscovery of Aristotle and indeed of his near-canonization, it should prove interesting to inquire whether the Middle Ages somehow picked up on and profited from this suggestion of his. Let us say from the outset that our investigation was sparked by the conviction that the answer is in the negative. What we must try to understand, then, is why there exists no medieval theory of metaphor as an instrument of knowledge, at least in the aforementioned Aristotelian sense. The answer, which we will attempt to document in what follows, is that not only did medieval authors gain access to the Poetics and the Rhetoric at a very late date, but they also became acquainted with these texts in translations that were, to say the least, somewhat misleading. We will see later (in Chapter 3) what the other sources of medieval reflection on metaphor were, and what other tools (such as, for example, the concept of analogia entis or “analogy of being”) they did attribute a cognitive function to.

2.1. The Latin Aristotle

It is no secret how protracted and tormented were the fortunes of the Aristoteles Latinus. In the sixth century Boethius had translated the entire Organon, but for centuries only one section of it, the so-called Logica Vetus—translations, in other words, of the Categories and the De interpretatione, accompanied by a version of the Isagoge by Porphyry and a number of treatises by Boethius on categorical and hypothetical syllogisms, on division and on topics—was in circulation, and that for the most part in a corrupt form.1 Boethius had also translated the Prior Analytics, the Topics, and the Sophistical Refutations, but these works did not circulate at all until they were revised or retranslated, from Greek or Arabic,2 along with the Posterior Analytics, in the twelfth century. True, this last-named work had also been translated by Boethius, but his version had been lost and remained practically unknown.3 With the twelfth century the Libri Naturales also make their appearance: the Physics, the De coelo et mundo, the De generatione et corruptione, the Meteorologica, the De anima, the Parva Naturalia are translated, first from Arabic then from Greek.

The Metaphysics too appeared, first in partial form in a translatio vetustissima by James of Venice, while another extended portion appeared—translated from the Greek—in the same century (the so-called translatio media). Thomas Aquinas will own a complete version only when William of Moerbeke, completing his rendering, will make Book K available to him. Partial versions of the Greek text of the Libri Morales also go back to the twelfth century. In the mid-thirteenth century Robert Grosseteste translated the Nicomachean Ethics, later revised by Moerbeke, and it will be the 1260s before the latter will provide a complete version of the Politics. It is likewise in the thirteenth century that Michael Scotus made versions of the books on animals from the Arabic, while at a slightly later date Moerbeke will also translate them from Greek. A rendering of De motu animalium by yet another translator was known to Albertus Magnus.
Coming to the two texts that most concern us, we note that Moerbeke did not translate the Poetics until 1278—in other words, after Thomas’s death in 12744—while Averroes’s Middle