Regarding the prudent reprehensibility of artificial memory:
"To move, to excite the imagination and the emotions with metaphorica seems suggestion utterly contrary to the scholastic puritanism with its attention severely fixed on the next world, on Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven." (Yates, 66) It sounds like the church and state back in the olden day were quite tighter than nowadays. The church has an apparently large historical impact within the structuring of scholastic pedagogy in that they didn't want the practice of artificial memorization to imprint images which would be "highly reprehensible morally." We all know by now that very easier to recall a memory image if it's vivid, colorful, and dramatic rather than simple, gray, and boring. Imagine if our memories were censored, if hyperbolic imaginations were considered heresy and condemnable, like early Hollywood films and the MPPC (Motion Picture Production Code). In time the filmmakers challenged regulations by spicing up their movies with sex, drugs, and expletive infested scripting. These metaphorical ingredients are key for keeping memories, being highly involved in successful artificial memory making. Mnemonic methods promoting images "beautiful and hideous, dressed in crowns and purple garments, deformed or disfigured with blood or mud, smeared with red paint, comic or ridiculous" are questionable and problematic as if they will corrupt the youth, but they're useful when something is to, as Yates puts it, "adhere to the soul." (67)
There's an argument here, but Yates continues to explain along with Tullius' case that this methodology of "artificial memory achieves a moral triumph" because the memories which are put into image incorporate corporeal matters which only may be obtained or recollected by experiencing this world, not the next one. However exaggerated these images are, they are still derived from this life in one way or another. Therefore this notion of prudence maintains its morality and virtue.
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