The Wikipedia summarizer provides an excellent description of the Oral tradition. Oral tradition is a form of human communication where knowledge, art, ideas, and cultural material is received, preserved, and transmitted orally from one generation to another through speech or song. It is not the same as testimony or oral history. Oral tradition refers to the recall and transmission of a specific, preserved textual and cultural knowledge through vocal utterance.
Oral tradition is a way of transmitting history, literature, or law from one generation to the next, without a writing system, by voice. People tell stories, often made into poems and songs to make remembering easy. Oral history preservation is the field that deals with the care and upkeep of oral history materials, whatever format they may be in. Oral storytelling is an ancient and intimate tradition between the storyteller and their audience, often seated together in a circular fashion.
Basically, before the widespread publication of written material, cultures had no choice but to remember everything needed for their present culture to be transmitted in whole to the next generation. Examples are available.
People: The Navajo
Dr. Lynne Kelly (Memory Craft, 2020 Pegasus Books NY, NY) writes that the indigenous Navajo (Arizona, New Mexico, Southern Utah) memorized a field guide to over 700 insects. Only ten were critical, because they annoyed stock (lice, ticks, flies) or adversely affected crops (aphids, stink bugs). One insect, the cicada, was a food source. The entire remainder of the 700 insects was maintained in memory because the Navajo, like all humans, value knowledge for its own sake.
The Navajo stored this knowledge in their mythology, frequently using insects as human analogs. It has been determined on multiple occasions by numerous cultures that the more vivid the story, the easier the information is remembered. And these stories were designed to be indelible. They involved the five human senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. They were focused around the behavior of sentient beings, sometimes humans and at other times spirit animals. And the stories always concluded in consequences, sometimes auspicious, but usually disastrous. If you want to remember it, make it unforgettable.
In addition to insects, a wider but certainly not exhaustive list of the guides held in memory by the Navajo would include land management, astronomy, navigation, and complex genealogies. All this and more, retained in memory and passed on to later generations, via the telling of vivid stories.
People: The Pueblo
A somewhat overlapping group, the Pueblo Indians (northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico) make their stories easier to remember (i.e., more vivid) through the use of kachina dolls rather than insects. Each doll has its own design. The design is consistent across the costumes of dancers at ceremonies, the designs seen on pottery and petroglyphs, and the figurines used to introduce the toys to children.
We do a little of the same thing when the male opera tenor is consistently the good guy, and the bass is the scoundrel.
People: The Aboriginals
Most astonishing, however, is that research on the stories among the Australian Aboriginals has shown that their memory guides on landscape changes can be reliably dated to 7,000 to 10,000 years ago. Their stories tell exactly what happened to the landscape after the last ice age, which peaked 20,000 years ago during the last Glacial Maximum when glaciers covered large portions of the earth and the sea level was about 400 feet lower than it is today.
Period: European Middle Ages
The Middle Ages are generally dated from somewhere in the mid-400’s CE to perhaps 1400 CE, when the Renaissance quickened. The Renaissance lasted 200 years, plus or minus. The exact dates are soft because people and countries neither left the Middle Ages nor entered the Renaissance at the same time. Italy, for example, made the journey significantly faster than Scotland. Within Italy, the city of Florence (in Tuscany) reached its future faster than Trapani (in Sicily). This, notwithstanding that Florence is well inland and Trapani is coastal. Usually, but not always, coastal cities develop faster due to their cross-fertilizing relationships with a variety of trading partners.
During and before this period local cultures relied upon storytellers as a repository of dependable information, both physically (“Go that way until you come to the tree that was split by lightning, then turn right.”) and culturally (“Edward, stop hitting your sister! That’s just not something we do!). Students, in the Middle Ages and through the Renaissance, were given memory training and expected to use it, for it had shown itself to be a reliable guide to useful knowledge.
Memory training gradually changed its personality.
By the middle ages the rhetorical and rational arguments of the classic Greek and Roman orators morphed into the pious sermons and meditations of an increasingly ecclesiastical world. After the Western Roman empire collapsed in the mid-400’s CE, monasteries became the centers of knowledge, and monastic education was focused on the study of Christianity.
Period: The Profession
People with highly trained memories were regarded with awe and assumed to have an elevated intellect together with a superior moral character. That is perhaps why many descriptions of the lives of saints refer to their astonishing memory.
Dr. Lynne Kelly has mentioned that Saint Francis of Assisi was apparently a great memorizer, and that Saint Augustine reportedly had a prodigious memory. Saint Anthony of Padua (1195-1231) is said to have memorized the entire Bible.
A student in the Early Middle Ages was expected to memorize major portions of the Bible word-perfect, as well as important speeches of the leading thinkers from ancient times, current speeches, laws, history, the natural history of plants and animals, and more.
This knowledge was contained in books, but the only books were a few precious handwritten manuscripts, written on either papyrus or parchment made from animal skins. At the time, since there was no paper in Europe, how could a student remember all that he is expected to know? Only in the old way: it must be memorized without fault. He who can do so can reasonably expect to be a socially valuable person and to find a welcome wherever he travels. Memorization was indeed a profession.
Period: The Structure of Memory
There were probably earlier attempts to understand the structure of memory, but records are not available. There are recorded attempts that date from the Middle Ages.
In the attempt to understand how the brain structures experience (i.e., memory), Plato’s ideas were preeminent. He had written of memory being like a pigeon coop, each bird representing bits of knowledge that are stored when the student was able to shut them in their mental coops. Other metaphors for memory included bees bringing knowledge-nectar to beehives, and treasures being placed in a chest.
Memory was seen as a structured set of locations into which bits of knowledge were stored. To indicate as much, cartoons of pigeons, bees, and coins were frequently drawn in the margins of early medieval books. These marginalia did not usually denote the actual text, but might indicate a memorable thought somewhere on that page. In a contemporary sense, it wasn’t all that much different from a college student highlighting a text.
To recall information, then, was seen as drawing together knowledge from different storage cells. It was considered an act that could not be usefully performed unless the fundamental texts had been thoroughly memorized in advance. Thus, the stringent training with the focus on verbatim accuracy.
Process: Mnemonics
In the Middle Ages, preachers toured the country delivering massively entertaining sermons that were dependent on the same techniques of memorization as the orators of the classical world. The speeches were memorized in the same sequential segments and each segment was associated with some small portion of a building they knew well. Monasteries, where the preachers learned their memorization, were particular favorites.
During the Renaissance, the spread of literacy due to the availability of books was hugely enhanced by the introduction of the movable type printing press. This brought, counterintuitively, a quickened interest for short books on mnemonics (nee-mon-icks). The first printed memory treatise became commercially available in 1482. It was the start of what became many printed books on the memory arts.
The most popular Renaissance treatises were those by Peter of Ravenna, who allowed readers to be finally released from the medieval practice of endlessly referencing vices and virtues, heaven and hell. Peter gave practical advice seasoned with examples that appealed to a lay audience. It is no wonder his books sold very well. More, later.
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