The Art of Rereading

The rote learning of texts has been a common practice in elementary education in many periods and places, but literacy training so generally consisted of memorization in the Middle Ages that those who could read and write tended to carry the contents of the same set of basic texts with them through life. Poets trained in this manner involved those texts in their writing, not as quotations, but as a technique of art whereby the recognition that what one had first learned in school was true constituted, not a form of knowledge, but a kind of comfort.