Nicholas Hammond, Fragmentary Voices. Memory and Education at Port-Royal

Nicholas Hammond, Fragmentary Voices. Memory and Education at Port-Royal. Biblio 17, Band 152
192 p. ISBN: 3-8233-6055-8
 
 

 This book is the first study to be concerned with the conscious shaping of memory within the community known as Port-Royal in seventeenth-century France and the contribution which its members thought that memory could make to the new ideas which they had of education. Concentrating on memoirs in the first chapter and on various educational treatises in the second, Nicholas Hammond explores many previously unknown works which are vital to our understanding of some of the most interesting thinkers of the period. Port-Royal was also to a large extent responsible for producing two of the greatest writers of the age, Blaise Pascal and Jean Racine, and Hammond devotes a chapter to each, providing fascinating new insights and provocative interpretations of central works from the perspective of education and memory. The role of memory in the persuasive process of Pascal's Pensées is shown to be vital to a full understanding of the work. In the chapter on Racine, Hammond looks both at notes which Jean Racine made while a pupil at the Port-Royal schools and at the two plays which were written both after his reconciliation with Port-Royal and for an educational purpose, Esther and Athalie. Fragmentary Voices will be of interest to historians and educationalists, as well as to students of religious thought, philosophy and literature.