Petrarcheschi segni di memoria. Spie, postille, metafore

In Petrarch’s Work we can find evidence of the constant attention he gives to mnemotechnics and interesting examples of a very rich mnemonic imagery, as well as examine the fundamental role that he assigns to the act of memory in the humanistic practice of reading, comprehension and inner ownership of a text. Present in Petrarch’s Work as technique, experience and metaphor, the memory lives also as creative skill in his experience of reading, and in particular in his habit to gloss the texts so that they are installed better (longer and more accurately) in the mind. This habit played also an important role in Petrarch’s writing workshop, which was never shallow but based on an emotively involved reading and memorization of the classical authors and hence in complete accordance with the type of active reading that Augustine proposes to Franciscus in the second book of Secretum (II, 197): «When you come to any passages that seem to you useful, impress secure marks against them, which may serve as hooks in your memory, lest otherwise they might fly away». A suggestion of this mnemonic balance between reading and writing, visible language and mental images, is annotation often found in manuscripts that belonged to Petrarch: lege memoriter, that is to say “read in such a way to impress the text in your memory and make it as familiar as possible”. Here we can clearly recognize the active and operating dimension of a mnemonic oriented reading. In Middle Ages the experience of reading is in fact an experience of meditatio which implies a strong emotional component and which is essentially based on the power of mnemonic imagery to express words through images, to emotionally enrich them, to keep them firmly in mind, and to make them a base for the moral growth of man.