Tuesday, October 18, 2022

Stephen J. Shoemaker on Hypomnēmata

  

Hypomnēmata were notes written to serve as memory aids, and very often specially to help individuals to remember things that had been heard orally in order to aid with their reproduction on a later occasion. These memoranda recorded things that had been heard, so that the hearer could better remember them later on for his or her own benefit or to share them orally with someone else. They served as “physical extension” of memory, assisting the survival of the living voice of oral tradition after the speaker was finished and no longer present. We also find some instances where the term is used to describe notes or drafts for a work in progress, compiled by someone with the intent of seeing the notes turned into a more formal literary document at some later point, perhaps even by another person. Thus, we have here a common kind of writing that is used primarily to write things down that were learned orally, in order that they might be more faithfully recalled at some later point. Likewise, this type of reminder document was understood as being by definition an open text, whose composition remained ongoing process, so that its contents could be adjusted—things changed, added, deleted—as additional memories were inventoried or older ones corrected in light of more recent developments. (Stephen J. Shoemaker, Creating the Qur'an: A Historical-Critical Study [Oakland, Calif.: University of California Press, 2022], 213)