Carruthers, a professor of English at New York University, is a specialist in medieval culture with an emphasis on memory, said Werner Kelber, Rice professor of religious studies. Carruthers draws widely on literary criticism, art history, theology, psychology and anthropology, Kelber said. Her basic argument is that from late antiquity to the Renaissance, memory was the intellectual, religious and psychological faculty valued above all other faculties and the well-spring of culture and civilized life. Traditionally, medieval studies, along with classics and biblical studies, have focused on the textual and documentary aspects of Western culture, Kelber said. Carruthers, on the other hand, asserts that manuscripts are a function of memory.
Manuscripts serve as mnemonic devices.
This is not what Carruthers has in mind when she describes medieval culture as a still dominantly memorial culture. She is referring to the processes of retrieving items from the storage system of memory into the conscious present and organizing thoughts into speeches and textual compositions. For the medieval scholar, memory was more than a storage facility according to Carruthers. It was a place where active compositional process took place. Thinking, for Augustine, entailed walks through the infinite spaces of memory and through chambers and corridors with each door, and room and icon acting like a hot link for his memory, Kelber said.