Oral Tradition and Memory

Memory Tricks I was thinking about how monks and scholars in the Middle Ages must have had amazing memories to have remembered all these oral stories and put them down in books. I looked into it and found this video on the TED website about memory tricks. One of the things he touches on is that memory used to be a much more studied art which has died since oral traditions have died. It's an interesting concept in and of itself. However, it also brings up points we don't often think about. The Middle Ages are seen as a kind of depression in creativity between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. However, things like memory tricks to keep track of long poems and stories are incredibly important to how our culture is formed. Before printing, which wasn't invented until halfway through this last millennium, oral tradition was the only way that history and literature were preserved. Without these memory tricks, we would have very little record of the cultures we are built on. The creative culture must have been extraordinary.